DadCentric

An Unsolicited Review of "Booty Camp"

Due to procrastination and extreme naïveté, we elected to train our nearly-3-year-old boy to use a toilet 4 days before he started the "must be potty trained" preschool we'd already begun financing.  So, we (and by "we," I mean "my wife did all of this while I made up reasons to spend extended hours at the office") bought the above-pictured DVD, put the little camouflaged t-shirt on him, and began the rigorous process of force feeding him sodium-filled snacks and sweetened liquids that promote frequent urination and defecation. 

The training isn't very unlike the obedience classes I took with my dog, Winnie, at PetSmart.  There was shouting, hand motions, lavish priase for minor accomplishments, and the promise of treats I would never consider putting in my mouth to reward completion of a desired behavior.  And, just as it did for Winnie, the praise and treats worked after only a couple days.  Mostly.

While our little Owen was the master of his frontal firehose, he had difficulty (i.e., he refused to even try) controlling his rear exit port.  Luckily for us, however, he held his poo during the day and successfully fooled his school into believing he was 100% toilet trained, only to come home and release his fully grown sewer bass into his underbritches for us to clean up.  This elimination dichotomy continued for nearly 2 weeks until FINALLY, one day this week, the little boy crapped in the green plastic Kermit the Frog toddler potty contraption thing instead of his pants. 

There were animated "high fives" and verbal congratulations, and we immediately put him in the back of the minivan, took him to the nearest department store, and let him pick out his much-anticipated prize:  a large blue balloon.  Sure, it said, "Happy Birthday" on it, but do you think a 2-year-old cares about words?  Of course not.  The kid shat his pants for 2 weeks.  It's not like he can read.

So, Booty Camp?  I give you a solid B+.  You weren't as fast as you claimed to be, but you got the job done.  Now I just need to find a "Train your son not to knee you in the balls at 5AM!" video.

Posterous: Summer Means SPF - Sharing Privacy Factor

I am not the Family Photographer, for a couple of reasons. First, I take horrible pictures; my attempts to pass off pictures of the tops of my kids' heads as "art" have met with resistance. Second, I'm a bit reluctant to post family photos on The Internets. There's the obvious reason (namely, creepy people who like to collect photos for their own nefarious purposes), and one that I hadn't really thought about until people actually started reading my blog - creepy businesses who like to collect photos for their own nefarious purposes. A few of my blogging friends have had personal photos lifted from their sites and posted on other monetized websites without permission or compensation, and that's why I used to save those pictures for Facebook. But even Facebook isn't 100% secure: like many paid writers, I use it to publicize my online writing, and thus total strangers as well as Friends can get access to my personal pictures. Now, I know Facebook says that you can make your pictures 100% secure, but like many of you I see the constant flow of articles on techy websites about ways that Facebook is trying to work around your privacy settings and it makes me slightly twitchy. 

The folks at Posterous reached out to me (FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a sponsored post, meaning that I got paid to endorse the product, which I do, because I like what it does) about their sharing platform. Posterous allows you to post all kinds of stuff: photos, links, musings, diatribes, and the nice thing about it is that it's simple. And that includes the privacy settings. You can make everything public, or you can make your stuff visable only to Posterous subscribers, or you can password-protect everything and keep out the riffraff. It's easy to set up a page, and the post-via-email function makes it great for busy folks who don't have time to deal with uploads and Albums. Subscribers to your page can opt for an email notification when you post something new; nothing revolutionary, of course, but if you're looking to build a social network of friends and family around your Posterous page, it's a good feature. 

And maybe that's why I like Posterous, and plan on doing more with it. While Facebook is nice, like many of us bloggers who unexpectedly found ourselves in a small spotlight, it's nice to have some exclusive, Members Only Internet space. I take comfort in the fact that when I do end posting blurry, tilted pictures of my kids with their eyes half-closed, I'll actually know the people who'll be making fun of me.

Stifler's List; Or, How Lacrosse Became My Latest Obsession

"Soft hands", I told my son. "Remember what the guy in the video said? Soft hands." 

I know how that sounds. But this is lacrosse we're talking about, a sport that manages to be both extremely silly and extremely badass at the same time. I've never played lacrosse, have only watched it a handful of times, and yet there I was, coaching Lucas on the proper way to catch a lacrosse ball with a lacrosse...hang on while I Google the proper name for it, ah, yes..."stick". The thing is like a butterfly net with a shrunken head, and when you catch the ball and run with it you have to twist the stick in your hands to keep the ball from falling out. This is called "cradling balls". (If you want to learn how to properly cradle balls, watch this. Yes, it's safe for work. Also, heh heh heh, cradling balls. Like I said, it's kind of a silly sport.)

Father-son obsessions, the Beast With Two Heads. This one was born about a year ago. We were driving back from something; our route took us past a local high school. "Dad! Look at that! What is that game? It looks awesome." I slowed down. A lacrosse practice, kids running to and fro, whipping balls into the net, smacking each other with those sticks (yes, I know how that sounds). Fast-paced and brutal - that's how my son likes his team sports. He gets that from his old man. The wheels started turning. Assuming that youth lacrosse doesn't interfere with youth rugby..."That's lacrosse. It's kind of like hockey meets basketball meets tennis. Looks pretty fun, no?" "And you can hit people with those stick-things?" "I think so, yes." "Cool! I want to play. Can I play?" "I think it's for older kids. But yes, when you're older, you can play." Thus the seed was planted; shortly after that, I bought a Mini-Lacrosse set (smaller, plastic sticks and a spongy ball, for the undersized player). 

Eight Bucks And A Smile

“Now when we go in here, you need to be quiet. No running, no screaming. If you start acting crazy, we’ll have to leave. It’s serious bidness up in here.”

Both boys nodded their consent to this Behavioural Agreement we laid out before them. We got out of the car and walked across the parking lot, then stepped into the air-conditioned bank lobby.

“EVERYBODY BE COOL, THIS IS A ROBBERY!” is not something that I or my wife or anyone else said because that’s a good way to get shot. Rather, we made our way across the great carpeted expanse to an open teller’s booth. Each of my boys carried in their confident little hands a plastic ziploc bag filled to bulging with coin currency that they had emptied from their piggy banks that very morning. If smiles had been dodge balls, then the female employees would have totally been pelting my kids, and then I would have had to call the police and maybe press charges and probably get a free toaster oven from the bank by way of apology. Do banks still give out free toaster ovens?

“Hey gorgeous, what’s a guy gotta do to get a free toaster oven in this dump?” That’s what I should have asked, but my kids cut in line in front of me. They plopped their baggies on the counter for the nice lady so she could turn their coins into cool crisp Washingtons. Actually, she wasn’t that nice. She wasn’t overtly rude or anything, but she didn’t go to any great lengths to conceal how put out she felt by having to count out a bunch of grubby change that these two goblins had probably snotted all over. “Come on, lady, they’re fucking precious!” Did I say that? I think that was my wife.

She counted out the youngest kid’s coinage first. Both boys gasped as she announced the total.

Your Move, Safari

Ok, the guy's not a dadblogger per se, but we'll take it.

 

Oh, and if you haven't seen the other great Google Chrome ad - about the It Gets Better campaign - it's a doozy.

DadCentric Interviews Top Chef Richard Blais

Fans of great food and Top Chef know Richard Blais: his creative approach to cooking, incorporating the concepts of molecular gastronomy (using non-traditional equipment and materials like liquid nitrogen and blowtorches - think Wile E. Coyote in the kitchen, but without the explosions), has made him an iconoclast in the culinary world. Blais has appeared on three of the four Top Chef series: Top Chef, Top Chef Masters, and most recently, the inaugural season of Top Chef All-Stars, which he won. He's also a father of two, and if anyone can get his kids to eat their veggies, I'm sure it's him. I got the chance to do a phone/video interview with Richard; he's working with the National Pork Board, promoting the Other White Meat, and we spoke about cooking, being a celebrity chef, and raising kids while he whipped up a terrific looking pork chop. (Apologies for the sound quality: I assure you that the voice is in fact mine, and I do not suffer from emphysema.)

 

Birth Control: Your Balls are in Whose Court?

You know how fond of vasectomies we are here at DadCentric. By "fond of vasectomies," I mean "fond of writing about (and making comic strips of) the horrors and embarrassment of vasectomies."

(I've never detailed here or anywhere else my personal experience with the snip-snip some eight years ago, so here's the Twitter version: "A strange man shaved my boys bald. Later, during the procedure, he failed to use enough anesthesia. I kicked him squarely in the jaw.")

Anyway, I received an e-mail the other day with the subject line: "New Video Shows How Men Can Man-Up When It Comes to Permanent Birth Control." I assumed it to be a plug for a new brand of pain-numbing, memory-wiping tequila to suck down prior to and immediately after getting one's manhood hacked and, hey, no one needs to poke me with a sharp scalpel to get me to take a shot of The Worm Burn, so I took a gander.

Instead I was treated to a pitch for a type of procedure in which a doctor sticks plastic barriers inside "a woman's fallopian tubes through the cervix without incisions" to block the eggs from the incoming sperm ... and 58 seconds of dudes allegedly being all squeamish in reaction to watching a video of other guys getting their sacks permanently sacked:

I am all in favor of advances in medical technology but a few steps forward in marketing strategy would be nice, too. What exactly is the viewer to take away from this? I offer these two suggestions:

1) Hey there, wimpy yet virile man! Avoid a few days of pain and several bags of frozen peas by talking your special lady into this new procedure in which a doctor shoehorns widgets right smack into her baby-making equipment!

Or:

2) Hey there, empowered yet feminine woman! Your man is a wuss when it comes to responsibility, like putting down the toilet seat and birth control. Teach him a lesson by letting us invade your lady parts so we can build the Great Wall of Sperm Deflection! Right on, sister!

All I know is, when decision time came for me I figured my wife did enough in hosting my little swimmers (and its vehicle for delivery) time and time again over the years and, for an encore, she squeezed two bowling balls in two years out of her Box O' Joy. The least I could do was not be a candy-ass and just get the ol' cut and paste in the family jewels for her sake.

But that's just the way I'm cut.

Hope I Die Before I Get Old

You may know that I moonlight over at Man of The House. One of my fellow MoTH writers, Josh Katzowitz, wrote a piece a few days ago that got me thinking about my age, and whether or not I act it. It inspired the following post:)

Conventional wisdom says that if you are a dad, you need to set aside foolish/dangerous activities for the sake of your children. Before I had kids, I did plenty: I was an avid surfer, a frequent rock climber, solo backpacker, rugby player and a pseudo-adrenaline junkie. I also went to a lot of Phish concerts, partied in bars until the wee hours and generally behaved like a beach-dwelling twenty-something well into my thirties.

Several years ago, I went through a Harley Obsession. Many guys do; few of those guys have wives who tacitly approved of adding a big V-Twin to the family. My wife did not encourage me, but she didn’t put up much resistance. She bought my logic: Harleys are safer because they’re easier to ride than “Crotch Rocket”-style street bikes, they’re bigger (thus easier for car drivers to see), and they come with a built-in collision avoidance warning system – their signature deafening engines. She wasn’t a Harley fan so much as a fan of the cool leather jacket she’d need to buy in order to be able to ride with me. I’d never ridden a motorcycle, so I did my research: there was a Motorcycle Rider’s School nearby, and my friends who owned Harleys assured me that riding them, once you got the hang of it, was fun and easy. (I didn’t think too much about the notion of “getting the hang” of riding a machine that weighs several hundred pounds, can reach speeds of 80+ mph, and only has two wheels.) I knew the model I wanted: the Heritage Softail. I took a few trips to Harley dealers, sat on the thing, and imagined myself rumbling up the Pacific Coast Highway, the wind in my face.

(You can find out how this all turns out over here. After you finish, pop on back - I wanna hear from you dads out there, and their Significant Others, about why you do or don't wanna grow up.)

More Hating on Disney: Baby Einstein Edition

I'm afraid I'm about to get self-righteous and snobby and maybe a little preachy.

I didn't set out to do that.  I was going to write a snarky little post about how babies have terrible taste and the books they enjoy often have little literary or artistic merit.  Something like:

WTF is up with Goodnight Moon, anyway?  "Goodnight, nobody/Goodnight, mush"?  It's like somebody transcribed their peyote trip.  And the artwork, arbitrarily alternatint from vertiginously lurid color blocks to black and white line drawings, is as discomfiting as a David Lynch movie, but far less visually interesting.

And don't get me started on Baby Einstein...

But I did get started on Baby Einstein, and became a little horrified in the process.

The Unsustainable Cuteness Bubble and Resulting Photography Glut

It should have been the happiest day of my parenting career.  I had just been tapped by Jason, the Don of DadCentric, to enter the inner circle of the most powerful group blog in the dad-o-sphere.  I was a made man.  The future was spread out before me in a pastiche of Scorcese-esque images: luxurious homes and automobiles, custom-made suits, diamond-encrusted chinchillas for my wife, and a small but swanky apartment for my brassy, psychotic mistress. And of course, only the best boarding schools for my 19 month-old twin girls.

But before plowing ahead with my new life, I had to get my proverbial house in order.  There were bills to pay, travel plans to be shuffled, long-time acquaintances to be snubbed, and tracks to be covered.  Fortunately, my wife takes care of all that shit.  All I needed to do was to back up the data on my iPhone.      

I had bought the phone back in August and blah blah blah boring blah exchanged phone blah blah didn't bother backing it up blah blah boring. So I plugged the phone into my ancient MacBook, and absentmindedly clicked on an option in the dropdown window that had the word "restore" in it, which, my wife later told me (repeatedly because I'm a slow learner), is a code word for "destroy everything you hold dear."