DadCentric

Is It Okay to Publicly Announce Which of Your Kids is Your Favorite? (The answer is no, dumbass)

I tweeted a sarcastic tweet the other day, and ended up on national TV, as part of what will probably come to be known as the most ridiculous of all parent blogging controversies ever.

So there's this dad blogger who writes, in an offhand way, apropos of almost nothing, that he favors his older son over the younger one.  This inspires a bunch of comments saying how mean he is for writing that, and how his youngest will probably read it and hate him one day. 

Then he writes a post to clarify his original one.  This is the point at which he could have said: "Well, that was a poor choice of words.  What I really meant to say is that I like the 5-year old stage better than the 2-year old stage."  That would have been only a little dicky rather than flat-out cruel.  But instead, he attempts a very risky stunt: He simultaneously backpedals and doubles down.  He says that he only likes the older kid better because he's more fun right now and can do more stuff, and his relationship with the younger child is still developing.  That sounds a little more reasonable, right?  But.  Instead of conceding that maybe he should have phrased it differently, he essentially says, "And if that's what 'favorite' means, then, yeah...he's my favorite.  You know you've got a favorite too.  You should admit it.  Feels good."  It's almost like he's being controversial on purpose, to get some pageviews and media attention or something.

Oh, hey.  He does get a bunch of attention!  This becomes "news," and international media outlets cover the "story."  The blogger sticks to his guns on all the interviews he does, and never admits that there's any problem with announcing his favoritism on the internet and now on TV.  His statements are preserved in countless forums across the internet, which his kids will certainly run across one day.  (For their sake, I hope they recognize it as one of wacky ol' Dad's ploys to get famous.)

Dad Sends Stanley The Train Into Space, Awesomeness Ensues

Ok, this is pretty cool.

 

Help The Daddy Yo Dude Live, Fight, Win

We'll cut to the chase: dadblogger John Taylor, aka The Daddy Yo Dude, was recently dealt a shitty hand. He's fighting cancer, and he could use some help. It goes without saying that John is a good man, and a great dad, and if you can spare a few bucks and spread the word, we know he'd appreciate it.  If you want to stop by his Tumblr and wish him well, we know he'd appreciate it. Another thing that goes without saying: fuck cancer. 

The Slayer of Nightmares (Barks at the Mailman)

There is no reason and every reason to be afraid of the dark. There’s a whole lot of nothing in there and you can’t see any of it, and even after your pupils adjust to the proper size, there’s always a few shadows off in the corners that some beastie or another could emerge from just as soon as you convince yourself that there’s really nothing there, that you didn’t hear anything, that Mommy and Daddy are right down the hall and it’s safe to go to sleep. The moment your eyelids slam shut, it’ll slip out of the darkness and slither towards your bed, oozing mucus all over the carpet.

Such is the inner life of an imaginative young child like my youngest son, the boy whose senses take in not just the waking world, but paints all over it with images of the dreamscape that lives in his head. Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not all morose and macabre in there. When the sun’s shining, he see all sorts of worlds filled with all sorts of creatures, kind, unkind, and everything in-between, all of whom bow to his whim. But when the sun descends, so does his courage, his trust in the safety that exists inside the four walls of his room. 

Night lights help some. He’s got two of them, shining from opposite ends of his room. We even leave the light on in his closet sometimes with the door cracked just a touch. But there are some nights that even this fails to drive away all of the imagined evils under his bed, behind his dresser, walking straight through his walls from the outside. Did you know cats can do that? He told me so. He’s also got a bed full of stuffed friends, but he’s made it clear time and again, this army can’t possibly stand against the one he imagines is coming for him. 

It became really clear, the kid was scaring himself shitless with his wonderful imagination. 

But just as he created the problem, he also nailed the solution. When in the midst of yet another one of our pre-bedtime conversations where I was trying to be rational with him, pointing out how there was nothing in his room, nothing dangerous that could get in, that his family was outside, and that he had a bed full of stuffed buddies, he bawled out, “But I want somebody alive in here!”

Somebody alive. None of this stuffed animal nonsense. Something with a pulse. 

Of course, his mom and I are way way way past any of that co-sleeping business. This kid barely ever slept with us anyway, back when we had the new parent fortitude to do such a thing. But a dog? Well hell, a dog can sleep anywhere. 

We called in Elliott, our oldest child, our medium-sized lab-dachshund-ish mutt dog whom I’ve often referred to as The Best Dog Ever because, well, he kinda is. He laid down and went to sleep at the end of the kid’s bed, and there he stayed. Kid’s slept easy every since. 

I thought I loved this dog before. Now, he’s something like my hero.

Another Ride Home from Another BlogHer Conference

 

Lorax and me. WTF

At the beginning of August I once again went to the big, huge, enormous, ladies' blogging conference, over there in New York City, New York, US of A, as did a few of my fellow DadCentricians and some other unaffiliated dudes.  It was really, really big, and there were plenty of ladies there.  Like around five thousand of them.  There were some speakers whose names you might recognize: Katie Couric, Martha Stewart, Soledad O'Brien, Christy Turlington, and Barack Obama (via video feed), to name a few.

 

It was a nice party.  The food was plentiful and mostly good, and mostly free.  There were a lot of talks given by a lot of bloggers and other social media types who had a lot of worthwhile ideas about which they were quite passionate.  I attended a couple of these talks and, as is usually the case, got briefly excited, and then thought about how the issues discussed pertained to me or the non-parentblogging world.  Then I shrugged, and looked for the next cocktail party.

My take-home from the official conference events and ancillary chatter was that if you don't write for one or more of the big parenting websites, and you're not ready to hustle your ass off courting sponsors 24/7, blogging about your life and your family is not going to pay the bills. This was not a revelation that hit me like a ton of bricks as I had gotten that particular cosmic memo a while back, but it did sometimes make me feel like I was participating in a bizarre charade. 

That sounds bad, I know.  But there were plenty of real moments too, and that made the trip worth taking.  And there were also plenty of amazing writers who weren't necessarily chasing dreams of buying groceries with their ad revenue.  Some of these writers read their stuff at the Voices of the Year presentation, which, for my money, blew the famous keynoters' doors off.

 

Karaoke Survivor, 4:00 a.m.

Of the three nights I spent in New York, it was only on the first, Thursday, that I didn't stay up long enough to see the hazy glimmering of a sweltering sunrise over Manhattan.  On Friday, the after-party provoked an impromptu and overly enthusiastic karaoke adventure, and I awoke around 1:00 p.m..  I tried to speak to my roomie, and found that somehow I had swapped larynxes with Harvey Firestein.  This condition persisted until at least a week later, but it didn't stop me from repeating the karaoke freakout with an even bigger group the next night.

 

Pee Angel: a karaoke casualty, Times Square, 6:00 a.m.

Blogging conferences are inherently weird because of the interfacing of online and real worlds.  But as has been my experience at the other conferences I've attended, talking to my imaginary friends in the flesh was a seamless transition.  I met some people whose words I had been reading for ages, and was not disappointed in their fleshly presences.  I reconnected with some great people I had met previously.  I met some amazing folks that I had never even known existed.  And somehow I became the darling of the lesbian momblogging parentblogging community, a distinction I plan on cherishing and nurturing until they tire of me, which has probably already happened.

 

 

 

The Burgeoning Monster Art Market

The other day, my kids got bored and busted out the old Mighty Men and Monster Maker. Remember these things? It has all these plastic plates with outlines of different legs, torsos, and heads that you can mix and match into all sorts of creatures, humanoid, alien, and otherwise. You lay a piece of paper down on top of it, run a crayon back and forth over it like you’re doing a grave rubbing, then sit back and admire the abomination you’ve brought into the world. I don’t think they make the MM&MM anymore, so it’s lucky for my kids that my mom kept mine.  

So my kids are working away making their monsters and their mighty men and other ungodly variations on these themes when my eldest, who starts first grade in a couple of short weeks, stops and looks at what he’s created and announces, “I should sell these!” His tone says this idea has just hit him like an idea-laden thunderbolt and that he thinks it’s a winner. I do not doubt at all that he means what he’s saying. I don’t know where he gets it from, but this kid is all about the money. He keeps a meticulous runnning tally of his current holdings and is always looking for ways to stack his paper higher. Frankly, his Alex P. Keaton-ness freaks me out sometimes, but he seems to have a knack for the whole money thing, so short of steering him away from anything illegal or unethical, he’s free to build his little empire as he sees fit. 

To which he was now planning to add a branch for art. 

10 Tips for Dadbloggers Attending BlogHer 2012

If you're not a parenting blogger, you may have never heard of the annual BlogHer conference, which is kicking off in two days.  Allow me to explain.

BlogHer conferences are where about eleventy-million ladies and maybe six or seven dudes get together in some glamorous location and talk about parenting and blogging and parentblogging and making money from all those things and also some stuff mostly about just being ladies in general.

Before the big conference every year, there are lots of blog posts and facebook status updates and tweets that indicate a high level of excitement and pants-peeing in the mom blogging community.  This post on Mom 101 includes a pie chart demonstrating the topics many lady bloggers are freaking out about, which mainly include clothing choices, collecting free merch, and the prospect of interacting with their blogging heroes.  Mmmm...pie.

I went to BlogHer last year, because it was just down the street from my house.  It was cool.  I met a lot of people and scored an electric nose-douche.  I screwed up and didn't pick up the bag of dildos that some of my friends got, though.  Still, mostly good times. 

This year the conference is in New York City, which is not such a bad place either.  I will be attending.  I'm looking forward to it.  I'm not freaking out so much, although perhaps I should be.

Maybe I'm just not freaking out because I'm a little sleepy and I have a lot of other stuff to be freaking out about at the moment.  But as a public service to any other dudes that may be attending BlogHer 2012, I'm going to try to muster as much panic as I can in order to fill in the blanks in this obligatory pre-conference list, even though you still have plenty of time to prepare.  Here goes:

The Tips

1. Plan your wardrobe so that you have one shirt for each day. 
2. Remember to put on the shirt in the morning, not in the evening.  That way, after you sleep in it, you'll have a fresh one to put on the next day. (Example: Put on blue shirt on Friday morning, sleep in blue shirt Friday night, put on yellow shirt Saturday morning, sleep in yellow shirt Saturday night, etc.)
3. You should have some pants too.  No one will look at your pants so it doesn't really matter if you sleep in the same ones every night.  I prefer shorts with lots of pockets.
4. Bring your analgesic of choice and some multivitamins.  There will be a lot of free booze but no free Tylenol.
5. You'll probably meet some internet famous people you've never heard of.  Pretend that you're really excited to meet everyone.  That way the famous people won't think you are a dick, and the nonfamous people will just think you're weird and who cares about them anyway.
6. You should, at some point, look at the schedule and figure out roughly where you're going to go when.  But if you don't get around to it, don't worry.  There are thousands of moms everywhere who will tell you what to do.
7. Be prepared for enormous--and completely empty--conference center men's rooms.  They can be a little creepy, so you might want to get a friend to go in with you.
8. You should probably get some business cards.  Everyone seems to have them.  Shit.  Maybe I can get some made in time for next year.
9. Don't be an idiot and stay in the hotel the whole time.  You're in New York City.  (Residents of New York City can ignore this.)
10. Bring a towel?  I don't know.  I needed something to make it an even ten.

 

'Pittsburgh Dad' - Movie Critic of the Year?

Someone recommended I peruse Pittsburgh Dad, the video creation of Chris Preksta and Curt Wootton, which chronicles the rantings and ravings of the title character (played by Wootton) about family, kids and life in general. He's a throwback to the meatheads of yore (OK, not Meathead nor Archie Bunker -- more like Peter Boyle's Frank from Everybody Loves Raymond), spouting off a lot of vitriol like a cranky old man chasing kids off the lawn.

Meh. It's not helped by a lame laugh track, either.

However, I will give my DadCentric thumbs up to Pittsburgh Dad's series of movie reviews, which drop the canned laughter to create some of the real stuff thanks to his narrow view of pop culture and the world. Here's one of my faves:

Pittsburgh Dad Tricked into Seeing Magic Mike

If you don't mind knowing the entire plot of the new Batman flick, you'll also want to check out his review of Dark Knight Rises.

Caught Slipping

My boys and I have this game. You could call it Extreme Backyard Cardio if you’re a believer in accurate descriptions in titles, but the boys just call it Horsey. Basically, one of them chases me while I run through the yard with the other one riding on my back. Through the trees, around the playhouse, past the chicken coop, across the deck until I decide the ride has lasted long enough and I run back to base where I ease the kid off my back, plunk down, and relish the feeling of the tom-tom drum pounding away in my chest. “You feel that?!” my heart yells at me. “That means you’re alive, motherfucker! You won’t always be, but you are now, so get up!” And so, after I catch enough of my breath, I do. The kids switch places - rider becomes chaser and vice versa - and we do that shit all over again. 

And now, friends, let us pause at this paragraph to laugh and mourn at the imperfection that permeates and in part even defines our very humanity. Faulty creatures we are, stumbling through life doing our best to accommodate for our flaws, sometimes even increasing our failures by orders of magnitude even while trying so hard to head them off at the pass. 

So Horsey. Whenever my kids ask to play it, my first instinct is self-preservation tinged with laziness. But most of the time, I reverse course and let them have their way. Imagine, if you will, one of those old scales, the two-cupped kind akin to the one that blind Lady Justice uses, but instead of guilt and innocence, this scale balances my children’s weight against my strength and stamina. Right now, while the strength side outweighs the weight side, games like Horsey are entirely possible, even if it grows a little more difficult as the two sides move toward a balance. And one day that balance is going to tip and Horsey will be a thing of our past. So yeah, I acquiesce. 

And so it was on a recent summer afternoon. I had my youngest on my back and eldest on my tail. This is by far the more difficult of the two Horsey combinations, for even though my youngest is lighter, his older brother is faster and takes the chasing part of the game much more seriously, which has a way of bringing out my normally latent competitive side. Maybe it’s some hardwired father thing, make him try harder so that his eventual and inevitable victory over me will be truly earned, or something, I don’t know. Anyway, youngest and I are zipping across the yard, between the trees, etc., eldest is right behind us, when I come around the corner between the kid’s playhouse and the chicken’s coop and my foot just … goes out from under me. 

Responsibility - The Thing That Keeps Me From Blowing Away

Responsibility’s a funny thing, ain’t it? All the obligations and duties that you take on in the course of trying to put together the kind of life you’re trying to live, the stuff you have to do that comes along with the things you want, hopefully at least some of which you actually like doing, and even if you don’t you do it anyway because hopefully (there’s that word again) it’s all building towards something bigger that’s worth dealing with some bullshit. 

Like taking kids to the doctor. Man, who the hell enjoys doing that? Show of hands? That’s right, not a soul. But it’s part of the parenthood package, so you do it and you don’t complain about it. Or maybe you do. Whatever. Take your kid to the doctor. 

There’s this other side, though. Those roles you take on that manage to make your to-do list about a mile long and plunge a syphon right into your bank account but are still somehow (hopefully) totally worth it and you wouldn’t ever give them up, they come to define you in such a way that they keep you grounded. This is part of who I am and who I am is a person that does these things and whether I do them because I want to or because I have to may differ from day to day but the fact is I’m doing them because it’s my responsibility. 

But if responsibility helps to ground you, what happens when it’s lifted off of your shoulders for a bit? 

We had ourselves a few child-free days this past weekend. Not just an evening out where you have to get home to relieve the babysitter or a couple of hours in the afternoon while they’re at the neighbor’s house, but an entire weekend. My mom took the boys to her house in Houston, leaving my wife and I in Austin to do absolutely as we pleased. 

Let’s see, we:

• Stayed up until well past midnight both nights.
• Slept in both mornings.
• Drank. We definitely drank. 
• Spent more money than is advisable, mostly on beer and overly rich food, not to mention this hunk of fancy cheese. Don't ask me what it was because I don't remember. 

In other words, the kind of stuff we did back in our twenties before we had kids. Except back then, we never stopped to reflect on how much we missed our children because we didn’t have any to miss. Weird how you can be in the middle of doing something totally fun that would be very difficult if not impossible to do if your kids were there, and yet they’re still kind of present by way of your pining for them. 

But all that fun stuff, as great a time as we had, damn, did we pay for it. By the time we picked the little dudes up, the wife and I were both dragging. There were great big hugs all around. As we listened to them tell us all about the fun weekend they had with Nanny, I just kept thinking, “It’s so great to have the boys back so now we can get some rest.”