Looky, Daddy!

Dodging the Severed Finger of Blame

There is a startling disconnect with my daughter, Kathryn. Packed deep in her petite frame of blond tresses and winsome smiles is a frighteningly morbid little creature. Many of you, in comments and emails, have blamed me for being the tree from which this particular apple did not fall far (read it again, it makes sense) but I think the fault lies firmly with The Mom. To wit:

The cupcakes made by The Mom for Kathryn's birthday:

And the cookies:

Sure it was Kathryn's idea to have her birthday party be a "Summer Scare," but it was her mom who jumped on the idea and ran. Far.

I won't even mention the takeaway goodie bags, stapled shut so that the guests wouldn't open them on the spot and ask us the question that I'm sure they asked their moms later: "Where is the head to my new Barbie?"

Those two should really be separated.

An 85% Accurate Birthday Wish

Dear Kathryn,

You were a day-and-a-half old when your mother woke me to tell me you were choking. It was sometime around 3 AM and you, your mom, and I were all sharing the same hospital room. Never in my life before or since have I moved as fast as I did then. You were lying there, still, quiet when I jumped up from my cot and wrapped my hands around you, not knowing what to do but knowing that picking you up was probably a good start. And you wailed. And that was how I interrupted the first full hour of sleep I had had since you were born.

You weren't choking at all, of course. You were sleeping. The word your mom had said was "joking", not "choking," and to hear her tell it, she had said it a good fifteen minutes before I jumped up and made you cry so pitifully. It seems your mom had woken up in some discomfort from her surgery and had asked me for a cup of water, prompting me to stand up from my cot, walk to her bed, and hand her my pillow. As I shuffled back to my cot, she asked if I were joking.

Fifteen minutes later my sleep-deprived brain processed that last word. With about 85% accuracy.

Since that day, I've tried to maintain that same 85% success rate in my raising of you, my first child. Certainly some days have been better and some days have been worse, but all-in-all, I feel that I have earned a solid B on any fathering report card I might be issued.

And now today, Kathryn, you are seven years old. So far the biggest change is in your timeline for the future. For the past year, seven was everything to you. At mealtimes you'd regale us with tales of your future seven-year-old accomplishments, and now that you are there, you have already begun the monumental task of shifting those feats up one more year. Like when you're eight, you'll read that book we bought you. Or you'll swim the width of the pool. Or you'll be famous. And then we will all celebrate by jumping in our rocket-powered hovercrafts and jaunting over to your favorite restaurant where the food is cooked entirely by robots.

But seven is still really exciting to you, and when we were driving the other day, in one of those rare moments when the twins were quiet and we could speak to each other, you told me that you thought Kate or Katy might be a good name for a seven-year-old. You said it hesitatingly, nervous how I might take it, as in the past I have expressed a general dislike of diminutive nicknames. But you were about to turn seven, a wonderfully delightful seven at that, and I was determined to not fall below the 85% mark on this occasion, so I said that you could certainly call yourself anything you wished, because it was your name and you were the boss of you.

Then I asked if you thought it would be okay if I still called you Kathryn, because calling you that made me happy. For a long time you were quiet, and when you spoke, you sounded two years younger. "Daddy," you said, "I really like it when you call me Little Bear."

So Happy Birthday, Little Bear. May your next seven years be at least as good as 85% of your last seven.

Love, Daddy

Odds and Ends

Toddler Planet invites you to steal this post. While you are there, be sure to leave behind all the love and strength you can.

Also, the good people who keep me in lattes want you to take this survey.

And finally, there seems to be some confusion among my readership. There are many reasons why a man might choose to become a stay-at-home parent. He might make less money than his spouse, or maybe he finds his job unsatisfying, or maybe he is just a moron, but whatever the reason, remember, he's still a man. That part doesn't change. And that means that, no, he doesn't want to see pictures of your kids.

And yet pictures of children who are not mine come to my InBox. Pictures of babies, mostly. Not babes, babies. Most of them come with a request that the next Looky, Daddy! contest be a cute baby photo contest. This will never happen. People get funny when their children are subjects in contests. Not funny-ha-ha, but what-do-you-mean-my-kid-isn't-a-finalist-time-to-get-an-unlisted-phone-number-funny. And my life is plenty stressful as it is, thank you very much. Other people send me pictures of their kids just for the apparent heck of it. Like they are sitting around one day, sending out the latest photo of Bobby's Cutest Face Ever to friends and family, and they say, hey, let's send it to that Looky, Daddy! guy, too, won't he get a kick out of it? Oh boy, won't I!

But still, despite my manly misgivings about this whole situation, here's what I was thinking. If you are so inclined to use the awesome power of the Internet to send me your baby pictures, then do so. And for the month of August, I'll choose one a day (give or take) to use as the masthead for this site. If you wish to participate, your pics have to be at least 860 pixels wide (preferably more), and you have to agree to let me crop them/photoshop them for fit and humor. Pictures do not have to be limited to baby pics, and it does help if they show a little personality, but please don't send any pictures of your child channeling Elton John channeling Harry Potter. I already have one of those.

Send the pics to lookydaddy at gmail dot com.

Still Not Pushing Forty

On my twenty-first birthday, exactly seventeen years ago, my college roommate and I drove his VW bus to the liquor store to buy me a keg of beer. The keg we bought, for reasons that I cannot now recall, already had a tap installed, and my job as we were driving home was to hold the keg upright in the back of the bus lest it tip and break off the tap.

Needless to say, on one corner, not far from our apartment, my grip on the keg failed. The keg tipped, rolled, and the tap broke off at the base. The whole mechanism was beyond repair and for the next few minutes all I could do was watch as my birthday keg emptied itself, spewing yellow, foamy liquid in every conceivable direction.

Today is my 38th birthday, and despite the fact that there is nothing particularly monumental about turning 38, I am still spending it watching yellow, foamy liquid spew in every conceivable direction.

Potty training is not going well.

Still, as I came downstairs this morning, I was greeted with such a crowd of young girls all waving handmade presents and scribbled cards, screaming like it was 1964 and I was the Beatles, that it's hard to carry too much of a grudge.

Hard, mind you, but not impossible. Nothing is impossible to a father of twins.

AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIGH!

AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIGH!

Updated to add:

EEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRG!

Through Screwing Around

The Mom is gone, off on a three-day retreat, to hone her already prodigious editing skills, which I hope will mean that from now on when I ask her to read over something, she'll have graduated from, "It's okay, I guess," to the more confident, "It's okay."

The last activity she partook of before she left was helping me move our couch to our kitchen. Our downstairs has exactly three rooms, placed in a row, like the segments of a caterpillar. All three of the rooms are the same size, which means if the couch fit in the living room, then it will fit in the dining room and in the kitchen, too. The upshot is, when you visit my house, you will either be surprised at the grandness of our kitchen, or the puniness of our living room, depending on your personality. Personally, I am surprised by both.

As for why the couch is in the kitchen, it is because I am through screwing around. Somebody's getting potty trained this week, by God, and I'm purging our living spaces of diapers, pull-ups, and furniture until it happens.

Don't expect regular posts.

Weekend Weblink

Nice advertisement, sent in by The 40-year-old Uncle

In Which My Brother Ages

Today my older brother turns 40. All last week the girls and I were making cards and crafts for this monumental occasion. We made designs of black paper pasted on black paper, colored more black paper with black markers, drew black flowers with little skulls in the middle (Kathryn's touch), and were altogether hideously tacky individuals. Long ago my family forswore pleasant Hallmark birthday greetings for more irreverent fare, and as the youngest of the bunch, I can be as tasteless as I want, knowing that everyone will always be older than me. By a lot.

As we worked, Kathryn recited a stream-of-conscious series of poems all about death and old age, each one more disturbing than the last, making me wonder if my ability to choose to stay home with children should have been curtailed by a more conservative Supreme Court. Each poem was titled Turning Forty, and there were maybe a dozen in all. Here's the one she wanted included on this site:

Turning Forty, by Kathryn

Time turns weary
You moan for your bed
And then one day you rest your head
And never awaken again
Until it's time to say goodbye
And go into the grave

After she dictated the poem to me, I asked her if there was anything else she wanted to add to it. She said, "Oh, yes. Please make the last line say 'Happy Birthday Uncle Randy.' With an explanation point."

So Happy Birthday Uncle Randy. With an explanation point.

In Which God's Messages are Ignored

To say that my wife is more religious than I am is to say that Old Navy is more of a discount clothing outlet than I am. That is, it is not necessarily saying much. But in truth, The Mom does have a very deep-seated religious conviction, which made it even more baffling to me that, when God spoke to us last week, The Mom was able to completely ignore his message. And that message was this: DO NOT GO CAMPING.

But camping we went. And God smote us for our insolence.

Our optimism was well-founded. Four years ago, deep in the heat of a Texas summer, The Mom and I took a not-quite-three-year-old Kathryn on a mammoth 10-day camping trip out in the  Big Bend area of West Texas. It was extremely ambitious, extremely foolhardy, and extremely fun. It took us two days of driving to get there, and although we had borrowed a DVD player for the car to entertain our backseat two-year-old, we never used it. And when we reached our destination, we learned that all of the hiking trails leading away from it were closed due to an aggressive mountian lion that had mauled a few people some days before.

At each trailhead, there were big signs of scary looking mountain lions. Kathryn thought these were advertisements, teases of what was to be found just out of sight, and she spent most of her time standing at each of the trailheads that radiated like spokes from our campground, calling out "Mountain lion! Oh, MOUNTAIN lion!" and shaking a baggie of Goldfish snack crackers as a tasty enticement for her newest and bestest friend to come visit.

The day before we left, the renegade mountain lion, a female apparently driven from her normal hunting lands, finally came into the campgrounds, skinny and hungry, only to be shot by the park rangers. Later that day, the trails were opened and the warning signs were taken down, replaced with less alarming, more generic signs asking potential hikers to take care and keep an eye open for mountain lions and bears. Kathryn, ever inquisitive, asked about the new signs, and when The Mom read them aloud, her eyes lit up. "Oh, Mama! Bears!" she exclaimed, running back to our tent for more Goldfish.

But dangerous wildlife aside, we had a great time. Kathryn loved sleeping in a tent and while she was never exactly thrilled with what we prepared to eat over our campfire, she was always delighted how it was prepared and that alone seemed to keep her going. And with her mother's hiking stick as a horsey and a stream to cool off in, she was easily the happiest person there. Which is good, because it would have been a long two-day drive back had she not been.

But this camping trip was different. We knew it would be going in to it. All the signs were there.

For starters, the forecast for our destination, captured the night before our departure:

Then came this, courtesy of Lila:

The Mom's response? Pack some ponchos and children's Tylenol. Let's go.

I could have argued, but though I'm loathe to admit it, I wanted to go as much as she did. Before the kids came, we used to camp all the time. In Japan, our favorite activity was to strap a tent and a few blankets to the backs of our bikes and ride, ride, ride until we found a beach or an old shrine or just a dry plot of ground next to a rice field to sleep for the night, just to return home the next morning. And I craved the ability to do that again. So much of my time right now is dedicated to raising these kids that when the carrot of my former life is dangled before me, I jump.

Besides, there was no way I was going to countermand my wife. She's mean.

So camping we went. And if you ask each of us what our favorite part of the trip was, here's what we would not say.

Kathryn would not say it was sitting in the tent for hours while mother nature did exactly what it promised it would:

Lila would not say spending the night in the tent, during which she woke up no less than five times confused and screaming and inconsolable.

The Mom would not say trying to calm Lila in the middle of the night, repeating ad infinitum that she was there and it was all okay to a child who did not hear her, while nearby campers grew more agitated and less sympathetic.

Victoria would not say the wasp that stung her just below her eye:

And I would not say it was watching the dangling carrot of my former life turn rotten and drop from the line.

On the way home, I asked The Mom, what with her closeness to God and all, why she didn't listen to him when he told us not to go. She replied that every good Catholic knows you should never listen when God speaks. "No good comes from it. It's either sacrifice your son, or build an ark, or wander the desert, or you're pregnant with my baby and good luck with that. Trust me, this camping trip was way better than any of those things."

Five Things I Would Not Do This Week If I Weren't Married to My Wife

1. Wake up in New Jersey
2. Shop on the feminine hygiene aisle.
3. Burn a copy of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack.
4. Take care of three children.
5. Take those children on a three-day camping trip over the Fourth of July holiday.

Guess which one is the most colossally stupid.

I'll tell you all about it when we get back. If we get back.