Category Archives: Parenting Issues (i.e. Mistakes)

Put your head on my shoulder, dammit!

Is it unmanly to admit that I’m a touch jealous of the way the baby snuggles up so happily on Mommy’s chest and rests his contented little head on her shoulder? Luckily, I have some wood to split out back, so if an admission like this siphons some of my manliness, I’ll just pick up my splitting maul and go pump it back up to the fill line.

The baby settles in so easily when Mommy holds him close. He looks like he fits the spot perfectly and would rather be nowhere else. Whenever I try to rest his little noggin on my shoulder, he swipes his face from side to side, unable to find a comfy spot for it. He never settles down and eventually becomes so disgusted with the arrangement that he tries to thrust himself off of me like a backstroke swimmer at the start of a race.

The baby seems to have some difficulty with my clavicle. As he fidgets around my shoulder area, you can tell he is wondering to himself, “What’s this raggedy bone doing here? It’s all in my face no matter how I squirm. I can’t rest here. I’m gonna backstroke my way right out of this mess.” Then he kicks off.

“Oh no! Here comes Daddy. I hope he isn’t thinking about trying to hold me on his chest.”

I’ve never considered myself to be the bearer of an overly prominent collar bone. My clavicle seems to protrude no more profoundly than my wife’s does. So why is the baby not bothered by hers? Do mothers have a retractable clavicle that hops out of the way when Baby is near?

“Get those broken glass shoulders of yours away from here, Daddy. I mean it!”

Or maybe my torso is too long. Maybe I need to heft him up higher so he can hook his chin over my collar bone. I wish we had kept the instruction manual so I could look at the diagram and see how to align Chin-A with Clavicle-B. I try to lift him up high so he can find a good spot, but he always acts like my shoulder is as cozy as a pile of rocks.

“Help, Mommy! Don’t let him scrape me on those pricker bushes he’s got growing out of the sides of his neck!”

When he’s snuggled in good on Mommy’s shoulder, his button nose burrowed into her neck, he spreads his contented gaze over the whole world. His baby eyes say to me, “Mommy is so warm and soft,” without needing to finish the comparison they are implying.

At times like this, I am tempted to point my bony finger into his face and say, “Listen you! I know Mommy is warm is soft. I knew that before you were even born. And if I hadn’t discovered how warm and soft Mommy is, you wouldn’t be here. Lucky for you, Mommy doesn’t get all bent out of shape just because I happen to have a clavicle. So put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

“Phew! He’s just taking pictures. Sure, I’ll smile. Keep that bed of nails away from me and I’ll smile all night long.”

I don’t actually say these things. How could I when he is so damned adorable, nestled on Mommy’s shoulder? I could never raise my voice to his happy little face, even telepathically. Besides, is it his fault that I have a mondo-monstrous clavicle that starts arguments by poking innocent bystanders in the eye?

“You’ve got the best shoulders in the world, Mommy. Good enough to eat. You just keep snapping the pictures, Pops.”

Don’t look a gift dad in the mouth

My son has quite a little collection of Matchbox cars. He likes to line up all his cars in the manner of a miniature used car lot. It’s a way to organize his ever-expanding empire and make its growth quantifiable.

The miniature car lot: Bad credit? No problem! Just go work your charm on Mommy or Daddy.

One day, while he was lining up his cars, a burst of generosity overcame him. “Here, Daddy,” he said. “I have a surprise for you.” He held out his hand in the way a child does when offering an imaginary gift.

I took his pretend present eagerly. I was happy that his head was not so turned by the success of his car dealership that he had forgotten his poor old dad.

“It’s a transformer,” he told me as he handed the gift to me.

“Oh good,” I said. “I love transformers.” I made some turning motions with my hands and some transformative sounds through my teeth. “Schwitt, schwitt, schwitt,” I said as I twisted the air between my fingers. “It’s a truck. Schwitt, schwitt, schwitt. Now, it’s a robot with a laser canon.”

The boy laughed. He was pleased with how well I understood the workings of his gift to me. “Do you have a surprise for me?” he asked.

“Oh yes, I certainly do,” I replied. I could give the kid these kinds of toys all day long. They are imaginative and economical, and that is just the sort of world I need to live in, even if it is make-believe and only lasts until our next trip to Target.

I quickly put my empty hand behind my back and pulled it out again, offering him all the treasure it held. He took the wonder from my hand. “What is it?” he asked.

“It’s an airplane,” I said, happy that I could give him something so nice.

All good things must end. What caused our precious moment to end is hard to know. The best I can guess is that a surge of petulant testosterone spiked up his spine to that reptilian spot in the brainstem of all little boys. Who can say for sure what it is that transforms the pleasant Master Jekyll into that nasty Hyde urchin in the blink of an eye.

He flung my gift away. “I hate airplanes,” he huffed. His cerebrum does not hate airplanes in the least, but a spastic, testosterone-drenched medulla oblongata is liable to hate anything and everything.

“Oh,” I said. “If that’s what you do with my presents, I guess you don’t need to get any more from me.” I looked meaningfully at his array of die-cast cars.

He followed my eyes to his cars. I could almost see self-interest tamping down the testosterone at the top of his neck. “Wait,” he said. “Can we do that again? Here’s another surprise for you.” He held out his hand. “It’s another transformer.”

“That’s so nice,” I said. “I love it.” I drew out the word love as I gazed my meaning into his eyes. “And here’s another surprise for you.”

He took his present out of my hand. “What is it?”

“It’s another airplane.”

He stared at his hands for a moment, too proud to love his imaginary present and too wise hate it. “Let’s play with my cars,” he said after he had given the problem in his hands just enough time to evaporate.

Somewhere between pride and humility there lies a sanctuary of comforting die-cast vehicles. Diplomacy is a complicated playroom.

Ginger and his brother, Mary Ann: a nicknaming debacle

Sometimes I wonder why people go to the trouble of naming babies. After all those hours of pouring over the baby names books, after all those alarmed faces you had to make, listening to the ridiculous names your spouse suggested, after all those recollections of the goofy children of your youth who put otherwise respectable names off-limits with their oafish behavior, you finally settle on a name that everybody can live with. And then you call the baby something else anyway.

Children should not be formally named until they are two or three, when they have outgrown all the infant, pet names their parents have invented for them. If all little boys were named at age two, none of them would have names that mean peace is some distant language. There would be a lot more truth in advertising.

Before the new baby was born, our son wanted to name him Brother or Doritos, depending upon whether he was more in the mood for a sibling or a snack. Both of these names made sense in their own way, and I was happy that he chose them instead of names like Parasite or Usurper. At the very least, I knew Doritos were something he liked.

Meanwhile, my wife and I spent countless hours negotiating. None of our top picks could win the support of the other parent. Finally, hours after the baby was born, we found a compromise.

Now, weeks later, I have observed that my wife refers to the baby most often as Tiny Tim. His name is not Tim, nor is it Tiny. Sometimes she calls him Peanut. This is also not his name.

“You can call me Tiny, or you can call me Tim, or you can call me Peanut . . . it really doesn’t matter; I only respond to spitting noises anyway.”

His big brother still tries to tell people that the baby’s name is Brother, but when he is addressing the baby directly, he usually calls him Mr. Baby. While I appreciate that this is a very respectful form of address, that name is also nowhere to be found in the baby’s official paperwork.

I too have fallen into the habit of addressing the infant as Mr. Baby. It makes him sound like a young gentleman of substantial accomplishment. Other times, I simply call him Junior. This worked fine until his big brother adopted it as well. Big Brother’s three-year-old pronunciation of Junior comes out Junjor. To my wife, it sounds like Ginger, which she has already jokingly repeated several times in reference to the baby.

These things have a tendency to take on a life of their own, and I don’t think I want Ginger attached to my son as his nickname. The way we free-associate in my house, we’d soon be calling his brother Mary Ann. Even with all the “A Boy Named Sue” toughening qualities that these names stand to gain the children, I would still disapprove of this development.

My boys could hardly have a couple of prettier namesakes. (Image: United Artists/CBS Productions)

I am simply going to have to pull the entire family back from the Junior word-association thread. I must find a name with a more suitable web of mispronunciations attached to it. If I get desperate enough, I may even have to use the one printed on the baby’s birth certificate.

Houston, we have splashdown

I had my first extended stint as Mr. Mom since the new baby came, and it didn’t start out so well. The baby didn’t want to sleep all day, which isn’t really a crisis, and is understandable, considering that I had nothing more soothing than a bottle to put into his mouth. But it would have been nice if he could have taken a short nap just to let me get organized before setting upon me with his verbal assault.

A crying toddler, on the other hand, is always a crisis – to the toddler anyway. And it does distract from Daddy’s ability to soothe a crying baby, which he’s not really very good at in the first place.

The three-year-old announced that he had to go potty. No problem. He’s adept at climbing onto the toilet and getting the party started all by himself. He wouldn’t need any help for a few minutes. Meanwhile, Daddy could keep arguing with the baby.

After a little while, I went into the bathroom to check on the boy. His pants were down, but he wasn’t sitting on the potty. He was standing with his shirt hiked up behind him, using two hands to buff his lower back with a hand towel. It looked like he had a bad itch.

“What’s going on?” I asked, not even in that accusing tone I most often use.

He burst into tears. Now, toddlers are pretty clever folks, but two things they have never effectively learned to do at the same time are cry and answer a lot of pointless questions. The boy made no attempt at words. He focused all his attention upon his wailing. The baby heard his song and picked up the harmony.

“I can’t have two crying kids,” I told him, a little in that annoyed father tone I most often use. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

For a second, he tried to say something, but the crying would not relent.

“Stop crying and tell me what’s wrong,” I insisted, comfortingly, instead of in the impatient tone I most often use.

“My shirt’s wet,” he choked out between sobs.

“How’d your shirt get wet?” I asked. You can probably imagine all the tonal cues from here.

“I don’t know.”

When my son says, “I don’t know,” it means one of the following, in order of frequency:

a.) “I think the truth might get me into trouble, so I’m pleading the fifth.”

b.) “I’m really embarrassed and I’d rather not talk about it.”

c.) “I don’t know.” This last example is a rare usage, usually reserved for questions of an academic nature (e.g. “What number comes after 19?”).

I may not be the world’s most perceptive parent, but I know there are only two sources of water in our downstairs bathroom, and I didn’t hear the sink running. Further investigation revealed that his toddler potty seat was over in the corner, where it could do nothing toward keeping him high and dry.

“Did you fall in?” I asked.

Footstool, toddler seat, books to read – of all the amenities, only the toddler seat is indispensable. Alas . . .

“Maybe.”

“Okay. Take off your shirt. I’ll get you a new one.”

I got him cleaned up and settled back into the world. We spoke no more of the incident. I didn’t even laugh, and I want credit for that. Somebody falls into the toilet and a guy with four brothers doesn’t even laugh. That’s love, pure and simple.

I think the baby might have laughed though. He stopped crying for minute, which is as good as a laugh to me. But I guess he has to laugh at this kind of stuff. It’s his brother.