Tag Archives: children

No girls allowed

“Oh my! I already know what it is,” the ultrasound technician said as soon as she set her fancy air hockey paddle on my wife’s belly. She nodded toward the monitor. “That’s a boy – no doubt about it.” She typed the words “It’s a Boy!” on the screen with an arrow pointing to the peninsula of grayish-white protruding into the sea of black.

My wife grinned. She knew I was thinking, “Yeah, they’ve never had to squint to find it on any of my boys. Score one for heredity.” I gave her my You’re a Lucky, Lucky Woman nod. This is one moment when a man should be allowed to be full of himself.

We always assumed it would be a boy, because that’s what we do. We’re used to boys. We have clothes for them. Everything we know about children we learned from boys. Only after the ultrasound was over did we notice that both of us were wearing something pink. I wonder what that means.

Gentlemen's railway car

The quiet club for civilized gentlemen that our parlor is destined to become in just a few, short years. (Image: George R. Lawrence)

This ultrasound seemed to last a lot longer than the previous ones. If they’re going to drag this process out, like Major League Baseball games, I think they should try to save the penis for last, just to keep some drama in it. Instant penis is like a 10-run first inning. After that, they’re just padding the score sheet until its time to go home.

The face, fingers, feet and things are nice, but they don’t really tell you anything specific about your child, except that he has those things. The ultrasound pictures of our boys are indistinguishable from one another. They all flashed their junk and then presented generic baby parts to the camera.

Our one-year-old was watching with me. He was excited to see the pictures at first, but soon became bored with all the semi-distinguishable parts. When the technician wouldn’t let him run the machine, he decided he was outta there. He and I walked the halls, he trying to sneak into offices and find buttons to push.

When Mommy was done, she joined us in another room where we waited for the doctor. Our little boy was bored and antsy, so we had to find something to occupy him. They have interesting pastimes in an OBGYN office.

He started with a pen and a pad of paper, each sheet printed with a diagram of a uterus. He made a nice drawing over the lady parts. When this got dull, he found a sample birth control ring on the counter. It was attached by a string to a little box. On the box was a button that, when pushed, retracted the string like the cord on a fancy vacuum cleaner. It made a delightful toy, but I had to wonder, is the real ring attached to a retractable cord? That would be surprising, though it’s probably convenient.

one-year-old's souvenir from the OBGYN

A doctor’s office activity book. Somebody had already colored the picture, which was okay since we couldn’t find the crayons.

The doctor said everything looked good. Did we have any questions?

Yeah. Why are we wearing pink to a peninsula party?

No, we’re not really morning people

My last post was about things I am thankful for. This one is about something I’m not thankful for. I am starting a new tradition (if it doesn’t already exist) that I will call the Post-Thanksgiving Bitch and Moan Fest. You in?

Good.

Because of the nature of the floating shifts at my wife’s part time job, I must often use pieces of my vacation time to take the kids to school and day care or pick them up. Picking them up is easy; you just show up and ask for your kid. You repeat the process until you have everybody you started the day with. Then you go home.

Dropping them off in the morning is a royal pain in the butt. Specifically, getting the kindergartener up, clothed, fed, and into the car in reasonable amount of time will be the death of me.

The kid is not a morning person. I get that. I’ll never forgive 7 a.m. for showing up uninvited day after day, and yet I get up every morning because it’s part of my job. Kindergarten is his job. On one level, he understands that, but that one level is the last to become conscious in the morning. The intervening levels complain that the light hurts their eyes. Hurt eyes make it difficult to go back to sleep.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. He’s not buying it. It’s infuriating, how much like me he can be. I make him eat, which he does in tiny, protesting bites. I even set an example by choking down something myself, if I can find a moment between prodding him to eat and packing a lunch that he might nibble at before recess. His master plan is to build up his appetite for a big snack after school before pestering his parents to take him out to eat shrimp. It’s a bad plan.

Who wants my sandwich?

The lunch sandwich: made with love, battered in transit, nibbled at with indifference.

Assuming we didn’t spend a half hour pouting over the lack of stylish clothes to wear to kindergarten, we will only be moderately late when it’s time for coats and shoes. Perhaps there is no five-year-old who can maintain a sense of urgency; there is none in my morning. When a dad says “Hurry up!” 100 times in the space of five minutes, you might think there’d be no time in between for a boy to be distracted by a piece of lint. There 99 such opportunities.

Finally delivering the boy to school, it is only a matter of dropping off his brother at day care and trying to escape before the little boy’s crying stabs the dagger of guilt into my heart. Feeling like I’ve already had a full day’s work, I head to my job to hunt with the other late-comers for a precious parking spot, because the university we work at doesn’t believe that all its daytime employees should be able to park there on the same day.

My eye stops twitching about an hour later.

This leads me full circle to something I am very thankful for: my wife, who conducts this process more often and with much more grace than I do.

The world according to Buster

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “I’m a lover not a fighter.” If our one-year-old could speak English, he would never say such a thing. He would proudly proclaim that he is a lover and a fighter.

He’s a little scrapper, that one. He loves to roughhouse and he’s not above bopping a family member on the nose when push comes to shove, or at any time before or after. He’s not very big for his age, but he makes up for his lack of volume with full doses of piss and vinegar.

Buster Brown

With a haircut like this, you’d have to be a fighter. (Image: Richard F. Outcalt)

My wife suggested that we change his name to Buster, or maybe Brutus. Brutus was the big meanie who picked fights with Popeye. This was either directly before, or directly after, his name was Bluto. I can’t remember the chronology; it’s so hard to keep up with Popeye now that he’s not appropriate for children anymore.

Buster and Brutus are tough guy names. But our little rough and tumble kid has a sweet side too. He’s a really good hugger who is never shy about passing out kisses to his family. If you rescue him from his crib when it has become a prison to him, he’s apt to take your face in his hands, turn it toward him, and plant a big wet one on your lips. (And you can pretty much count on baby kisses to be wet, even out of runny nose season.)

Pick him up from day care and he will smother you with hugs and kisses. He’s never loved anybody so much as he loves the particular parent who brings him home from that peculiar form of exile.

When you have a toddler who is both so rough and so tender, you have to be careful about how you teach him to employ the opposing sides of his personality. We’ve learned it is dangerous to lead such a child to the belief that a kiss is the equivalent of an apology.

Brutus . . . er . . . Bluto?

“See, it says right here. My name was Bluto until 1956, and again after 1958.” (Image: Fleischer Studios)

Sure, it seems like a sweet kiss would be a nice way to say I’m sorry, when the culprit is too young to say I’m sorry with actual words. But no.

Whenever the little boy plowed an unprovoked fist into this brother’s ear or pinched his arm, we asked him to make up by giving his brother a kiss. He had no problem doing this. After all, the punch was meant in good fun. Since no one hits him, he doesn’t know how much it can hurt.

Kisses seemed like a fine substitute until Buster could express his remorse in actual words.

Then, one day Mommy picked up her little boy and asked him for a kiss. He knitted his brow. He wanted to give her a kiss, but could not recall having anything to apologize for. So he punched her in the ear.

And then, in accordance with his training, he gave her a sweet kiss dripping with love (i.e. baby spit).

Be careful what you inadvertently teach your Buster.

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like a house with the right kind of bed in it

On the days I pick my son up from kindergarten, we come home through the neighborhood. There are a lot of very nice, roomy houses on the school side of our neighborhood. The homes get smaller and plainer as we get closer to ours. When there is nothing left to envy about the houses we pass, we know we are home.

dream home

What our house surely looks like from the other end of the neighborhood. (Image: Marion Post Wolcott/US Farm Security Administration)

There have been three or four houses for sale along our path since we began taking it. They are all near the school, over on the swanky side of town. We couldn’t afford to upgrade to any of them, but with the addition coming to our family, it is tempting to fantasize about living in a bigger house.

My son always points out each house with a for sale sign in the front yard. We make a game of picking out which property each of us thinks is the nicest. It’s kind of a stupid game, since they are all nicer than people of our ilk can afford. But it passes the time.

One day, on our trip home, I asked the boy, “Would you like to move to a new house?”

“No.”

“Not even a nice, big, fancy one like these?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because the new house might have a girl’s bed in it.”

“A girl’s bed? What does that mean?”

“It might come with a girl’s bed in my bedroom instead of a boy’s bed.”

I’d never thought of that. Who would want to take such a chance? “When you move to a new house, you take your own bed with you,” I explained.

“Oh. That’s a good idea. I should keep my same bed.”

Yesterday was my morning to take him to school. All of his favorite pants and shirts were in the hamper, so we had to make do with whatever was clean. He balked at the two pairs of pants I could find that fit him. Then, when I finally got him to understand that there were no other choices, he complained that the shirt I found went with a different pair of pants. The situation escalated. I yelled at him to just put something on before we were late. He whined and got all pouty about having to wear such unappealing clothes.

fresh laundry

All his other clothes were dirty. (Image: Dorthea Lange/US Farm Security Administration)

And there I was arguing fashion with my five-year-old son. I’d never imagined a scenario that would lead me to this result.

It’s a good thing I don’t have any money to buy a new house. There was an hour yesterday morning when I might have shopped for one that came with a girl’s bed.

That knee-jerk reaction faded fast. It soon occurred to me that he was arguing about his loss of control more than about fashion. Even so, he can be into fashion or whatever else he wants. He’ll always be my boy and he’ll always be able to bring his own bed wherever we might go.