Tag Archives: parenting

You work for me now

My wife is utterly devoted to our children. She does whatever it takes to see to it that their young lives are full and happy. This is a wonderful thing to see, and it warms my heart. It also makes it such a shame that this is the woman with whom I have to compete in the ruthless tug-of-war for “me” time.

I could go on and on about how deserving my wife is of every moment of “me” time she can grab, but this is, after all, a competition.

I first truly realized how much a competition it is when she explained to me that I got my “me” time when I went to work. I get eight hours a day all to myself, with no needy, helpless, little people to distract or make unreasonable demands upon me. That’s the way she sees it, anyhow.

Way back in the years before children (B.C.), I used to spend some of my numerous idle hours brewing beer. It now seems like that was decades and decades ago.

It is too bad that I can’t mow the lawn from work, because that is the sort of thing I do with the rare snippets of “me” time I find these days. In fact, my “me” time belongs almost completely to our homeowners association. It is devoted to some sort of mowing or trimming, necessary to keep our property’s appearance at or near the minimum acceptable standard. I begin to feel like an indentured servant.

I would like all of our concerned neighbors to know that our grass is not long because I am inside playing video games. I am trying to get out to tend to the lawn, but I am being hindered by certain burdens. There is a 110 lb. woman draped over my shoulders, a three-year-old with his arms locked around my ankles, and a newborn hanging by his gums from my earlobe.

The woman is on my back because her schedules show that my “me” time ended when I took off my necktie. The boy is wrapped around my legs because there is no way I am going out to play with a loud, dangerous piece of machinery without him underfoot the entire time. The baby merely figures that, if he clamps down hard enough, long enough, he is bound to coax some milk out of this weird nipple at the side of my head.

On Wednesday evenings, my wife takes the boys to her moms’ group. The anticipation with which I look forward to this is shameful. It is my opportunity to enjoy mowing the lawn without distraction. Mowing the lawn doesn’t require inordinate concentration; you walk around a rectangle with an ever-shortening perimeter. Yet, it is very easy to mow Lucky Charms shapes into your lawn when you are constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure your little helper doesn’t follow the neighborhood cat into the street and wherever else a cat-about-town needs to be on a spring evening.

There were days, long ago, when I would have spent time playing computer games, or frittered it away on those wasteful activities known as hobbies. Not anymore. Now, if I find a moment that is not owed to my sons, my wife, or my fellow homeowners, I try to work in a little reading or writing. You are enduring one of the fruits of my “me” time even now. It’s more a dried prune than a plump, juicy watermelon, but you harvest what you can in these precious moments.

This is one of my more recent hobbies. It's really difficult to do this and write a blog post at the same time, but it can be done - just not very well.

It turns out that I don’t miss computer games, home brewing, or any of my former, solitary activities all that much. My sons are much more rewarding. They are more fun than any of my erstwhile hobbies, which is fortunate because they own me. It would be nice if I could just find a little more opportunity to read and write, but I guess I’ll have to arm wrestle my wife for that.

Got them low-down, no-good, bottle-feeding blues

Both times we’ve had a new baby in our family, my wife has taken pains to prepare me for the first time I would be left to care for him. “Are you ready to handle him all by yourself?” she asked, as if she thought I was afraid of him. I think a lot of mothers believe that Daddy is secretly afraid of the baby. I would be insulted by this condescending attitude, except that they are right.

Toddlers, we’re okay with. By that time, the playing field has been leveled. In fact, fathers are sometimes better suited to meet toddlers on their own mental and emotional levels than mothers are. But when it comes to infants, Mommy has an inherent, secret weapon that Daddy will never have, leaving Daddy feeling a little vulnerable because he has nothing on which he can so confidently rely.

He'll help Daddy manage while Mommy's out - with his polite requests and gentle reminders.

Mommy’s secret weapon is actually a twin-pack of big guns. They are strapped right onto the front of her, and they never seem to fail.

My wife claims that a moment with the nipple will quiet a man of any age from his fussing; my own data supports this conclusion. Our new baby is no exception to the rule. He might be wailing like the sky is falling, but snap him onto a booby for 15 minutes and it’s all sweet dreams. Once he’s taken off, he’ll doze through a quick, satisfied burp, as if to whisper, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Then, just lay him down and he’s out for hours.

No bottle works like that. Bottle nipples are always too slow or too fast, leaving Daddy with a baby who is frustrated or messy, or both. Also, the milk is the wrong temperature; that’s what you get for mixing drinks with only one hand while an infant screams impatient demands into your ear. Even if the child could find some comfort in the bottle, he is so full of gas by the end of it that he practically has to do calisthenics to air himself out.

Some of the pieces of Daddy's baby-feeding kit. (Including the refrigerator in the background.) Mommy's kit is easier to keep track of, having come fully assembled and ready for use.

So, you’ve just fed the baby and he’s still crying like Armageddon. What else you got up your sleeve, Pops?

I tried swinging him in the car seat first. This was moderately successful for a while, but car seats grow heavy. Swinging them gets boring. Next we sat together in the rocking chair. That was less tiring, and also less effective, than the car seat. In desperation, I even tried putting him into the useless chair. The useless chair is a reclined device that slides back and forth on its base. The motion is supposed to be soothing, but it never calmed Baby #1, and so far it has done nothing for Baby #2. Its record is still unblemished by success.

Frustrated that he had spurned all of my attempts to sway him into contentedness, I gave the baby the finger — the pinky finger of my right hand is the one he usually finds most soothing to suckle. But he closed his mouth tight and shook his head. Even Daddy’s tastiest finger would not do.

Because Daddy has no ace in the hole to settle Baby down, he needs some luck to have a good day with Junior. Luck came to me in the form of my three-year-old son, who reminded me that all of us guys in our family are Bluesmen. How could I have forgotten the semi-secret semi-weapon I had developed during the first go-round? Before a moment could be wasted, we were listening to Luther Allison on the stereo, swaying to the soulful notes from his electric guitar and floating on his gravelly lyrics. In mere minutes, the baby was in dreamland and I was feeling pretty mellow myself. (Watch Luther Allison YouTube clip.)

"We're all Bluesmen here, Daddy. So let's quit with the cryin' and get with the wailin'"

The baby woke up when he was hungry again. By that time, Mommy was home and Daddy had to rush to salvage a half day at work. I couldn’t stick around to watch, but I doubt Mommy had any problems with her hungry baby. I’m sure she just hooked him up to the spigot for half an hour and then had the afternoon to herself.

Killing me softly with yogurt

As a rule, I avoid the ladies (and occasional gentlemen) who hand out samples in the grocery store. My wife likes to see what they have to offer, but I don’t even like to make eye contact with them.

One summer during college, I worked in a grocery store, often behind the bottle return counter. This was before anyone invented machines to take back all those gross, sticky bottles. Instead, they got handed to me. I had to touch every one of them in order to sort them into the proper bins. With that kind of baggage, is it any wonder that I find the idea of eating anything in the grocery store abhorrent?

The days of my youthful exuberance, before working the bottle return counter made me cold and cynical . . . and bald. (My neck is no longer bent under the weight of that hair.)

So, no, I don’t want to try a sample. It’s probably some unholy combination anyway; hence the need to force it upon unwitting passersby. Even if it could defy the odds and appear somewhat appetizing, I have my grocery store demons to keep my teeth clenched together.

I was appalled, therefore, shopping with my son, to find a sample lady beaming at us expectantly from the end of our aisle. This meant I would have to sacrifice another little piece of my soul in declining the generous offer of a kindly stranger.

Worse was the betrayal I felt at realizing that my boy was pulling me toward the trap, eager to see what treats this woman was offering out of her gingerbread house. I hate it when he acts like his mother’s boy and his mother is nowhere near to deal with the consequences.

Overcome with a rare spell of patience, I concluded that it was not right to make the boy carry the burden of my supermarket baggage. I allowed him to lead me to the sample cart, where his instincts were proven to be uncanny. The lady was doling out cups filled with flavored yogurt made especially for kids.

Through what witchcraft this lady wordlessly reeled him to her, I cannot say. I let him taste a sample, but I stayed very near his side. As sweet and gentle as she appeared, she was still a grocery store sample lady.

My son ate the entire sample. He said he liked it. I was skeptical. This boy eating yogurt? It didn’t seem right. I asked him if he were sure he liked it. He nodded. He really liked it. We should buy some for home.

A scientific breakthrough of enormous potential: flavored yogurt developed especially to appeal to kids.

I asked the proud lady where this magical, child-friendly yogurt was to be found. She pointed toward the opposite corner of the store. Excellent. This would give me a chance to remove the boy from her sphere of influence and question him privately about the yogurt. When the truth came out, we could exit the store yogurt-free, and without Yogurt-Mesmer knowing our deception.

She read my duplicitous soul through my eyes. A knowing smile lit her face. “I happen to have one more four-pack right here,” she said, materializing the item from the amorphous folds of her robe. (Robe, apron, what’s the difference?) My son’s eyes grew bright. Mine darkened. Defeated, I took the package and put it into our cart.

Later that day, when my son asked for a snack, I opened one of his cups of yogurt for him. He took the first spoonful willingly enough, but made an unhappy face at tasting it. The second spoonful took more effort. It was the last. “This stuff is disgusting!” the boy declared. He’s never taken another bite of the concoction. He runs away whenever I mention opening another cup of it for him.

Wasted potential: flavored yogurt developed especially to appeal to kids, meet garbage disposal, developed especially to erase evidence of Daddy’s gullibility.

That’s how modern witchcraft works, my friends. No longer does it lure children into candy houses where they are fattened up as dinner entrees. Now it lures them to the sample cart, where Daddy’s money is sucked down the rabbit hole of the retail machine. It’s good to see that even fairy tales are keeping up with the times.