Exhibit A: Work of genius.

The gifts are all unwrapped and put away (and there were a whole lot of them, just as the Times reported there would be, causing Ted with some justification to roll his eyes). As our house has slowly become littered with brightly colored baby gear, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to keep it all contained, and I’ve hit on a solution that I’m passing on here. We’re not exactly Hints from Heloise types here at Dadwagon, but hell, an odd scrap of practical advice isn’t against the rules.

Each room of our apartment now contains a modest-sized wooden crate to which I’ve attached four swivel casters. Each rolls discreetly under a chair when nobody’s around, and into the middle of the floor for playtime. It’s open on top, so there’s no impediment to tossing everything back in at the end of a play session. Ours are twelve-bottle French wine crates, except for one very nicely jointed wooden box that used to be someone’s desk drawer. All of them were freebies, picked up at curbside or somewhere, for free. (Before you gasp, be assured that they each got a good scrubbing before crate and baby made contact.)

The best thing about these things is that, when our little guy gets tired of playing with the toys themselves, I can sit him in the box and roll him around the living room for a few minutes. So far, this activity may be his favorite part of playtime, ever. (Frankly, if I could fit in there, I’d probably enjoy being rolled around the house for a few minutes, too.)

All right, it’s not exactly the invention of fire. But in the war against clutter—which, in small-apartment life, can feel like a battle for the last shreds of sanity—it is definitely a skirmish won. Mom also approves.

I have nothing against the great Republic of Brazil. I’ve never been there, but I understand they are world leaders in hairless crotches and bearded presidents. But the recent resolution of David Goldman’s five-year fight to get his 9-year-old boy Sean back to the States (the boy’s mother absconded to Brazil with the boy in 2004 and died there in childbirth in 2008) tempts me to offer some enlightened commentary, something like: Suck it, Brazil.

But I’ll resist. After all, this wasn’t about the people of Brazil. Brazilian courts ultimately ruled in the father’s favor. And, as DadWagon friend Seth Kugel pointed out, Brazilian opinion was heavily divided about the case (one Brazilian went to the trouble of recording an earnest, accented rock ballad in favor of Sean’s return to the U.S.).

So how about this:

Suck it, João Paulo Lins e Silva.

He’s the stepfather who fought for custody of Sean. He undeniably suffered from the death of his wife (Sean’s mother). And he’s not the worst stepfather in Brazil (that prize goes to the guy recently caught sewing needles into his 2-year-old stepson). But Lins e Silva had some less endearing traits. He was, as his bio page at his daddy’s firm shows, a well-heeled divorce lawyer with a James Spader hairdo. He reportedly had 70 lawyers working at one point on his novel claims as to why he, and not the boy’s father, was the right one to raise him.

Worst of all, he tried to make it a case about Brazil vs. the Superpower. In his rather stunning open letter published in Brazilian newspapers, he drove his point home by referring to David Goldman as “The American” 18 times. And he closed his argument thusly:

However, there’s a real fear in the family that due to North American political pressures, through the Consulate, that the minor’s interests will be put on the back burner… It doesn’t matter that he is BRAZILIAN. We are essentially running the risk of seeing our highest law that we respect, before everything, the child’s best interest, being violated, torn up, thrown away by North American political interests. They want to use the boy as an example. Example of what? It’s not enough that he was orphaned at age 8, and now, about to be taken from his house, his home, the people he lived with and who cared for him for five years, from daily living with the sister he loves, from his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, and friends?? Where is the best interest of the child??? Or does it deal with the best interest of the U.S., the American ambassador, of Hillary Clinton?

Of course, there are plenty of Americans equally willing to turn any disagreement into a pistol-shooting distance-piss between the U-S-of-A and foreigners. There have been calls for boycotts (which would be tough, since Brazil does a heckuva job making American cars, for starters).

But that stage of the fight is over. What comes next is perhaps the harder part. Given the slurs thrown at Goldman père in public, one can only imagine what Sean has been told about his father in private over the last five years. Deprogramming him will be arduous work. In 2006, after Natascha Kampusch was freed from her Viennese dungeon and pined for her dead captor, I wrote an article for TIME about the niche therapies that are available to children who have been poisoned against their parents:

Increasingly, family courts are ordering a treatment called reconciliation therapy. One technique is to have the child look through an album of photos of the alienated parent to humanize that person again. Another is to show studies about how easily the mind is tricked, to let children know it’s not their fault that they have come to believe falsehoods about their parent. But those first steps toward rebuilding the parent-child relationship can be wobbly.

All I can say is… boa sorte/good luck.

foto courtesy of Matthew Romack www.stoichiometryphotography.com

Over the weekend, we excursioned out to Pound Ridge, N.Y., to meet some old friends in from Cleveland. Among the usual sports of child-gawking and midday beer-drinking, there was this conversation:

Our friends are raising a son who is almost 2. Now that potty training is on the horizon, they let it be known that they don’t plan to let him pee standing up in their bathroom. Not just during potty training, but forever. That’s right, he’s got to sit until he’s 18. Outside of the home, he can do what he wants, but not under their roof.

Some more information: they are both women. Yes, they are sapphists, and also excellent parents. And if any of you don’t think it’s a scandal that my home state of Florida does not trust teh gays to raise children, let me direct your attention to merely the latest evidence of the complete inability of heterosexuals to raise their children without breaking the laws of God and man.

However, it can be said that in our friends’ household, there is not much understanding of, or tolerance for, the joys of peeing standing up. They are simply worried about splash and clean-up. But as the men in the room at Pound Ridge tried to explain, peeing while vertical is important. It’s one of the great advantages of the Y chromosome. It makes life infinitely more convenient. It makes tailgating possible. It makes up for the tragic fact that we can’t bear children, yadda yadda.

Actually, I can think of another reason why our friends would do well to reconsider their anti-standing stance: it could make it harder to potty-train their boy. Boys are notoriously behind the curve when it comes to ditching the diaper. True, sitting is recommended by many during the initial training, but afterward you’ll still have to entice the boy to pee before going out of the house, etc. As this NPR report on the history of the urinal fly makes clear, men of all ages get a sort of primal satisfaction from peeing at a target. Thus, the advent of the toddler toilet target industry, with new products like Piddlers, My Wee Friend, Tinkle Targets, and, of course, Wee Wee Pals. Why deprive yourselves of such twee allies in the War on Diapers?

I am a pretty peaceful guy, relatively patient and understanding—mild, you might even say—but on Christmas Day I found myself in an angry and resentful mood, all directed at the baby. First, I woke to find her at my bedside, tearing the cover off a 1960’s edition of “Europe on $5 a Day” that a friend in Istanbul had sent me. Later, after changing her pants in my bedroom (because Jean’s cousin and boyfriend were occupying the baby’s room), I accidentally kicked a bedpost and broke a toe.

Neither of these incidents were truly Sasha’s fault. At just 1 year of age, she’s not responsible for anything she does. It’s not as if she knows the difference between right and wrong and has chosen the dark path—she has no conception of either, only of what she’s doing at the moment and (maybe) what Mommy and Daddy are doing, too. How can I get angry at her when there’s not really even a “her” to be angry at?

Which just makes it ever more frustrating—and which, scarily, bends the anger in a strange direction. For, if I can’t be angry at the choice she’s made, I then have to be angry at her very existence. Which again isn’t her fault—it’s mine and her mother’s.

And so what does one do with this anger? It’s a horrible, ongoing feedback loop: anger at someone who can’t be responsible becomes frustration, becomes anger again, and so on. Where does it finally get released? (Paging Ted Ross!)

On some level, it doesn’t have to. From the earliest age, I’ve been well-trained by children’s TV shows such as “Sesame Street” to eliminate anger from my life—or rather, to deal with anger in various ways, by counting down from 10 or breathing deeply. I don’t ever remember watching kids’ TV or movies in which someone is justifiably angry and expresses that anger in a righteous way. The angry ones are always the bad guys, the dalmatian-killers or Lords of the Sith. Bert (of ___ & Ernie) is at most exasperated. Even Oscar the Grouch is only ever grouchy and bad-tempered, and in a whingeing, self-pitiful way.

Yes, it’s good to control one’s anger, and when Sasha’s achieved enough sentience to understand that, I’m sure it’s what I’ll teach her. But anger controlled is not anger eliminated. What are kids supposed to do with such emotions? And more importantly, what am I?