Greek-American candidates...

When we first e-mailed pictures of our wee newborn to his grandparents, one of them responded, “Looks like a future president!” My reaction was a proud chuckle; my wife’s was mild horror. “I would NOT want him to be president,” she said.

Not even a little? I’ve been thinking about that question ever since. Extreme achievement can do extreme good, and it can also damage and warp people. It’s often said that the qualities that allow one to become president (an almost pathological urge to power, a willingness to shill for campaign funds, a potentially dangerous ability to persuade) should automatically disqualify you from the job. It would be difficult, as a parent, to hear the absolutely vicious things said about your kid should he achieve high office. The last few presidents have all been called treasonous, traitorous, murderous.

Then, of course, there is the other possibility. Every presidential family knows that there’s a shadow over that house. Forty-three men have been president, and nine of them have been shot at. Four have been killed. That’s nearly 10 percent.

...have been a little less successful than we've hoped.

This came to mind this morning at daycare, when one of the teachers remarked upon our little guy’s ability to throw his sippy cup a great distance. I made a little crack about our future Olympian, and she responded, “Little guy’s going to make you proud.” And not to get all squishy about it, but I did realize that almost anything productive he found himself doing would, in fact, make me proud. If it comes with a motorcade, well, that’s very nice, too.

Let me stipulate up front, for those readers unhappy about my having poked fun at really small people (who happen to look like old men dressed up as newborns): What I’m about to write about is not funny. Not at all. Not a little bit. Definitively not funny.

There. Can I proceed to make fun of this?

So, it seems, according to the BBC, that last year the local residents of Maharashtra state in India “sacrificed” eleven children in “black magic rituals.” Nothing new there, you say? Yet another magic-realism story minus the love (but probably with added cholera)? A passage to India that ends up in the seventh circle of Hell? A suitable boy who kills children to make children?

Perhaps so.

But this story is a little different. The BBC relates that the criminals were a childless couple in a village of 300 people. They had been married twelve years but had been able to produce nary a crotchfruit (BBC makes no effort to determine if they had really been trying).

Said couple decided to kidnap children from the village (did I mention only 300 people live there?), perform arcane and murderous rituals upon them, and then hope for babies to rain from the sky like nuts from the banyan tree in Siddhartha. (Fact-check: Are there nuts on a banyan tree? Ed.: If Wikipedia counts as a fact-check, no. They bear fruits with seeds, but no nuts.)

Horrible. Awful. Inhumanity of man. All conceded 100 percent without argument.

However, what also struck me was the ratio being employed here: eleven kids to produce one? What kind of math are they doing in India?

To this place is where we Americans have outsourced our very future? Get thee to an abacus!

The NY Daily News, always on top of the important stuff, has this item about a Danish-Norwegian artist named Nina Maria Kleivan who made unusual sartorial choices for her baby for a photo essay. MomLogic has a fuller gallery: it’s not just Baby Hitler, but Baby Mao and Baby Khomenei.

From an interview Kleivan did with Israel’s Ha’aretz:

We all have evil within us. Even small children are evil towards each other… Even my daughter could end up ruling Denmark with an iron fist.

Let’s leave aside the fact that no one will end up running Denmark, a nauseatingly consensual society, with an iron first.

Apparently Kleivan’s father was a resistance fighter, and she has some Jewish family, and I’m not inclined to be offended anyway. I am even, in fact, a little tempted to find out where she got those clothes (surely the Interwebs can bring us babyhitler.com, with some tagline like “Even your first baby will love the Third Reich!”).

If nothing else, I think the get-up might get me something I’ve craved for a while: more fist-fights with fellow Upper West Side parents.

When I came home from the airport yesterday afternoon, things did not go quite as I’d hoped. That is, Sasha did not bound through the door into my open arms, screaming “Daddy!” Instead, she was still in the fog of sickness, drips dripping from her nose, eyes a little crusty. She was clingy and weepy and sensitive, and refused to be held by anyone but her mother. She was, in short, not the exuberant, outgoing, silly-cute child I’d missed so terribly in Italy.

Really, it was pretty awful. Like she had no idea who I was, and couldn’t trust me. I went back and forth: Was this just the illness, or had the week of illness somehow changed her personality completely? Waves of regret came over me. What a miserable father I’d been to go away for so long, and to neglect Sasha and Jean in their hour of need!

There was, however, one moment of hope, during which I briefly chased Sasha on all fours, eventually extracting a weak smile. And this morning, after an awkward diaper change and a slightly more enjoyable game of peekaboo, she even reached up her arms to me and said, “Bao-bao!” (Chinese for “hold me.”) For a little while, she even happily sat on my lap and bashed the computer keyboard, playing Alphababy, before it was time for daycare. Will she remember me when I pick her up in a few minutes? Or will I again be a stranger? If it’s the latter, at least I’ll be a stranger who plays peekaboo.