DADWAGON

One final note on my L.A. vacation: Sasha watched a lot of TV. Specifically, a lot of “Yo Gabba Gabba!,” possibly the best kids’ show on the tube. In the mornings, she’d get up, drink her milk and then march around the house demanding we put on a DVD. And, most of the time, despite our reluctance to turn her over to this glowing baby-sitter, we would. It was easier. While she sat on the beanbag chair across from the TV, we could eat breakfast, or check e-mail, or blog, or take a shower, or generally take care of the things we’d normally take care of while Sasha would (normally) be in day care.

Still, the guilt. TV! It’s bad! The more she watches, the more she wants to watch, and the less able we are to escape the screen. Plus, it rots her brain, right?

Well, at the same time, she’s learning a lot from “Yo Gabba Gabba!” The last two weeks, she’d sing out songs like “Keep trying, keep trying! Don’t give up, never give up!” And it was wonderful watching her trying to mimic the many, many funky dances on the show, or empathizing with the characters when they were hurt, naughty, or crying. TV may not be teaching her to read, to add, or to parse the Declaration of Independence, but it’s showing her how to be a human being.

So, we let her watch. After all, it was vacation. But now that we’re back, the TV will stay mostly dark: maybe 30 minutes a night, with some Sesame Street on the weekends. Will Sasha complain and demand we click it on? We shall see—and then we’ll find out just how well she’s learned that “never give up” lesson.

I know Shel Silverstein wasn’t being literal about “where the sidewalk ends and before the street begins”. The poem was not about an actual sidewalk, but about prelapsarian childminds and such.

But here in the town that Silverstein adopted as his own, Key West, I have a literal gripe. This is the town where the sidewalk actually ends. That is, sidewalks start and end, sometimes on the same block. Plenty of blocks don’t have any at all. What sidewalks there are here are likely cracked and buckled from the roots of a tree.

This is all a little hard because these days, kids come with wheels: strollers, wagons, trikes. All those breaks in the sidewalk confound the stroller-pushing parent. All the streets with no sidewalks are a little worse even because of the need then to push the kid in the street. Some of Obama’s stimulus money has built new sidewalks here, with proper storm drains, but there’s still a lot left to work on.

Of course I would find this distressing. I’m raising my kids in New York, so I’m addicted to sidewalks. In the Upper West Side, they are often wide stroller-highways unobstructed by bumps or blemishes. You can push a kid as fast as you need to, which often seems to be very fast indeed. Kids there have playdates to get to promptly, dance or baby music appreciation classes that start exactly at the appointed hour.

And so, on second thought, I think that maybe I hate sidewalks. Let the kids bump and jiggle over the gaps, or let them make their own way, stopping to admire the little weed-flowers that grow in between the concrete. They are almost completely unscheduled in their time in Key West, and happily so. So if it takes a little bit longer to get from here to there, I welcome it.

Just after my evening shower on New Year’s Eve, as I was getting dressed to go out, up to a party at my old, dear friend Jeff’s house in the Sierra Madre hills, I looked at my daughter, Sasha, who was bawling. It was almost 8 p.m., she hadn’t napped well all day, and we were trying to wrestle her into the bath. Then Jean said what was on both our minds: We’re not going to the party.

I unbuttoned the two buttons I’d just fastened on my nice shirt and sighed. So would go another New Year’s Eve—at home, everyone sleepy, no discernable debauchery. Unless you count the five chapters of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” that I read on my iPad on the couch before I passed out around 9:30.

And so ended the Great Gross Vacation in Bizarro World, a two-week trip to Los Angeles during which the three of us did, essentially, nothing. In a rented house that will probably eventually be featured in Dwell magazine, we cooked dinners, hung out with cousins and old friends, played with other children’s toys, fed the cats, and generally lived the kind of weekend lives we’d have if we lived on the West Coast.

It was great.

Elsewhere, I recently wrote that I don’t really know how to have a vacation any more, which is somewhat ironic given my career:

After so many trips, I can’t quite remember what it is that I like to do when I travel. Sure, I like to eat, to go running and hiking, and to meet new people. But somehow, without a saleable theme, those interests seem impossibly vague.

But you know what? Vague works. People don’t have fun based on how precise an activity is—they just enjoy themselves as they go along. Or they don’t. It’s impossible, almost, to pinpoint and predict how they’ll react.

The big question, though, at least for this site, is: How did Sasha handle the journey? Or rather: How did we handle Sasha handling the trip?

God, I have no idea. I’m writing all this on Sunday, our planned recovery day back here in Brooklyn, and already the two weeks of work-free leisure are slipping into the recesses of half-held memory. (Or maybe it’s just my late afternoon glass of wine taking effect.) All I know is that she’s jetlagged by almost exactly three hours, and that eventually she’ll recover, as we all will, and that tomorrow’s day at Preschool of America will seem like an incredible new adventure for her.

But then again, every day is, no matter where we are or what we’re doing. That’s childhood, I guess.