DADWAGON

I told myself I would stay away from making another contribution to the “JP is off with his mother for vacation” genre. I’ve covered it fairly extensively over time, both here and here. Such is the nature of divorce, it isn’t going to change, and besides, I’ll have my time with JP soon enough and it will be his mother’s turn to be blue.

That said, things will be slightly different this time, and every time from now on, as JP has a sister, Ellie, who lives with me full time. It’s impossible to predict what impact having my children only spend half of their time with each other will have on their relationship. It could be good, a way to mitigate sibling rivalries before they get going. Could be bad, too, though, as perhaps they won’t have the proper chance to bond without the weight of shared experiences. Not that I could do anything about it either way, but it’s something I think about regularly.

I’d be curious to hear from any of our readers with similar experiences. Any word from the divided/blended family contingent of DadWagon’s regulars?

Hello, readers! Do you like blog posts by parents about the ease/difficulty with which they feed their children? You do? Oh, boy! Then I’ve got one for you:

The thing with Sasha is, she’s unpredictable. Predictably so. There are things she likes to eat (noodles, rice, cereal, oranges, ice cream, lollipops) and things she doesn’t like to eat.

Except that that is not at all true. This 2-year-old simply eats what she wants, when she feels like it.

Which makes vacations (and, I guess, everyday life) a bit of a trial. Away from home, on the road, living out of restaurants, we are confronted at every minute by the terrifying question “What are we going to feed the baby?!?” The most frustrating part is that no matter how hard we try to game the system, we lose.

Yesterday at lunch, for example, we decided to hit up Mozza, the renowned Mario Batali–Nancy Silverstone pizzeria a few blocks from our rented house. Chowhound told us it was family-friendly (high chairs and high noise level = good), and it was—Sasha’s now old enough to enjoy the paper and crayons they hand out to younger diners. Well, enjoy them for a few minutes before throwing everything on the ground, I guess.

Why Mozza? Because it’s Italian food. Easy. EEEEAAAASSSSYYYY, right? Breadsticks on the table—bland, crunchy, hand-holdable—she should love those. Oh, wait, nope, she’s drooling them out of her mouth. Okay, how about a dish of fat meatballs in tomato sauce—that’s just the kind of thing she eats all the time at home. Nope! Oh, wait, she’s putting a nibble in her mouth, and . . . now it’s on the floor. Nix to the arancini, too.

But . . . put a pile of chopped salad (lettuce, radicchio, salami, provolone) in front of her, and she goes to town, stuffing forkfuls into her mouth. Or, huh? No, none of it really seems to be getting in, or staying in. Forget it.

At last, the pizza comes out, the marvelous egg, guanciale, radicchio, and bagna cauda we’ve been waiting for. And yes, Sasha does love the crust, devouring it as we knew she would.

But fuck. It’s like there’s no rhyme or reason to any of this. The things she’s supposed to like, the things she’s liked in the past, seem totally alien in a restaurant setting, and we wind up happy if she slobbers over a few pieces of crust.

There just isn’t that much to say about this. We suffer and strive and do what we can, knowing that she’s pretty much getting the nutrition she needs, and that one day it will all be better. I just wish that today was today. But it’s always tomorrow.

I won’t concentrate on some of the negatives. It’s not the season for that. I’ll just say that, on the flight from Newark to Atlanta, me alone with both my small children, I had what you might call a pleasant surprise.

It came about twenty seconds after my two-year-old son vomited all over himself and me and began to bawl. I was then busy doing what I needed to be doing: taking off his shirt and sweater, wiping his and mine with my sweatshirt, telling him he’s OK, despite all the evidence to the contrary. I was also half-shouting at my daughter, who is looking on in disgust and starting to wretch, telling her that under no circumstances is she allowed to vomit like her brother.  This I did in Spanish, as if that would somehow make any of this spectacle more private, as if any of the fellow passengers would have heard Nico throwing up all over himself and then seen our hurried stripping and then overheard me say, no vomites, mija! and figure we were talking about whether she likes Dora or Diego better.

Ah, right: the pleasant surprise. At some point during la purga, I realized that all this vomit didn’t really smell like vomit at all. It had been such an early departure–6 am, with a 3:30am wakeup–that he hadn’t wanted to eat breakfast beyond a handful of raisins and dry Chex cereal earlier in the flight. But still, toddler vomit is supposed to be every bit as noxious as an adult’s. These aren’t little infant spitups. They are usually full calamities. Almost a year earlier, Nico basically cleared out the rear third of a transcontinental Virgin Airlines 757 through emesis. So when all this happened, and I realized that instead of frat-row-basement, Nico now smelled more like one of Momofuku Milk Bar’s Compost Cookies gone wrong: slightly dairy, a little off. The effect, that time and the next two times he threw up on me/him/his sister, was sort of like stunt vomit.

The technical question, I guess, is what’s up with that? We need some kind of Slate Explainer to walk us through the various forms of regurgitant to figure out what exactly spared us.

Or perhaps I shouldn’t probe. It all could have been so much worse. That 6am flight was delayed for de-icing so we had to run–me carrying both kids, actually–through the vast tubular terminals and intraterminal rail-lines of Atlanta’s airport in order to just make our connecting flight. But we made it, and by then Nico’s stomach was calmed again, and he was making jokes about Atlanta-Santa and we were headed down to my hometown of Key West, where half the people are already covered in vomit anyway, so he was going to fit in no matter what, and everything was actually totally OK.