DADWAGON

At 5:46 a.m. this morning, I received a phone call from Gateway Plumbing and Heating, informing me that they were sending a team over to my apartment, between 10 a.m. and noon, to take a look at the boiler that had mysteriously stopped working Saturday afternoon.

For Gateway, this was not a particularly early call. After all, they were in New York, where it was a very reasonable 8:46 a.m., while Jean, Sasha and I were at the start of a two-week vacation in Los Angeles. A vacation that began with:

• pouring rain and low temperatures throughout the area, scheduled to last till Thursday

• a small leak in the skylight of the beautiful West Hollywood home we rented, which resulted in a wet countertop and a bit of worry

• and, of course, the boiler troubles back home, which necessitated a lot of calls—between myself, the repair company, and the kind friend who is house-sitting for us—and will cost a bundle.

This is not so much a complaint as it is a reminder that—for me, and probably for a lot of parents—vacation is a lot like not being on vacation. The responsibilities remain the same: taking care of the kids, organizing a kitchen, talking to repairmen. I’ve also been doing interviews for an upcoming story, and will have to do more, and I want to write some other stuff, and and and. I’ve been trying to think back to a time when I went on a trip with no worries and no story to be written afterwards, and I can’t quite do it.

All of this is mitigated by the ridiculously beautiful (and affordable) house we’re in. Owned by an architect and a fashion designer who have two children, it’s huge, newly built and well-designed, with an unending array of things that are making our lives easier.

But what’s weird is the parallels we keep spotting. Certain bits of Ikea furniture and tableware are identical to the ones we own, which shouldn’t be a surprise given Ikea is the world’s biggest manufacturer of furniture. The kids’ library contains books everyone owns—”Goodnight, Moon,” for instance—but also tomes we haven’t seen around much, like “Waddle.” The chalkboard-painted wall. The Britax car seat. The Saveur subscription. The leaking skylight. This, my friends, is Bizarro World—a replica of our Brooklyn lives, only executed with a bit more taste and a bit more money.

Of course, not everything is the same in Bizarro World. The cutting boards are wood, not plastic, and instead of a microwave we have two cats. (And Moshie and Margot are terrible when it comes to reheating food.) Or, take the recycling. In Brooklyn, we put bottles, cans, paper, and cardboard aside, and every once in a while we it all in blue bags and take them down to the curb. But there’s a lot of crap we don’t recycle; we just throw it away.

Here, everything gets recycled—or composted. In fact, there’s no “regular trash” depository. Everything is either paper or plastic, metal or glass, or organic. Which leads to questions like: where does dental floss go? And what about the paper-wrapped metal twist-ties holding the bundle of organic celery together? There’s nothing like standing for five minutes in front of a multi-receptacle Ikea pull-out drawer to make you feel like you missed some vital life schooling, or maybe that you don’t yet deserve such wonders.

But at least the heat works, and come Thursday, when the sun emerges, I’m sure we’ll be chucking orange peels and milk cartons away with hardly a thought.

I simply refuse to enter into any debates as to whether or for how long breastfeeding (as opposed to formula, or in this case, breast milk in a bottle) should be done. You feed your kid how you like and I’ll do the same with mine, and eighteen years from now we’ll compare SAT scores and broad jumps, ok?

There. Onto the post. Ellie has in all matters related to food been an easier child than old JP. No trouble with latching, no cajoling to eat, and now, as we’ve learned in the past week or so, no trouble with the bottle.

Tomoko, who in her great mercy, has not been asking me to wake up with her in what I like to call “sympathy suffering” while she feeds Ellie in the middle of the night. But I did volunteer, after about a month, to do some bottle feeding in the middle of the night. This helps Tomoko get more sleep, and it also helps prepare for the day when she goes back to work and I will be providing at least as much if not more care as she does.

I want that kid used to eating with me for the nights I have to put her down. JP didn’t touch a bottle until his mother’s maternity leave was over and I began putting him down every weeknight. It sucked, no pun intended. It was a crash-course in baby feeding for me, and neither me nor JP benefited from it.

All that said, Ellie’s love of the bottle (it’s faster than the boob) has had the negative effect of making me a zombie at work. For those female readers of DadWagon who are currently rolling their eyes (or worse), I get it–it’s worse for you. But doesn’t mean I’m not tired.

So I officially beefed with United, and then we laid down our weapons. Now, after a very brief and playdate-filled return to New York, we headed out again this morning, this time for a more traditionally-timed sojourn to my hometown.

And with any new flight itinerary these days, it seems, comes a fresh outrage. But don’t worry, Delta: I don’t blame you for your richly anti-passenger policies. You are just keeping up with the competition.

OK: I will allow myself a little peevishness at the numerous unsolicited credit card applications you send to my home, many of which are trumpeting that if I open a line of credit with you, you will waive my baggage fees in future. It’s a lovely tactic: come up with an insane fee for what was heretofore always a free service and then make me open up a new credit card to avoid the fee. Swell.

The more traditional problem I had this morning was changing our flight times. My 2-year-old woke up yesterday with a croupy cough. Sounded a bit like a sea lion. By mid-afternoon, that sea lion had swallowed a frog. By yesterday evening, the cough was even worse, almost mechanically sharp and violent. Given that the only flight available to us was a 6am out of Newark, I wanted to look into flying standby at least to give the boy some time to recuperate.

Yes, I know. I wasn’t expecting anything less than the $50/ticket standby fee, or the $150/ticket fee to fly tomorrow instead of today. I know those are the new rules.

All I’m saying is: I don’t have to like them. They suck for everyone, but most of all, it seems, for families.

And they’re not done. Mark my word: the days of being able to check in infant car seats  as luggage for free are coming to an end. So, likely, is free gate-checking of strollers. It’ll all pass into oblivion the way that pre-boarding for parents with small children has. Traveling with children will become, finally and truly, the parent’s own damn fault and the parent’s own damn problem. The only penance, of course, will be additional payment.

My daughter finally had a playdate yesterday with a friend from last year, who had started kindergarten elsewhere and whom my daughter hadn’t seen in over six months. It was a pleasure to see both the girl and her parents. The father grew up in the Upper West Side 30 or 40 years ago, when it was a jumble of vacant lots and drug dealers and Dominican and Puerto Rican families just trying to get by. His stories about the neighborhood are phenomenal. It’s a lost era, flushed down the gutter by the Biblical flood of lattes and Merlot that came with yuppification.

A few things had changed in the past months for the parents: they moved out of their tiny studio apartment and into a cozy two-bedroom place on 103rd. Their daughter had grown (as had ours) quite a bit. But the biggest change was clipped to the girl’s waistband: a pint-sized fanny pack that held an insulin pump. In the months since we’d seen them, my daughter’s friend had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.

I don’t know a lot about diabetes. I had, as near as I could tell, two friends in college who were type 1 diabetics. Both were musicians of a sort. One now conducts research into the psychology of diabetes and kids. The other died when we were all living in San Francisco in our early 20s, something having to do with his diabetes, but also with heroin.

I do know that no matter what path this girl is on in life, diabetes is going to follow her. It’s not just the pump that is attached to her stomach now; it’s the constant monitoring and worrying, the host of long-term complications that can come from slipping up, as anyone would do from time to time. It’s a heavy enough burden on parents of a young child, much less the kid themselves.

The father told me, not surprisingly, that he was crushed by the diagnosis, and was indulging in a fair amount of ‘why her’ and ‘why me’ until he started to tell his story to a woman who countered that her grandchild had some bad form of MS, which struck him as a much harsher, and no more deserved, state. That conversation, he says, got him thinking more positively about their situation.

I suspect it wasn’t just that one talk, however. I think the real reason he was able to be optimistic about the disease was because his daughter was showing him how. She had never struck me as any more patient or durable than my own sometimes-frail girl, but I was amazed at how she seemed to be taking her new circumstances in stride. Yes, she’s had a few months to get used to things, but still: this is a five-year-old girl who has a tube running from her abdomen to a tiny machine that feeds her drugs. So it was beautiful to see her playing and running around and laughing, even as her mom was checking her blood-sugar levels, the same way she had last year. It just reminded me of the incredible elasticity of the hearts and brains of young children. There’s almost nothing they can do better than adults, except for one of the most important things of all: adapt to change.

That’s my Monday morning thought. Kids are pretty powerful.