DADWAGON

OK, I kid. Summer actually never ends around here for the boys of DadWagon. We’ll be kicking back Bacardi Breezers and shagging cocktail waitresses well into February.

But we know that many of you are the more conventional types, for whom the end of summer means the end of vacation, the beginning of the school year, and a long but ineluctable march toward Seasonal Affective Disorder.

So this week we took an end-of-season approach to things.

Nathan took one last monster trip of the summer with his kids (solo!) to the surprisingly pleasant Midwest, and came home just in time to get his boy crunked and cut at Columbia Presbyterian’s pediatric surgery unit

Christopher (or at least his wife) got puked on and regretted not getting puked on harder. Then again, if his boy keeps turning into a jock, there may be lots of frat parties and plenty of puking still ahead. Perhaps that’s why Christopher seemed engaged by the bizarre anti-children enviro-violence at Discovery Channel HQ.

Speaking of death, in case you missed all the fun and frivolity of Kill Your Child Day on DadWagon, you can still read Nathan and Matt’s vengeful thoughts here and here. [spoiler alert!] Both decided that their children were, at the end of the day, too cute to kill.

We were also impressed with the output of some DadWagon friends this week: Big Preg wrote a lovely summation of the bareknuckle schedule of childrearers on her blog Accidents Will Happen, and occasional DadWagon commenter Nathan Hegedus got the Slate-heads in a tizzy with his piece about Swedish paternity leave (check out his very good blog Dispatches from Daddyland).

Theodore turned his own dark blogmind to issues of JP’s boy-violence and maturation, with a side dish of constipation and infanticide.

Matt wrote about how he loves his daughter’s eyesight and, while gingerly crossing over a preschool picket line, he made one eagle-eyed observation himself: Sasha has started playing house with various stuffed animals. This sent Matt scrambling to our readers asking what kind of doll he should get for her. I think the readers pretty much shrugged off that question, but one commenter from Matt’s past seemed to reveal a dark detail about his childhood. My Buddy, Matt? Really?

That’s all from us; happy labors, and happy Labor Day. We’ll be back Tuesday.

Australia, as we all know, is just like America, only upside-down. Australians speak English, though unintelligibly. They spend dollars, though theirs are worth far, far less than ours. And not only do they celebrate Father’s Day (tomorrow, apparently), but they have cranky dads who think the whole thing is koala-shit:

Regardless of what illness, deadlines or domestic spats we’re in the midst of, Father’s Day joy will prevail.

This is because fatherhood is the Most Important Thing Ever – next to the mortgage, career, football, television and Facebook. Given the chance to commemorate the sacred bonds between fathers and children, we’ll stop our bickering or distracted web surfing, and concentrate on the unalloyed happiness of family. For one day. Maybe. Perhaps just for lunch, while the footy replay’s on.

It’s bunkum. I say this as a committed, stay-at-home dad. Not even copywriters selling remote-controlled wine coolers really believe Father’s Day can overcome the ambivalent reality of family life. The moods that blight or boost everyday domesticity also prevail on the first Sunday of September.

I don’t really have much to add to this, except that it’s nice to know that for every parental paradise like Sweden, there’s another wretched hellhole of commercialism and banal moral lessons. Now go enjoy your extended weekend.

In keeping with the medical theme from this morning, I bring you this story from the Today show about a stillborn baby brought back from the dead by two hours of cuddling with his very stubborn (and very happy) mom.

Lovely story, even if they did have to import parents from Australia to find them. What I might suggest though, is instead of the “medical miracle” that the Today correspondent called it, this might just be a case of a doctor who made a supremely bad call on whether or not this baby was actually alive.

The mother recounted how the doctor kept saying, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it, as the baby squirmed back to life. That’s the same muttering doctors probably make when they misdose a patient, for example, and kill them.

I’d go further and venture that all of these so-called Medical Miracles, whether a stillborn that pops back to life or Uncle Walt, who has a massive heart attack and lies dead on the hospital bed for ten minutes before coming back for more turkey dinners, are actually something much more mundane (and, sadly, more common): doctor error.

Just remember. If it comes back to life, it was probably dead to begin with.

But I’ll let you decide:

After having consulted our wise (if not board-certified) readers about young Nico’s surgery, we decided to do the tubes in the ears and skip the adenoidectomy.

It all went down this morning, with the improbably early arrival time of 6am at the hospital (why are surgeons such morning people?). The wife and I put on our white paper clean suits and went into the ER with Nico, who fell asleep under the cherry-scented mask with no problems. He was actually giggling a bit.

We left before they actually put the tubes in, but it was all a little unsettling for us. He was a pitiful sight on the operating table, his skin pale under the klieg lights, with electrodes on his chest and a mask on his face, surrounded by OR techs. It reminded me of ET, trapped in the clean tent with all those thuggish government scientists in hazmat suits.

So why was Nico giggling? Because of the miracles of Midazolam. They weren’t going to offer it, but fortunately my wife thought to ask for it: 3.5 ccs of Happy Juice in an oral syringe for the boy 15 minutes before going into the OR. It’s enough of a hassle in the routine, she says, that most OR’s won’t give it unprompted, and sometimes refuse to give it even if you do ask.

But if you can get your kid some of this stuff before surgery, do it. Just that little bit of that Purple Drank got Nico higher than a Juggalo. Head lolling, giggle-snorting, staring momentously at his fingertips: he was so stoned he started to make us feel high. The waiting room turned into a psychedelic lovebus. And when it came time to enter freaky-land of the OR, he was totally unfazed.

Now we’re back home and he has woken up well, if angrily. The stony times are over, and, as I’m told, we have a day or so of crankiness and whining to look forward to until he gets completely comfortable. Also, no swimming for the next 18 months or so. But in all, a good result, and most likely an upcoming winter without ear infections.

If he does get more ear infections, though, I’m skipping the antibiotics and going straight back to the Midazolam.