DADWAGON

I am no jock, god knows. My favorite piece of sports equipment is the comfy armchair in which I slump to watch the Yankees. My wife is better, in that she actually likes getting her body moving, but I don’t think she’d call herself an athlete. And jock culture has, for most of my life, been something to avoid. That guy who got noogies in the locker room during gym class? Yeah, that’s me. The few athletic things I do like (tennis and such) are essentially one-person shows, or one-on-one competition, where I can’t let anyone down by my klutziness besides myself.

So where did my kid learn to high-five everyone?

He does it everywhere. To other kids, to André the doorman who we pass on Fifth Avenue every morning, to cash-register clerks. It’s adorable, and I imagine it’s easier for small hands, not yet fully coordinated, than a handshake or some other friendly gesture. But it’s a sign of independence. He’s never seen me do it (except in response to him), that’s for sure.

Next up for him: Bellowing WOO! when something exciting happens. (I don’t do that either.) And then father-son trips to the sports bar. And then, probably, he’ll arrange for a bunch of teenagers to give me a noogie somewhere, just to close the loop.

No jokes, please, about the hostage situation at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Maryland. A nut with a gun is no laughing matter, and we certainly hope everyone gets out of that building unhurt. Even James Jay Lee, the (inevitably three-named) alleged hostage-taker.

What you’ll be hearing a lot about, in the next couple of days, is his manifesto, available here. It is a screed worth reading, both for its loopy, goofy language but also for its underlying thought process. “The demands and sayings of Lee,” as he puts it, call for Discovery and its affiliated networks to stop broadcasting shows about weaponry, and replace them with programming that reveals that the earth is under assault, especially by overpopulation. So far, okay. I’m with you, Lee. And then he demands that we stop overpopulation by declaring a moratorium on human birth. Altogether. A sample:

All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.

You can see pretty easily how this kind of zealotry gets built. A tottering but not completely illogical mind gets hold of some good information, runs it out to its logical end, and then just keeps going. It happens every day now, encouraged by partisan media. Rand Paul spins a laissez-faire attitude to its logical conclusion, and suggests that the Civil Rights Act be dismantled, because it proceeds from the assumption that we do not have a level playing field. On the left, old radicals still say that it was worth blowing up a few buildings to stop a war that was killing thousands. And all over the world, God speaks to all sorts of groups, telling them that they’re personally selected to destroy other groups in order to save everyone else. Educated people with solidly planted psyches can filter this stuff, taking what they know to be true and discarding the rest. But not everyone is so equipped, and that’s where the trouble begins.

I’m curious to see how fast the anti-population, pro-environment, anti-Christian, anti-baby crusade this guy is on gets picked up by right-wing media. “See, this is what happens on the loony left,” those O’Reilly types are likely to say. They will conveniently leave out his vicious anti-immigration stance, I am sure. And we’re back on the same road that feeds the crazies. Too many people may not be the problem; too much airtime to fill, there’s the real culprit.

This past weekend I got rid of JP’s car seat and replaced it with a booster. He’s four and half, so this is a bit late, I suppose, but JP’s pretty slender (he just reached the minimum weight of 40 pounds), and I’m pretty lazy. He was more than a little excited about the new chair, not because he didn’t like the old one, but if you tell JP, “here, this is a new thing, and it’s YOURS!” he’s thrilled. I suppose there’s a lesson somewhere in that about his desire for autonomy, perhaps a small signal of some overparenting, or maybe he just likes new stuff that’s his. I don’t know.

Either way, I was surprisingly happy with the whole thing. I felt some inexplicable gush of pride when I got him in the seat and he insisted on threading the belt through the shoulder harness. And when we arrived at our destination and he unbuckled himself without myself, I was even more pumped–next stop Harvard, folks! The kid’s a genius.

Small pleasures for small minds, I know, but hey, who else, other than his mother, gets to witness, document, and feel the milestones of his life, however insignificant? Plus, you never know when something about your kid is going to get to you.

This whole parenting thing has turned me into a pudding. Someone please get me a Kleenex.

• There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead.
• And when she was good, she was very, very good.
• But when she was bad, she was horrid.

Given all that happened yesterday, these ancient and very, very famous lines could have been written about my daughter, Sasha, whose daycare center was closed for administrative reasons yesterday. After a wonderful morning spent getting soaked at Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 6 waterworld, Sasha’s horridity began to emerge. At lunch, at the frighteningly kid-friendly Moxie Spot, she deigned only to play with her macaroni and cheese. Did you know it’s fun to smear it in your hair? Neither did I.

But that was just a prelude. After a mercifully long nap, she awoke in tears, inconsolable and frustrated. It wasn’t quite a temper tantrum—I know what those look like—but she wasn’t simply upset, either. She wanted nothing—no water, juice, or milk, no cereal or apples, no toys or books or games—but would not stop crying. I can’t even remember how I finally got her outside to go pick up our biweekly vegetable box from the local CSA, but when we arrived, things got worse, to the point where I just had to leave her writhing and crying on the ground while everyone around me stared, no doubt disgusted with my fatherly incompetence.

The thing is, as horrid as she gets, Sasha has an in-built sense of when to pull back and, to counteract all the anger she’s engendered in me, act ridiculously, unnervingly cute. A thrashing tantrum will end with her hearing a bird in the trees, signing “bird” and saying “tweet, tweet!” She’ll squirm out of her stroller again and again until, at last, she’ll beg to be carried and then lean her head on my shoulder, which is what she wanted all along. And a miserable afternoon like yesterday will end with her force-feeding me pretzels in our garden while fellow ‘wagoneer Theodore—who for some reason thinks his own Upcoming daughter will be easier to handle—kept marveling at how adorable she was.

So, yes, Nathan, I know just how you feel. And I have to add that I’m amazed that you’re even willing to undertake a five-day solo adventure with two kids. I remember back in May, when we all went camping at the edge of Brooklyn, how impressed I was with your willingness to bring 2-year-old Nico along, and I recall saying to myself, “Ah, well, he’s 2! That’s when they’re mature enough to do such things.” But now, as Sasha nears that age herself, I see how brave (or should that be “insane”?) you were. What were you thinking? What were any of us thinking?