DADWAGON

I don’t know what happened between 7:58pm, when my boy was jumping up and down with excitement about the chocolate cake we were about to have for his great-grandfather’s 88th birthday, and 8:45pm, when he was screaming like I’d shot his foot when I tried to get him into the bath.

Whatever the change, I did not like it. As much as I loved him earlier that day, when he was petting rabbits and turning the brim of his cap sideways and in general being the most adorable thing that was ever adored, I started to hate him when his mood turned wildly south and my plans of getting him and his sister to bed calmly and on time so we could fly home easily today melted. I did not kill him, but I did yell at him, which happens from time to time and is always ridiculous: a two-year-old and a 34-year-old having simultaneous meltdowns.

This is the end of a five-day solo trip with both kids, and I’d like to think that I can handle that long and much more, because there are such things as Single Parents, and I doubt they have the luxury of self-pity. But it’s possible that for all my efforts to live in the moment and accept what the kids are feeling and just enjoy what there is to enjoy, it’s possible that I am the same narcissistic hothead that I was at the start of this process, the kind of dude capable of screaming obscenities at a prelingual two-foot tall love muffin just because my plans are being threatened.

And that, dear readers, is your Wednesday affirmation from DadWagon.

They don’t call it a blog for nothing, right? Here’s a video from our good friends at Dadlabs, with everything damn you need to know about babies and constipation. Why? Because you should be informed about shit, folks! Having a kid doesn’t make you enough of an expert–you need to know what everyone else knows about poop.

Enjoy.

When I went to pick Sasha up from daycare yesterday, a woman outside the building shoved a flyer in my hand. Tune into WBAI, it instructed, “to hear the real story of what is happening at Preschools of America from the teachers who have been fired for merely expressing their rights.”

The second page went on to explain that teachers at POA, which has dozens of locations throughout the city, had voted on August 2 to form a union. In response (allegedly), five of them were fired. Which (if this is accurate) is illegal. (This politicalaffairs.net story has more details.)

Which is frustrating. As a good little New York City liberal, I’m pro-union (despite the unions’ partial culpability for our current financial mess, a result of their inability/refusal to adapt to changing economic circumstances), not to mention pro-following-the-law, so I feel like I should do something. Fire off an angry e-mail! Text them into submission!

But because I live here, I also have no faith in my power to change anything. It’s like fighting a landlord, and on someone else’s behalf, too: Even if you win, years will have gone by, people moved on, and the next guy in power’s going to do exactly the same thing anyway. Add to that the fact that the fired teachers weren’t at our branch, and so seem almost fictional, like the people you read about in the New York Post.

Plus, there’s paranoia. If I come out publicly on behalf of the fired teachers, will the school’s management deny Sasha a place there? Or, conversely, if I threaten to pull Sasha out if POA doesn’t reinstate the teachers, and POA doesn’t, what do I do? How many bilingual Chinese-English preschools do you know of that operate out of brand-new buildings near the F train?

All of which is just a way of rationalizing my laziness. If someone hands me a petition, I may sign it. I might even work up to an e-mail. But most likely I’ll simply blog about it and save my energy for wrangling the toddler onto and off of the subway.

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman! No, wait—actually, it is a plane.

This, pretty much, is a typical excursion out of doors with Sasha these days. No matter where she is or what she’s doing, she’ll suddenly tilt her head heavenward, point, and say, “Airplane!” And usually, Jean or I will have to squint and follow her finger because the little speck of a jet is so distant that we can barely see it. But Sasha can, or she can hear the roar of its engines and locate it in an instant. It’s amazing.

In fact, the kid is always spotting planes, bird, bugs, squirrels, cats, dogs, and, whether he’s sprawled huge on a distant subway poster or shrunk to a microdot on a discard diaper, Elmo. And so we’re always asking ourselves: Is this kind of seemingly spectacular eyesight normal?

The Internet is, unaccountably, lacking when it comes to information on toddler eyesight. Googling “toddler eyesight” brings up results related to poor vision, not good vision, and asking the Tubes “Do toddlers see better than adults?” leads to wacko stuff about children and ghosts.

Because I don’t want to imagine my kid is Supergirl—and because I don’t want to be dismayed when she eventually gets prescription lenses like her parents—I tend not to believe she has bionic eyes. Rather, I have a theory: When you’re faced with thousands of objects and events you don’t understand, your eyes naturally pick out the two dozen things they do recognize, like airplanes and Elmo. It’s like when I try to read Chinese—95 percent of the characters are gibberish, but the few I know, I can spot right away.

Still, we’re enrolling her in archery and riflery classes as soon as she’s eligible.