Wanted: DadWagon’s Newest Suckers (only moneybags need apply)

It’s possible that some of you have noticed a certain downturn in the number of DadWagon posts in recent months. I want to assure you that while my name hasn’t appeared much on the site, the real culprit here is in fact Nathan. I’ve been writing lots of things—poignant, amusing, wry—and he just fucking deletes them.

There’s a whole passive-aggressive competition thing that goes on behind the scenes at DadWagon that most people (okay, no people) know about, but frankly it’s reached a boiling point. The result: while I can’t actually replace Nathan—he has the only key to the executive washroom—I can reduce his importance to the overall project.

In short: DadWagon is hiring! Well, not so much hiring—we don’t really make any money—but we are looking for a fourth guy (or a huskily voiced woman) to join the team at what very few people other than ourselves consider the best Dad blog on the Internet.

Readers, dear, dear, readers: Who should it be? You? Steven King? The guy hogging the couch at your local cafe? We’d like to hear your thoughts. And remember: blame Nathan.

 

UPDATE: Hey folks. Tell us in the comments why you are the man (or woman, seriously) for the job.

Pre-K Converts

We’re converting.

I think. I mean, I don’t know where I’m going to get a baptismal record for my son, who was never baptized. Nor am I confident that a boy who is really not that excited about the sight of blood will be able to concentrate in a classroom that has a gigantic statue of suffering, blood-soaked Christ in it.

And what will I tell him about the other three-quarters of his heritage, the Jews and Dutch Reformed Church-goers in my family, the Buddhists on my wife’s side? Her mother is the only Catholic anywhere in the family tree, and yet here we are: very close to putting the boy in Church of Bleeding Jesus of the Ascendant Virgin (or whatever it’s called at the church down the street) preschool.

We are doing this because, as much as I might make fun of the Doloroso names that Catholics love to give their institutions, they seem to offer the only halfway affordable preschool education in Manhattan. So after a quick surgical reattachment of his foreskin, we will be shipping the boy off to be beaten by nuns for the next school year.

We thought we would be able to scrape by with what qualifies as a moderately priced private preschool in the Upper West Side: my son’s current $19,000 a year school. But we could not. Every penny of that has ended up on credit cards, taking from the kids’ college fund and, thanks to the compounding wonders of interest, taking from their college funds of the future. We went in to tell the Director of Admissions, a smooth-voiced southerner who had always been kind to us, and said that we were taking him out of school next year because we couldn’t afford it. She smiled faintly, shook her head and said, “I honestly don’t know how young families do it anymore.”

That answer did not help us much. We are not a young family. My wife is a doctor, and I am a high-rolling dadblogger. OK, even without much income from me, we still should be able to afford to put our kid in preschool. Not that I can single my son’s school out. There are dozens of schools, Montessoris or Progressive Preschools or little boutique-y schools like my daughter went to last year that talk about building a thriving, loving, whole community, and then charge tuitions that ensure that they will only ever educate the children of stockbrokers with the occasional scholarship child thrown awkwardly into the mix. The rest of us are just left to be parboiled by the price.

There is Universal Pre-K: for two years now, in different forms, DadWagon has been pointing out the somewhat obvious (but important!) point that Universal Does not Mean Universal. The only thing I have to add to that conversation is that all the private schools—including the ones that come with rosary beads—cunningly require ALL YOUR MONEY and a commitment well before the Universal Pre-K application process with NYC public schools even begins.

Anyhow, dear readers, I would admit that this is just a Manhattan folly, and that we deserve these strange collection of choices because we have chosen to live in a very expensive city. But the bad news about pre-kindergarten is not just here.

From a new AP report on the importance—and scarcity—of pre-kindergarten around America:

Kids from low-income families who start kindergarten without first attending a quality education program enter school an estimated 18 months behind their peers. Many never catch up, and research shows they are more likely to need special education services and to drop out. Kids in families with higher incomes also can benefit from early education, research shows.

Yet, roughly a quarter of the nation’s 4-year-olds and more than half of 3-year-olds attend no preschool, either public or private. Families who earn about $40,000 to $50,000 annually face the greatest difficulties because they make too much to quality for many publicly funded programs, but can’t afford private ones, said Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

Put a one in front of those annual earnings, and you still are stuck, unable to pay, ineligible for free.

So tell me again, GOP candidates in the debates, what is so wrong with Europe?

Unrelated Incidents

So, there’s this kid in Sasha’s preschool class. Let’s call him David. He’s a sweet 3-year-old, blond and smiling. In the evenings, he’ll run to hug any and all parents coming to pick up their kids. Very affectionate—likable, even.

On Friday, when I went to pick up Sasha, David came running up to me, as usual, wearing a construction worker’s costume: hardhat and reflective orange vest. Then he punched me in the balls—hard. Well, hard for a toddler, hard enough that I instinctively yelled “Oof!” and covered my grapes with my hands. Hard enough that Sasha’s teacher noticed something had happened. “He punched me in the balls” is what I wanted to say, but somehow that seemed unacceptable. Also, Sasha’s teacher doesn’t speak English 100 percent perfectly, so I wasn’t sure she’d understand me.

But then David kept trying to do it again, and I had to fend him off. This wasn’t difficult. He’s only 3. Eventually, he left me alone.

As I bundled Sasha into her winter gear and left, I had only one thought: Poor David’s father!

***

Sunday it was 16 degrees out, and I was carrying Sasha over to our friend’s house for some Burmese food. At the corner of Third Avenue and Bergen Street, she said, suddenly, apropos of nothing, for the first time I’d ever heard, “That’s dis-gus-ting!”

Then, silently, unrelatedly, I burped. And it was as if Sasha had predicted this very future.

“It smells like doggie food!” she said.

Thing is, it did, kind of.

And the Punchline Is…

Have you ever wished you could see inside your child’s brain? Not with a hacksaw and a sheet of curved plastic—I mean, anyone can do that. What I’ve always wanted was to watch it tick, to see little 3-year-old Sasha’s brain make new connections, to finally crest each hill of understanding. As it is, we have only limited, indirect evidence to rely upon, but even that can be fascinating.

Case in point: In the last month or so, Sasha has suddenly become much more capable of understanding narrative. She watches entire movies—My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service are on endless repeat these days—and when you ask her questions about them (“Why is Kiki sad?”), she can attempt reasonable answers. It’s sort of incredible that she can hold all these things within her head and attempt to figure them out.

While in Italy, I put this new understanding to the test: Instead of reading her bedtime stories, I began to make them up. There was one story about a princess who would only wear pink, and another about Pinocchio, but most of them were about Daddy’s valiant attempts to find and warm up milk for his daughter Sasha. Mountains were climbed, moons lasso’d, rocket ships built and launched, all so that the fictional Sasha will have something comforting to drink. Each “milky” story, as the real Sasha calls them, ends the same way: Daddy returns, exhausted, and presents the milk to the fictional Sasha, who, after considering this hard-won gift, turns to her father and says, “Daddy—I want juice!”

This ending always occasions much mirth, and it’s rewarding to me to see that she gets the humor—that it’s a joke about her behavior but that, not being real, it’s seen as funny and not a harsh criticism. She laughs, I laugh, this is great.

But then something even more amazing happened. While we were all waiting for a bus on the streets of Rome, Jean and I started bouncing Sasha in our arms and tickling her. This is pretty normal, as was her crazy laughter. But then, in the middle of one fit of insane laughter, she turned to me and said, “Daddy—I want juice!” Then we all laughed, harder than ever, as she said my punchline again and again. Wow. She gets it—she really does. It’s not just that she sees some things as funny, there’s some underlying understanding of humor there—how it works, etc. She can connect things, she can play with context, she can make us laugh. This is great!

But do you know what’s even better than having a smart kid who understand both narrative and humor? Having a kid who’s dumb enough to laugh at my jokes. I’m enjoying that while it lasts.