DADWAGON

It’s no surprise that little kids (and even bigger kids) tend to prefer one parent to the other. Maybe they hang on Mom or run to Dad, but given a choice, they inevitably pick one.

Which is why, every morning when I get Sasha up from her crib, Jean hides. Not because she’s shirking her motherly responsibilities—she fulfills those with panache, of course—but because we both know that if Sasha even senses that Mom is around, I will instantly become useless. I may have just changed her diaper, gotten her dressed, given her her milk, fed her toast and crackers and cereal and fruit, read to her, danced with her, tickled her belly with my beard, played peekaboo with her, and let her bash my computer’s keyboard in a round of Alphababy, but if Sasha catches sight of Jean, it’s as if I’ve ceased to exist, or become slightly less interesting than her stuffed dog, Gou-gou.

The lengths Jean will go to to avoid detection are impressive. Maybe she watched too much MacGyver when she was young, but the way she’ll duck behind a kitchen counter or crouch behind the bed demonstrate a keen sense of sightlines and an instinct for self-preservation. If Jean were being stalked by a hungry protoplasmic hell-demon (which she kind of is), she’d surely survive into the third act of the movie, or at least long enough to get dressed and ready to go to work.

I suppose I’m sort of jealous of the situation. I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to have the baby focus all its love and attention on me for once? The thing is, I know that such allegiances are tenuous. They shift as kids age, and today’s beloved Mom is tomorrow’s pesky, needy grown-up who won’t leave me alone. Still, I’ll be waiting for that moment when Sasha pushes Jean’s arms away and cries until I, her favorite father of all time, picks her up. It’ll be nice for a while, I’m sure, but sooner or later, I know, I’ll be hiding, too.

The place: A Brooklyn-bound F train at the West 4th Street station.

The time: 5 p.m. on a typical Thursday.

The players: A young couple, possibly from Spain, the woman carrying an adorable 2-year-old girl in a sling. With them, the woman’s mother, or probably mother-in-law.

They get on the train and cluster around one of the center poles. They stand.

Mother-in-law to woman: “The one drawback of women’s liberation is that now, in the subway, no one gets up for you.”

Woman: [Unintelligible.]

[End scene.]

Okay, it’s not much of a drama, but it left me wondering: Was this woman’s observation accurate?

To me, it rang false on two levels. For one, contrary to their mass-media image, New Yorkers tend to be very polite. It’s quite common to see people offer up their subway seats to all kinds of people—the elderly, children, tired-looking folks, and so on. What I’m saying is, we’re not dicks.

And from personal experience, I know that I get offered a seat all the time when I’m carrying Sasha in the Ergo. It’s very nice of people to do this, and I often feel bad refusing. When she’s in the Ergo, it’s often easier just to stand—the distribution of weight is better, and besides, I’m still young and healthy. I can stand, and Sasha can look at the world from adult-eye level.

But maybe this phenomenon is more common among New York dads than moms? As Chris wrote in his immortal treatise, “I, Hot Chick,” being an obvious father in New York attracts a lot of attention, and it’s possible that our greater visibility means we get offered courtesies that women with kids—being more numerous and therefore less, well, special—don’t.

Now, I’ve heard that some women have been reading DadWagon, and not just women related to us writers by marriage or blood. I’d love to hear from them: Does carrying a kid around get you extra-nice treatment, too, or is it just by dint of our newness and rarity that we dads get to sit down on the F train?

I am a fan of Matt Gross. He’s got those frugal good looks. He grills extremely well. He was courageous to tell his regular readers at the Times that he wallows in the fetid swamp that is DadWagon. But man, he sure came back from Slovakia in rare form. Granted, I am too late for the first or even second swipe at his recent work, but let me add what I’ve got.

First off, he posts on his Frugal Traveler blog about finding a babysitter while away. It was, as usual, full of clever advice. I, too, used sittercity.com to find our full-time babysitter. His idea to look for exchange students to babysit in Italy was inspired. But I have to draw the line at this suggestion:

Wherever you’re going, simply contact the local branch of your religion and explain the situation, and they can often put you in touch with someone who can help. Who knows — maybe you’ll even find someone whose sense of faith is strong enough that they’ll do it free?

Matt: even if they are drooling Branch Davidians who believe that watching your baby will get them to the next level of Christendom, you should still pay them something. These are people who are performing a service, for god’s sake, a non-essential luxury service at that. If you want to go to that art opening, then bravo! But looking for people to help this happen without offering money is, to my mind, crossing the line between frugal and cheap. Just my two cents.

Ah, but before I finish plowing your frugal fields with salt, let me add a concern about your brown fat post. Our loyal commenters said it far better, but it’s worth repeating: fat baby = happy baby. Those four-year-olds with double chins and cankles? They’ve got problems. Sasha could not have those problems at this age, particularly not off of dairy products.

Now, I did have a similar conversation with two young moms (former models!) who, when I mentioned how fat and chubbers my two-year-old is, immediately rushed to comfort me saying, ‘don’t worry, your baby will lose that fat!’, totally misunderstanding that I actually like that my baby is chunky. To them, fat is ugly, I guess, at any age. But that conversation, Matt, was in Miami Beach, where people come from all over the world to hate on fat people and even fat babies. I expect more out of Brooklyn.

Alrighty! That’s it. I can now return to my usual fawning and loving tenderness toward the inimitable Matt G.

My feelings about the circus are already on record here—to sum up, I find it not the “Greatest Show on Earth” but possibly the dullest—and if you wanted to make the whole business even less appealing, you couldn’t do much better than this. A UK paper has reported that this gent, Dominic Deville, can be hired as a scary clown for children’s parties. Kid gets a cake smashed into his or her face at the get-go, and the festivities don’t stop there.

Great, great idea, folks. Nothing like public humiliation and at least two or three seriously spooked children to really get a party started. You know all those stories about the hazings boarding-school boys inflict? In case your kid happens to escape those, now you can hire your own pro to step in. On his or her birthday, even. (It’s no surprise to find that this service is in Switzerland, where real-life violence is entirely theoretical.)

But hey, let’s take this idea further, and Americanize it! Hire a guy in camo with a realistic toy AK-47, and we’ll call him Militia Dude. At the party, he can blow up the bouncy castle—not with air but with a truckload of fertilizer!

No, and no.