Mayhem Breaks Out!

We’ve been talking about babyproofing the house for weeks—months, really. We have sized up our living room, our sharp corners, our dangling power cords, our low shelves. And we have done… well, not nothing, but next to nothing. Even last weekend, when three suspicious-looking dudes I know brought their toddlers to visit, we didn’t quite pull it together. (Anyway, nobody lost an eye or shed any blood.) It seemed as though we’d deal with it when our son started creeping, then crawling, then walking.

What we didn’t count on was this: He want from Not Crawling One Bit to Not Only Crawling But Pretty Quick in no time at all. As of the middle of last week, he could move himself a couple of inches. Today, he can get across a room in under a minute. His parents, needless to say, are scrambling to reorder the house in order that he doesn’t get himself killed. In the meantime: constant, relentless supervision. (It’s a race to see which bad thing happens first — whether he bonks himself or something gets broken.)

Has anyone else had a developmental milestone come up this abruptly? I’m reminded of the old joke about Albert Einstein: It’s said that he couldn’t talk till he was 4 years old. Then one day he  looked at his parents over the lunch table and said, “My soup is too cold.” His parents were stunned, and asked him what on earth had been stopping him from talking. And he responded, “Everything’s been fine up till now.”

Trolling for Polling

Picture 17We here at DadWagon are not afraid to do a little polling from time to time. One thing we have in common with Fox News’s Greta van Susteren (besides a somewhat troubling love of Wasilla, Alaska): We both use PollDaddy for our polls.

PollDaddy now lets you search through all their user polls, and being an obsessive type, who had the privilege of helping steer polling at Time for a while, I took the challenge and looked for all the polls with the word “father” in them.

This I learned: people poll about some strange things. Someone woke up one morning and felt compelled to craft a poll about whether dads want a kitchenware gift for Father’s Day. Another amateur pollster wanted the Internet to guess his babies’ gender.

There were some alimony questions like: Should A Man Have to Pay Child Support If a Woman Tricks Him Into Fatherhood?

Plenty of niche polling, too. My favorite is this Scottish gem: Did your father play the pipe/drums? Turns out that Pipes/Drums Magazine has a lot of polling on the hottest topics in Highland music, like this one: “What’s your level of sympathy for the members of the Strathclyde Police Pipe Band?” That poll was a landslide—89 percent are very or somewhat sympathetic with the band, which apparently was the victim of budget cuts in West Scotland. How fired up are people about it? An accompanying article includes this quote:

“After 126 years of exemplary public service [the] Strathclyde Police Pipe Band has been thrown in a Cowcaddens litter bin with all the used fish supper pokes.”

I think that means he’s mad.

There were many TV polls, about Lost more than any other show (our own Matt weighed in on the Lost father phenom as well, but did not care to PollDaddy your opinion). A typical Lost poll: Except for Michael, who’s your favourite father of LOST’s main characters? Yes, Christian Shephard (Jack/Claire’s father) won that by a wide margin.

A U.K. pundit they call “The marmite of Conservative commentary” (is that a compliment?) wanted to know this: “Father of murdered girl calls for return of death penalty. Your preferred method?” Poll results: across the pond, they prefer hanging, apparently.

One poll that was either in response to the fleeting Hulk Hogan scandal or was just a father with his own boundary issues: At what age does it become inappropriate for a father to rub suntan lotion on his daughters ass? (the pervy dad contingent came out strong, with15 percent answering “never”)

Then, there’s the world’s Second Oldest Poll question: what should we name the kid? (presumably first invented about nine months after the world’s Oldest Poll Question: “will you have sex with me?”) One version wanted to know whether the kid’s first and middle names should be Ryan Alexander, Dylan Alexander, Ethan Alexander or Liam Alexander. Liam came out ahead on that one, but fans of Acting Without Acting, of course, know what the answer really should’ve been.

When it comes to parenting, of course, the focus group that counts is really quite small. What you really want to know as a father is how you will viewed by your partner, and later on, by your kids. So I took heart in this poll from last year: How Do You Feel About Dear Old Dad? Answers include “Meh” (24 percent) and “He’s actually my step-father and he’s a total dick” (1 percent).

But the winner, with 57 percent, was “Love Him!”

How Grover Made Me a Better Father

Super_Grover_flying_high

On one of our bookshelves here at Chez Gross sits an aging Muppet. He’s bluish and fuzzy, with a silver helmet, a pink nose, and a cape to match. He is—Super Grover! The greatest Muppet in the universe, and since today is, according to John Scalzi, International Grover Appreciation Day, I’d like to tell you all how he made me a better father.

Now, Grover may not seem like much of a role model for dads. He is famously inept: a poor waiter, a crummy baker, a superhero who can’t fly (or really, can’t land), a calamitous wig salesman. Wherever you meet this guy, something always goes wrong.

And yet Grover understands comedy better than any other felt-covered puppet. It’s not just because he introduces preschoolers to the Jewish tradition of the schlemiel and the schlamazel, the most important advance since the Greeks came up with the eiron and the alazon. (Grover is a textbook schlemiel: the waiter who inevitably dumps soup in the customer’s lap.)

To watch Grover is to see a master at work. After forcing a fake mullet on his bald, blue-faced nemesis, he asks the irate schlemazel, in his not-quite-smart-alecky lilt, “Are you saying you do not like it, my little butterfly?” Working in a bakery, he insists Fat Blue—the only customer—take a number before being served; Fat Blue gets 40, and Grover counts all the way up to it from 1 as his customer shakes with rage.

  • Grover: “Do you have number 12, sir?”
  • Fat Blue: “No.”
  • Grover: “Then please be quiet.”

Finally, at 39, in walks a schoolteacher with the number 39—and 120 students for whom she needs to order doughnuts. Fat Blue collapses, and Grover, acting as if nothing has happened, takes the order. His commitment to the routine is total. There’s no trace of ironic detachment or delivery in the performance—he’s like Fred Armisen, almost—except that somewhere under it all, you suspect he knows exactly what’s going on.

What does this have to do with fatherhood? Well, it gives me a model for interacting with my own daughter: Be willing to take any joke to its literal extremes, play your role uncomplainingly, and when you fall down, out of the sky, and land in a heap on the ground, get right back up and do it again.

Just watch this video, in which Grover explains the concepts of “near” and “far,” and tell me that isn’t a dad playing with his kid. You can almost hear the toddler giggling in the background.

Death: Another Thing I’m Certain I Should Talk About

deathLet me start by saying that while intend to write this post almost entirely in a serious tone, largely because the subject matter that inspired it is just that — serious. Last week I learned that one of JP’s preschool teachers — a young, smart, caring person who JP was wild about — died.

The school has decided not to tell the children about it; the kids will just be told the the teacher took a new job elsewhere and is being replaced by a new “friend.”

One can argue the merits of this decision, but in general, I’m neutral. I wouldn’t have been upset if they had sat the kids down and given them a long lecture on the beyond, as the research seems to suggest that kids can be told about death and withstand it. But I also understand that many parents at the school could disagree with my perspective, and furthermore, educating my child about death is my job, not the institution’s.

That said, I’m not entirely sure that a structured chat with JP will get me anywhere. I wouldn’t not discuss the issue with him if he asked, but as I’ve noted in the past, the sit-down lecture on weighty matters just isn’t my style (although when my dog is bad, I’m not shy about telling him that if he keeps fucking up, he’s going to the farm).

I’d be curious to hear from you folks out in Dadwagon land. Should I tell JP about the eternal Fellini-esque nothingness? Or keep it to myself (the teacher’s on an extended vacation)?