DADWAGON

I’ve been meaning to post about this news for the past few days: In Great Britain, there’s a push to require that employers offer mandatory paternity leave. New dads will be able to take three months off, with much of their salary guaranteed.

Do I even need to say that I’m in favor of this? More like “What took you so long, and can you please tell everyone over here to get on the same train?”

When my son was born, I was more than a little surprised to find that my employer—a family-run business that, on the whole, is pretty good about employee benefits—offered absolutely zilch. “Paid paternity leave” amounted to “my vacation time,” and since I’ve worked there for a lot of years, I was able to take portions of several weeks to bond with our baby, and to help keep my wife from going nuts. But if I’d been a newish employee, somewhere a little less accommodating? Two weeks and we’ll see you back here, brother, and if the baby gets sick for a couple of days next month, well, we just hope you can find a sitter.

The argument against required paternity leave, of course, always comes down to its potential strain on small-business owners. It’s true that requiring a five-person operation to let one or two employees just vanish for three months would be difficult without some kind of subsidy. Yet somehow, virtually every other country of means manages it. Italy gives every dad three months. (Maybe Berlusconi has plans for one of his girlfriends.) Germany mandates a year, with a salary limit. Most of the rest of Europe caps the leave at a week or two, but quite a few countries allow dads to take some of the (far more generous) maternity leave—that is, if Mom goes back to work after four months, and a seven-month leave is permissible, Dad can take the other three.

Sweden is the country that puts everyone to shame, allowing dads to take 480 days, paid. Four hundred and eighty days. Makes me want to buy a Saab and drive it to Ikea tomorrow, just to support this system. But even countries not known for progressive social policies (Uganda, for example) are better about this than the United States of America. It’s nuts, and—given the intransigence of Washington right now—it’s absolutely not going to change, for a very long time. Not for 480 days, not for 48,000.

I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about two things:

1. What to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner
2. What to do when the apocalypse comes

Recently, I realized that #2 will undoubtedly affect #1, but also that current eating trends here in Brooklyn may provide a solution. I’m talking about locavorism, the hifalutin approach to cooking and eating that requires using food products native to and produced within the region. It is a fad that, even after several years of currency, does not seem to be going away.

Now, you might think that an apocalypse—whether brought about by the collapse of our financial system, a national Tea Party victory, or, most likely, a zombie/vampire plague—would mean the end of locavorism. Not true! In part because we’d no longer be able to rely on illegal overnight imports of ortolans and Caspian Sea beluga, us survivors would have to scavenge locally, and once the supplies at Trader Joe’s, Sahadi’s, and BKLN LRDR run out, we will still have one great source of sustenance: our children.

To those of you forced to read Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” in high school, this is, of course, an obvious solution, and given the enormous child population of neighborhoods like Park Slope, BoCoCa, and Williamsburg, it will guarantee us adults enough to eat for some time to come.

But giving up your son or daughter is one thing. Brooklyn parents will yet be reluctant to give up their values. No Carroll Gardens gourmet wants little Beckham or Zoë simply to be, as Swift suggested, “stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled”; certainly the moms and dads who frequent Al di Là and Applewood expect something better than for their kids’ Bugaboo-toted carcasses just to be served “in a fricassee or a ragout.”

And so I’ve decided to do Swift one better. Herewith, the Brooklyn Locavore’s Children’s Cookbook:

1. Enfant en Papillote

• Take one Brooklyn child, preferably free-range, and wrap in several layers of preschool-rejection letters. (Pre-soak the letters in tears of shame, so they don’t ignite.) Bake in a 350-degree oven for five hours, or until little Franklin or Cassiopeia would have reached the top of the wait list.

2. Cured Child

• Flay one Brooklyn child—if possible, an unvaccinated one—and season liberally (unless the Tea Party vigilantes are watching, in which case conservatively) with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Drape the body over your Stokke pram, and set the contraption atop your brownstone’s furnished roof deck, where the wind will dry-cure the meat. Goes well with Sixpoint Sweet Action Ale.

3. Williamsburg Whopper Jr.

• Meat from hipster children tends to be exceptionally lean (and sometimes tattooed), but as the parents are likely to be Scandinavian, it will be all-natural and exceed EU import regulations. Grind it finely and grill over a fire made from excess skateboard decks. Serve with a sense of entitlement.

4. Water Babies

• This is great for large gatherings: Bring the water in your converted-Dumpster swimming pool to a boil, and ask each warehouse-party attendee to bring a child to add to the pot. No seasoning necessary if you use “water” from the Gowanus Canal.

5. Jerk Children

• I can’t find this recipe in my files. Go ask your nanny.

Got recipes of your own? Post ’em in the comments.

The culture wars made their way to Dadwagon this week. Matt started us off by noting that the nanny state has brought toothbrushing training into public schools, and followed that post up with our first-ever Q&A: a lively conversation with Bill Martin, the Marxist professor who shares a name with (and therefore brought controversy to) the late author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear. Matt also took the elitist-seeming stance that his nanny doesn’t read Dadwagon, since he admitted that, although she doesn’t know it, she’s likely to lose her job soon. (He’s probably right that she’s not among our readers, because she speaks no English.)

Ted, no stranger to the war on obscenity, proclaimed his admiration for Penthouse Letters, and (in a theoretically related post) noted that it’s hard to chat up fellow parents without looking like he’s hitting on them. He also called out Matt on his attitude toward sleep training; you two should hug it out on your own time, mmmkay?

Nathan spent the week traveling, ending up in a small town in Northern California, so you can pretty much figure out his stance on the culture wars right there. But if you need further information, he informed us about the very first word spoken by his friends’ kid. (Hint: It’s not something Ned Flanders would appreciate.) On the other hand, he apparently doesn’t come from particularly elitist stock, judging by his family’s cross-generational affection for plate-licking.

As for me, I didn’t realize it as the week progressed, but apparently I’ve been consuming too much trash culture. Posts about manboobs, horrifying reality TV, Roger Federer’s parenting skills, and this unfortunate bit of Americana made it clear that I’d best lay off reading Us Weekly this weekend. I’m going to go ahead and blame lack of sleep for my newfound shallowness—an opinion that’s backed up by my Tantrum post on our family’s sleep-training approach (which is to say, we’ve rejected it).

We’ll be back Monday, more polarizing than ever.

Here’s a post I’m doing just because I can, dammit, from seat 18D on United Flight 852 from SFO to JFK.

I have a great deal of ambivalence about wireless Internet entering the cabin. Mainly because I know how annoying and annoyed I can be in the presence of the Interwebs. Sure enough, the first thing I tried to do after paying my $7.95 access fee was to try to call Dadwagoner Matt on Skype, for what would have been a loud and probably unwelcome conversation about fathering on airplanes.

They’ve somehow scrambled the VOIP capabilities, though (anyone know a way around that?), so fellow passengers were spared having to listen to me.

Anyhow, we’re barely over the Sierras but I have a good feeling about this flight. Coming out to SF—just me and the two kids, as it is right now—tears were shed and urine flowed. I had also neglected to bring a change of clothes for me or the incontinent midget I call my son.

But now he’s wearing two diapers, sitting somewhere besides my lap, and I’ve got a change of clothes just in case.

And as you can see, the girl is enthralled, once again, by the Jungle Book. They may have Internet on airplanes, but they still haven’t made a better kids’ movie than that one from 1967.

UPDATE: just about ready to land and i’ve got to say: this is a cool crew working the flight. They’ve been feeding my kids ice cream from first class and just gave us a chocolate chip cookie. They know how to win over the girl.

So, I know the airline industry is in a dark place these days and I loved that YouTube from the guy who had his Taylor guitar broken by United. But that just makes it all the more stupendous when you run across a calm and generous crew. Right on.