DADWAGON

So, all this week I’ve been in San Francisco with Sasha—and without Jean. The wife is currently shopping for clothes in Berlin (yes, for work), and so we’re out here on vacation. Or maybe that should be “vacation,” as I’m really here for another Frugal Traveler story. Yes, I’m working, and working it with the baby.

Or really, trying to work it. I’ve been posting so little this week because, frankly, I’m completely exhausted. From waking up at 6 a.m., cooking, cleaning, and feeding, to exploring baby-friendly museums and activities, everything requires massive effort, and by the time the kid’s asleep (around 7:30 p.m) my brain is completely fried, not to mention the muscles in my arms and back. It’s all I can do to keep myself up till 10 p.m.

All of this has given me massive amounts of respect for all the single moms and dads out there, who do this day after day after day not because they’re on a working vacation but because, well, they have to. So cheers to you guys! I don’t know how you do it.

Kudos to the San Jose Mercury news for liveblogging the extraordinary Prop. 8 trial, in which the Reaganite former Solicitor General Ted Olson has teamed up with gay rights activists to strike down California’s ban on gay marriage. The Supreme Court just decided to outlaw a broadcast of the trial, so I’m glad that Howard Mintz is on the inside.

There’s plenty of good stuff there for legal geeks and equality hawks, but I was particularly drawn to this buffoonish cross-examination from Day 5 of the trial, after a sociologist named Michael Lamb testified that homosexuals are just as good at parenting as heterosexuals:

The cross-examination of Michael Lamb, the plaintiffs expert, began with the revelation (gasp!) that he’s a liberal. Proposition 8 lawyer David Thompson opened up his questioning of Lamb by asking him whether he’s a member of the ACLU, NOW, NAACP and Amnesty International. (He is.) Then Thompson really hit hard. “You’ve even given money to PBS, is that correct?” the lawyer asked, prompting a burst of laughter in the courtroom. (Lamb did give to PBS, and acknowledged he’s liberal.) Lamb also conceded he advocates same-sex marriage.

So this is what it has come to? In Massachusetts, a man is elected to the Senate because he drives a pickup truck, and the state of California tries to discredit scientific data by asking a witness if he contributes to PBS.

Progressives, I think y’all need to get aggressive.

No, this isn’t about yesterday’s Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts. (Though it could be.) It’s about a slightly different special election: People magazine’s Web readers recently chose the Sexiest Dad Alive. It’s this guy, Dustin Moyer, a university police officer from Ashland, Missouri. He seems nice, too, and more power to him.

What won it for him–besides his being hawwwt—is apparently this nugget of information: Officer Moyer stayed home days so his wife could return to work, and cooked and cleaned and changed diapers all day before heading off to his midnight shift at the U of M. This, my friends, makes him a hunk of all-American sexy sexiness, at least among the cohort that is People‘s readership.

Well, none of us Dadwagoneers have gone that far. Media careers are schedule-dependent and deadline-driven, and the only midnight shifts I pull are the ones that start at 10 a.m. and go deep into the night. But I would bet that SexyDad and my colleagues here are not that far apart when it comes to number of diapers changed, lullabys sung,  meals prepared, or stroller trips strolled. And does any of us even get nominated? Noooo.

Hunkiness trumps everything. The hell with baby care; get thee to a gym.

Here’s how breakfast went down this morning: me with my daughter on my shoulders, speed-walking down Columbus Avenue to get her to school on time, while she ate an unadorned Eggo waffle.

I think it was fairly obvious to most passersby that I was the kind of parent who woke my kid up late and made her eat a shitty breakfast in a hurry, in public. Hence the looks I was getting, which couldn’t have been more disapproving if she was wearing a leash and eating raw giblets off the sidewalk.

A friend of mine–a mom with a kid at Dalia’s school–assured me that dads get those looks more than moms. People just enjoy clucking at fathers. It feels safe. It fits their preconceived notion of fuck-up dads. The Germans have a term for it, Rabenvater–Raven Dad–because ravens are notoriously disinterested parents who push their offspring out of the nest the first chance they get (although, to be fair, Germans also use Rabenmutter).

Like a good New Yorker, I try not to give a damn what other people think. But I fail.

So what should I do? The daughter has been unusually nocturnal as of late: she’ll lay in her bed awake. For hours. She’s still in stone cold REM when 8am rolls around, and we’ve got to be out the door by 8:25.

I’ve got three choices:

• Wake her up 20 minutes earlier
• Miss the first 20 minutes of school
• Keep feeding her defrosted waffles on the go

Of course, there’s the stealth fourth option, which is to cut out the midday nap entirely so that she is dogtired by 7pm and will collapse in her highchair and wake up pert at 6am. But that would be a highly ambitious bit of social engineering, and as such, is probably doomed to failure.

But you know what they say in my hometown–you’ve got to lose a pinfish to catch a grouper. I don’t actually know what that’s supposed to mean, but either way, I think her napping days are over.