DADWAGON

This year my wife, Jean, and I are going to undertake some projects. We’re going to refinance the apartment. We may renovate the kitchen. We’ll put Sasha in daycare. And I’m going to put together our last will and testament.

Perhaps it’s obvious, but this is not one of the more enjoyable parts of being a parent. It ranks below blowouts, below kindergarten admissions, below catching your LO mid-avisodomy. And it’s bad enough just imagining your own death—to put the will together, you have to imagine all the many alternatives: What if you die? What if your spouse dies? What if both of you die? What happens next?

Sasha’s now 13 months old, and I feel like we’re already, like, 12 months late on this task. Part of this is—sorry, Jean—Jean’s fault. Every time I’ve brought it up, she’s refused to talk about things practically. “You’re making me sad,” she says.

Yes, well. Still, we’ve got to get it done, which is why my current plan is to make up a list of bullet points, have her sign off on them, and take it to a lawyer. Easy enough, right?

I guess the real problem is actually figuring out what to do. The online how-tos aren’t particularly helpful. I mean, even I know that I need to say I’m of sound mind and body, or that we need to a lawyer, or that Joe Jackson shouldn’t become Sasha’s guardian.

Which is really the difficult part. Jean and I are an international marriage: Her parents live in Taiwan; mine live in Connecticut. Whether one or both of us dies, we want poor Sasha to maintain some kind of ties with both sides. If Sasha winds up living in Taipei, we want her to have significant time with my family, and if Sasha grows up in Willington—or Minneapolis or Seattle—she also needs to spend time in Asia.

But is this the kind of thing we can just, you know, stipulate in the will? What does international law say about such situations? Do we need to get the okay from the people we’d like as Sasha’s guardians? And who are the guardians supposed to be, anyway?

And this is where I find myself falling into the same timid camp as Jean. I mean, I can spend all morning imagining how things might work out, but actually speaking to my family about my demise? It’s hard enough just bringing it up with Jean. Much easier to assume nothing bad will ever happen, hope our friends and family are clairvoyant, and keep from making ourselves sad, sad, sad.

Most of the hard work of fathering is carried out in the dim, totally boring dankness of non-fame: regular dads raising regular people who will never cause Harvey Levin to smirk or send out his hordes of batshit paparazzi.

Fortunately, celebrity dads–the famous people who famously sired famous kids–are in the news again this week.

Actually, the first news item is about an everyday dad who tried to become a celebrity back in October. For trying to rise above his station in life (and for causing Denver International to shut down), balloon-boy’s father headed to jail on Monday, where he’ll have 90 days to sketch out his next PR stunt on correctional stationery.

Two dads who didn’t need a hoax to get famous, just an unquenchable thirst for publicity, may finally hit bottom–and each other–in May. Who cares that the PacMan-Mayweather fight was called off? Fight fans can now eagerly await Jon Gosselin v. Michael Lohan later this Spring.

Meanwhile, Amy Winehouse’s dad Mitch had taken her to task for getting back together with her coke-smokin’ ex (OK, he’s an alleged coke-smoker. DadWagon doesn’t want any part of those ridiculous UK libel suits). So Winehouse struck back,  in a Tweet that was so taut and correctly composed that she could have been sober when she wrote it. Or maybe she was just on coke, which makes me, at least, tweet prolifically and powerfully. Amy’s twitter-venge:

WHY don’t my dad WRITE a SONG when something bothers him instead of going on national tv? An you thought YOUR parents were embarassing [SIC]

A dad who was already pretty famous in Nigeria before his son’s crotch became famous in the skies over Detroit may be feeling some Senate heat to testify in his son’s case. We here at DadWagon, of course, threw a Tantrum last week about whether it was right to rat out your kid. But Theodore pointed out that our whole debate was sorta bullshit, so don’t hold your breath waiting for a follow-up about whether it’s morally permissible to testify against your child in front  of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Let’s end on a grace note for us non-famous folk, though: no one else might think this, but your kid thinks you’re famous and powerful and magical. And some days, that’s almost enough.

Jason Avant over at PetCobra and DadCentric will not be having any more children.

This would be mostly of interest to him and his wife, if it weren’t for the excellent after-action report he wrote about the why and how of the vasectomy he had this month.

Now, I would guess that at least some on the DadWagon contemplate squeezing out another child or two, but I am done. As with Jason, it’s no reflection on the depth of love for my current children, nor a diminishing of my strange new infatuation with babies in general (I used to be quite the hater before I had my own). Rather, for my wife and I, two kids is and was The Plan.

Let me tell my fellow DadWagoners, who have one kid apiece, something I’ve learned over the last 20 months: two kids is a lot of work.

It is precisely two times as much work as having one kid, not the optimistic 1.5 multiplier I was told. There is no way to neutralize both kids at the same time. If one naps, the other yaps. If one’s hungry, the other’s tired. If one has to run to the potty, the other has a full diaper.

And yet, the cloud lifts. Every day since Nico was born has gotten just a little bit easier. After 20 months, we are now at the point where the two of them can peacefully play together without refereeing for five or ten minutes at a stretch. There is the possibility of reading half a newspaper article. Or writing at least the header of  a DadWagon post, before they need attending to.

Travel is also showing signs of promise. I am, God help me, taking both of them to San Francisco solo in two weeks, because I believe I am ready and they are ready.

What I won’t do is give back those hard-earned gains by bringing another helpless yob into our home. So yes, it would seem that my vas deferens might also meet the knife at some point in the not-to-distant future.

That’s why Jason’s additional camcorder PSA for DadCentric caught my attention. For those of us with testicles, it’s kind of like a cross between the Blair Witch Project and a Gallagher fruit-comedy routine. Watch at your own peril:

(This is the third in our new series, “The Tantrum,” in which each of our four regulars will address one subject over the course of a week. Read about TV trauma here and ratting out your kid here.)

It’s a case that DadWagon has been watching with some amusement and, let’s face it, a twinge of urban superiority. In Balch Springs, Texas, the long hairstyle worn by 20% of the boys in Dalia’s class in New York got 4-year-old Taylor Pugh suspended last month.

After an appeal by his mother, who has water buffalo horn ear piercings herself, the school board ruled this-a-way: screw you, mom and constitution, your boy can only wear his hair long if he braids it and it stays above the shoulder.

This raises a lot of questions. What kind of braid exactly? Braveheart side-braids with war paint? Allen Iverson brain-pattern cornrows? Legolas elvish herringbone?  A Lil Jon braid explosion?

Whatever they intend, it ain’t gonna look good on a preschooler. Mom has decided to ignore the ruling and send the boy to school with her own odd-looking compromise, a ponytail on top with lots of gel.

There’s just so much wrong with this story. As much as I sympathize with the mother, is it right for her to continue to have her kid suspended for her beliefs? I often have this question about the long hair worn by hipster New York kids–how much of that is the parents trying to feel cool and how much is what the kid himself really wants?

In the end, that’s why in this Tantrum, I’m coming out against long hair for little boys. Yes, I had long hair for much of the 90’s, and was a proud associate member of the langhaariger Ossirockerscheiss club (choke on that one, Google translate). Wearing your hair long is about individual expression; it’s a (tiny) gesture of defiance to conventional society. A preschooler doesn’t really have the information to give that kind of consent.

Back to the Mequite school district: what kind of hysteria is causing the public schools there to worry about gang-related hair (their ostensible concern) in preschool? It’s plenty ironic that this ruling comes from Texas, the state that, as you can see in this drawing I found on the Internet, once defined long hair for men (and, where, it might be noted, many people are quite fond of a certain longhair preacher from Nazareth).

What really bugs me is how much these school administrators are living in the past. It’s 2010, people. How could you not know about the invention of the boy-rette barrette for boys?