DADWAGON

Our day-care center was closed for the Christmas–New Year’s week, and my wife and I split the days at home: two for her, two for me. This was, somehow, the first time I’ve had to do more than a single day as a solo flier, and frankly I was a little uneasy about it. Our little guy has already begun to show that he’s more attached to his mom than to me—which is completely understandable, given that she’s the one who supplies all the milk.

It’s not (mostly) something I’m sad about; it’s just the way things are. But it does mean that, when I’m alone with him, he cries a little more, fusses a little more, and  has more trouble napping and taking his bottle. I refuse to indulge in that “learned helplessness” that so many dads deploy, and in fact try to to go in the opposite direction of “Everybody stay calm. I’ve got this.” But the fact is, a full day on my own with him can be a very long stretch. It was a relief, on Thursday, when his mom finished up work and came home early.

Unless the aforementioned naps work out.

In which case, you get Dadwagon posts like this one. And mom gets Julia Child’s boeuf à la bourguinonne for New Year’s Eve dinner, and the option (depending on the length of said naps) baked goods for dessert. And I start cleaning out the closet, which has been a study in mayhem ever since the piles of baby gear started breeding and multiplying at night. Suddenly I’ve realized how my freelance-writer, at-home-working friends can pull off anything like a career. It’s all about sleep schedules. If they work in your favor, daily baby care is, for long stretches, a matter of not letting him fall on his head. If they don’t, it’s constant attention, without the slightest break.

Nap time just ended. Gotta go.

My name is Mr. Thomas O’Malley. I talk weird. I look funny. My nose is long, and the hair on my chin is not a beard—it’s a mustache. I know tricks: how to make it look like you’ve only got nine fingers, how to confuse your brain to mix up left and right, how to scotch-tape your nose to your forehead. I also have another name: Mr. Weirdy-Weird.

All this is, of course, according to Mimi and Dada, the 7-and-a-half- and 5-year-old children of our friends D. and B., whom we visited over the weekend. The kids spent every day running me ragged, demanding pony rides and piggyback journeys and matches of Tangram Puzzle Pro and round after round of dreidel (yes, Chinese kids in suburban Philly learn to play dreidel in school) and pretty much just constant attention from the moment they woke up till they went to bed. Along the way, they may even have played the Why? game.

If hell is other people, I’d like to ask Sartre, then what are other people’s kids?

Not heaven, certainly, but not a lower circle of Hades either. Worn out as I was, I actually had a pretty good time, and I got the chance to see, right up close, how other parents are doing their job.

And my first, tentative reaction was: God, I don’t want to make the same choices! Mimi (whom I nicknamed Penelope Spheeris) and Dada are lovely and smart and everything, but they have way too many toys. As soon as they get in the minivan, on comes a Disney DVD to keep them entertained, whether it’s a trek up I-95 or a ten-minute ride to the Chinese restaurant. They get on well, but they fight in the irritating way that little kids do—about nothing at all—until eventually they get yelled at. They’re wonderful, but I’m so glad they’re not mine, and that mine won’t, given her and our progression so far, become them.

But I don’t want to be judgmental! I realize that so much of this family’s life is determined by where and how they live. A New York City dad like me doesn’t have to think about installing a DVD player in the minivan; suburban dads do. A New York City parent with limited square footage can more easily quash the toy-buying; suburban parents can devote an entire room (or rooms) to plastic gewgaws. Neither choice is morally superior to the other—it’s all about what we can bear, and that itself is determined by so many factors only partially under our control. In the Sisyphean world of parenting, the boulder is going to tumble down the mountain no matter what, and it’s all we can do to nudge it a degree or two in what we think is the best direction, and to hope we’re standing on the right peak to begin with.

Thank you, NY Daily News, for reminding us over the weekend that the streets we walk want to kill us and possibly our kids and definitely our dogs.

Yes, it’s winter in Gotham, which means that it’s time to worry that the slurry of snow and salt on metal grates and manhole covers will act as a conduit for the leaking voltage that ConEd has decided it doesn’t care as much about as it used to.

That’s too bad, because my kids have taken a new interest in grates and grills or really any kind of metal on the sidewalk. Nico takes particular pleasure in running up to a subway grate covering a 15-foot drop and jumping up and down. I’m somewhat certain the grates won’t give, but the voltage is something else entirely. There’s some information: A foundation set up after the death of Columbia grad student Jodie Lane six years ago tracks the data about “energized objects” in the city (they’ve found more than 31,900 potential electrocution points since she died). StreetZaps has a more personal accounting of various electrocutions, mostly dogs (“Pinky Shocked in Stuyvesant Oval,” “Princess Shocked in Brooklyn”).

As StreetZaps points out, New Yorkers walk above 94,000 miles of underground and transmission cables. Of course, there’s a good reason for this: before the blizzard of 1888—the Great White Hurricane—the streets of New York were a helpless tangle of telephone and electrical wires, since companies wouldn’t share hardware. The storm destroyed it all, and froze the elevated railway; 400 people died. In response, the subway was built and our electrical lives buried.

So now StreetZaps recommends you scan each block before you walk it, keeping yourself and your pet/kid away from metal and toward things like cardboard or plastic. If you really get into this habit, you can buy a T-shirt that says “Eyeball the Block, Avoid a Shock.”

Thankfully, we’ve got a few other things going for us. All the kids’ shoes seem to be made of rubber, which is not perfect, but better than, say, sandals. Also, our mayor, Mike Bloomberg—the man Al Sharpton once called “Ross Perot with a resume”—has a degree in electrical engineering (from a Dadwagon alma mater). That should help, right?

Even if ConEd isn’t really checking for stray voltage on a consistent basis, the Upper West Side is awash in a constant stream of dog piss. Every fire hydrant, flower bed, car tire and stairwell is checked dozens of times by these brave little voltage detectors. I know NY’s Bravest and and NY’s Finest are taken, but surely there’s an honorific out there for little Pinky and Princess and all the others who peed and died so that we might live?

We’re going dark for the next few days as we celebrate the new year. Till Monday, please enjoy this photo of a nameless, underdressed hero dad, who brought his kids sledding under the Manhattan Bridge on Thursday.

Cheers, and see you in 2010!

—The DadWagon editors (Matt, Nathan, Theodore, and Chris)