DADWAGON

Quite by accident, we found ourselves at the Aventura Mall yesterday just north of Miami. Wedged between the yacht-ridden Intracoastal Waterway and the Turnberry Isle Resort and Golf Club, it is a vast citadel of shopping, a gilded pimple on the ass of debt-laden America. Exactly the kind of mall experience we were glad to leave behind by moving to Gotham.

Of course, the 3-year-old Dalia loved it. Particularly because Christmas has come early to the mall. Santa was there hearing kids’ Christmas wishes near the entrance to Bloomingdale’s. A kiddie train in another part of the mall ran through a fluffy white landscape filled with animatronic bears and chipmunks. JC Penney Court had a $400,000 model train mountain that transfixed me her for a half-hour.

Dalia couldn’t have been happier if a coterie of fricking elves had personally taken her to the North Pole.

Yes, we live in Manhattan–home to the Rockefeller tree, the Miracle on 34th St., and, for a few hours a couple times each winter, white snow–but the New York Christmas experience can be almost too real. Lugging a stroller on the subway, dealing with the howling wind canyon that is 6th Avenue, and squeezing past the pudgy hordes of tourists from America’s stollenbasket. Here, in the mall, it was so easy. Just walk another 100 meters–with a frozen yogurt break on the way–from one attraction to the next.

No, Dalia didn’t want to talk to Santa. And her younger brother wouldn’t even look at the dude, as if he could make him go away just by averting his eyes.

But my relief at such an easily won Christmas experience, even an artificial one, is a sign that despite my better instincts, I’ve succumbed a bit to Christmas pressure. Apparently that’s the same force that makes New Zealanders beat their wives during the holidays, so I suppose we’re ahead of the game if a wasted afternoon at the mall is the worst thing that happens to us.

Of course, there’s still two weeks left before Christmas.

DadWagon has previously (and correctly) defended the right of children to be as annoying as adults on airplanes, but my 3-year-old girl has developed a new kind of menacing behavior on commercial flights: a loud and verbal curiosity about airplane disasters.

It’s not that she’s worried. Quite the contrary. She has her fears, though they change quickly around this age (studies show strangers become less scary just as monsters become more scary). She is definitely not afraid of planes. It’s just that in the infinite juncture between watching Kung Fu Panda while the plane is still parked at the gate and watching Kung Fu Panda once it’s safe to turn on all approved electronic devices at 10,000 feet, Dalia has only the colorful, clearly drawn Airline Safety Pamphlet to keep her entertained.

On our American Airlines flight to Miami this weekend, Dalia once again asked loudly to be led through drawn instructions about what to do in the event of fire, smoke, water landing or drop in cabin pressure. We whispered the answers to her, being truthful if a little evasive. She, however, held her end of the conversation in her loud, blunt quizzing-voice that could be heard three rows up and three rows back. As in, “When the plane lands in water, do we die or not die?”

As a frequent flier who has also from time to time morbidly pondered the unthinkable, I would probably rather hear a child screaming her lungs out or grunting a diaper full than have someone’s pre-schooler spend the initial ascent telling rows 19-26 all the ways one can die on a plane.

But there’s a sweetness to her curiosity. Disaster and death to her are total abstractions, as they are to all children under the age of 5. And even after 5, much of the work is about how to cope with fears and anxieties that they do understand. It’s one of the things that makes children children. It all reminds me, as it should anyone who was born in the 1970’s, of one thing: the Challenger disaster.

Challenger was, of course, the space shuttle that disintegrated shortly after liftoff in 1986. But it wasn’t just another NASA fuck-up. There was a schoolteacher on board, a fact which gave nearly every school in America the bright idea to turn the 11am liftoff into a live-on-TV curriculum event. So the children of America, who had been learning about the six brave astronauts and the teacher Christa McAuliffe, were watching live when all seven were blown to oblivion.

Imagine if, in the early morning of 9/11, 40 million schoolkids had gathered around to just watch the twin towers because of they had been learning all about stock brokers for school. That’s sort of what the Challenger was like.

No wonder there are 91 books with the keywords Challenger Disaster in Amazon’s children’s book section. Why do I think Dalia would love to read them all?

Quick–Third World Mothers: HIDE YOUR FRICKING BABIES!!!

Madonna still may be in the market for little ones to abduct adopt, and Lord knows she likes ’em cheap.

Here, via, Babble, is a rundown on Madonna and the evil dwarves who come in the night to TAKE YOUR CHILDREN:

“I’m really proud of the work that I’m doing in Africa. I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment in terms of my career and the work that I have done.

“I have four children now and I’d like to think I’m a good mother. I feel a great sense of satisfaction in all areas of my life.”

That woman is a saint.

JP’s first birthday after I split with his mother was a bit uncomfortable. His mother and I decided to go ahead and hold a party for him together. Her parents and mine came, along with JP’s little friends from  preschool, some aunts and uncles, and our mutual friends with children. Cake, balloons, and nail-biting tension were shared by all.

Not likely that will be repeated this year. On the one hand, JP is lucky—he’ll get two birthday parties this year instead of one. But even now, at 3, he knows something out-of-the-ordinary is going on between his mother and father. Not all of his schoolmates have a complicated visitation schedule, aggravation over toys and clothes left at the other apartment, and uncertainty over where he will be for the holidays.

I am thinking of this only because today I received another invitation to a birthday party for one of JP’s friends at school. The invite came to me, but the party happens to fall on of his mother’s days with JP. The problem is that I’m friends with the parents in this case, not my ex. I can ask her to take JP to the party, but that will necessitate her rejiggering her schedule with him, which inevitably becomes a fight between the two of us.

Or JP could just not go. Which sucks. As do birthdays. And everything else I can think of right now.