DADWAGON

Spent some weekend time shopping for holiday gifts, and yet again, I have been struck by the spectacular awfulness of most baby clothes. Who decided that the gender-specific appliqué is the only appropriate way to decorate a tiny outfit? Walk through the boys’ racks, and all you see are little footballs, hockey sticks, puppies, and DADDY LOVES ME embroideries; in the girls’ department, amid the sea of pink, it’s all sparkles and princesses and butterflies. Well, I am about as much a fan of the football/cheerleader dichotomy as I am of the head traumas that go with it.  I vote no.

To find better-looking infant clothes, you have to seek out some designer baby line, like the Brooklyn company Egg. Their clothes are great-looking and well-made; their prices mean that we just don’t own much of it. The middle ground, so far, has been astonishingly sparse. If it weren’t for the plain and sturdy and all-American stuff from Lands’ End, we’d be stuck permanently in DADDY LOVES ME land.

Then again, things could be worse.

Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story was the sort of thing that inspires a lot of eye-rolling. Elizabeth Weil’s story was ostensibly about attempting to submit a decent marriage to counseling and therapy, to see if things might improve. What readers got instead was a shapeless noodle of a story that felt like a therapy session itself: The writer airs grievances, goes on too long about small irritants, and wanders through her long-simmering gripes with more ferocity than they’d seem to merit. I came away feeling weirdly Sarah Palin-ish: This is what these San Francisco elitists have to complain about? My husband spends too much time at the gym, is too obsessive about his cooking prowess, and is decent but predictable in bed? Oh, get over yourselves.

But what interested me most about this story was that these two have three children, and they just barely make an appearance in this story. Maybe it’s just because Weil’s story is about marital strife, but to my reading,  she and her husband spend a whole lot of time screaming at each other. And the stressors in her marriage seem to stem from (a) her focus on being a parent first and a mate second, (b) her husband’s resentment of same, and (c) her resentment over his resentment. I have a sense that these kids (ages 4 and 7) are old enough to know there’s something not right between Mommy and Daddy, and that, it seems to me, ought to have been part of this essay-experiment. That, and a few days’ serious editing.

On Salon.com, Aaron Traister writes about a serious problem we face as fathers—stupidity:

I don’t know if parenting makes you chronically stupid or just temporarily slow, but after nearly four years of child rearing, most of them spent as a stay-at-home dad, my intellect has been dulled to a nub.

Now, I don’t know if this blog is proof of his claim or a repudiation, but it rings true to me. I sometimes look at my 1-year-old daughter, happily fluttering her arms and screaming at her reflection in a mirror, and wonder what exactly I’m supposed to be doing with my brain here.

Yes, I could sit by her side and do likewise. Or I could whip out my iPhone and catch up on the New York Times, Slate and, um, Harper’s, honing my neurons to razor-sharpness while Sasha climbs onto the couch, leaps off and faceplants on the floor.

Who, I ask you, is the stupid one here?

Not to call too loud of a shenanigans on my colleague, Nathan, but New York as a great place to raise kids? Hmm. Maybe. I mean there are marijuana delivery services, hot and cold running hookers, and this guy. So what’s not to love?

Well how about this: Universal pre-k. What does that term, universal, connote for you? Perhaps, oh, I don’t know, like everyone gets it? Maybe? Kinda?

No.

Universal pre-k is not universal. Or I should say, it’s only universal in places where it is. Other places it’s done by lottery. Or first come first serve. Except in the places that don’t have it at all..

Here’s the worst part. You can’t even apply for pre-K (apply!), until several months after the deadlines for enrolling at the private preschools.

What does that mean? Well, basically, even if JP gets a universal pre-K spot, I’ll be paying his current preschool (which I love, mind you) some $5,000 or more to ensure that if he doesn’t get a universal (shenanigans!) pre-K spot in the public school that he will still have somewhere to go.

God Bless Suburbia (spoken as someone who grew up here and will never leave).