DADWAGON

Okay, this isn’t so much a post as it is a miniature contest. Or a cry for help. Make that a scream from the pit of my stomach. Basically, I need your help, you brilliant DadWagon readers, to name a phenomenon.

Here is the phenomenon: Kids, from the time they become mobile, seem to have an unerring instinct for bashing Dad in the balls. With feet, hands, head, robot frogs, books, magic wands, and three-wheeled scooters, they’re like heat-seeking missiles—crotch rockets, if you will—that always manage to find their testicular targets. It often feels like destiny (painful destiny), in that no matter how far away the kid is from you, no matter what kind of soft toy they’re playing with, your balls are in danger.

So, in the vein of the Washington Post Style Invitational, I’d like you to help me name this situation. Points will be given for cleverness, extra points will be given to those who buy me a beer. The winner will receive nothing but the glory that comes from being highlighted on the biggest little dadblog in the world. Post your entries below.

A child’s development is a strange, lurching thing. You are convinced you kid can’t (or in some cases can) do this-or-that, and then on a dime, it all changes.

This is how it went on Friday with my daughter.

The skill: water-survival.

The backstory: for years now our daughter, an intense and thoughtful five-year-old who is also prone to moments of deep physical cowardice, has had a conflicted relationship with pools. She loves them, of course: what child doesn’t? But she hates the anarchy of water, how it gets in your nose and mattes your hair, how it threatens to swallow you up whole at any moment. Her solution, improvised in a child’s manner, has been to gird herself with a mountain of gear and even more false bravado.

As in: here she is, with little pink flippers, a mask and snorkel, and a Coast Guard rated child’s lifejacket cinched tight around her chest, taking small steps into a bathwarm pool, careful not to wet her hair. She steps into open water, grasps onto a little inflatable boat for a moment then comes back to the steps, saying: “see, I told you I’m a good swimmer!”

(For a rather exact portrait of her in the water, see Sergio Makes a Splash, a brilliant picture-book from my former colleague Edel Rodriguez, about a penguin who is not afraid of all water, just “the very deep kind.”)

My wife and I, ever helpful and encouraging in the style of parents who tell their children they did a great job when they crap in a toilet, applaud her accomplishment and tell her, when she returns to the step, that she’s a very good swimmer indeed.

Except, of course, that she isn’t. But it was only when my sister-in-law, a Miamian who would know about such things, pointed out that overconfidence can be a dangerous thing around the water, that we realized we were maybe doing our daughter a disservice by agreeing that she was a good swimmer. Maybe she realized that she actually wasn’t and was just saying so to seem brave or good. But more likely, we thought, she really thought that she was the kind of swimmer who could, say, jump off a boat or go into the pool with not adults around, and make it back to shore.

So on Friday morning, our second-to-last day of vacation in Key West, where I’m from, my wife set about to crush her little delusions like a grape. “You know, you can’t really swim,” my wife started, as Dalia once again boasted in the pool. “You have a life jacket and a little rubber boat, and that’s not swimming.”

Our daughter protested, but the mother was just getting warm.

“It’s important for you to know that you really can’t swim, because we don’t want you thinking you can be in the pool by yourself.”

And then my wife did something that proved unexpectedly clever. She spelled out what swimming really is: using your arms and legs to move through the water, without a lifejacket or rubber duckie or floatboard or anything like that.

We thought this would all defeat our daughter, make her cry a little, but help save her in the long run.

Instead, she took it as long-awaited instructions. She stood on the step, unbuckled her lifejacket, pushed into the pool, and swam.

As in, really swam. Feet behind her, arms working, body planked: she just swam. Straight across the pool.

And as she reached the far side, she picked up her head and asked, “like that?” without any trace of bravado or challenge, just a curiosity about whether that was indeed swimming.

For the next twenty minutes, she swam on her own. She joked around by floating still or frog-paddling. She didn’t panic or yelp or flail her arms like she had in the past. It was astounding.

So there you have it: one brief tiger-flash of cruel truth unlocked some internal ability that none of us–including her–thought she had. So my resolution for today: remind her that she can’t read and point out that her Spanish is crap. Then tonight we’ll be reading Cervantes in the original.

JP has been at “summer camp” since the start of the week. His summer camp is at the same pre-school that he attended all year; only difference, so far as I can tell is that they use a sprinkler at their rooftop playground. Only problem is that they haven’t used it yet, the sprinkler, that watering device designed to entrance, divert, and COOL youngsters.

The reason? It’s too hot. It has been too hot to go outside and let my five-year-old male child with energy enough for twenty old men like me and run around in some freezing water. Oh, and the ozone levels have been too high–the school coordinator actually told me that this morning. They had checked the OZONE yesterday and determined the air quality was too poor to venture outside.

I should mention that JP spent twenty minutes yesterday after dinner running laps around the table; this after we spent the better part of the evening outside with me playing catch and hanging out.

Ozone layers! Perhaps this image is what they teachers would prefer:

This happens sometimes: It’ll be 7:30-ish, and I’ll be in the kitchen, starting to get dinner ready. I’ll be chopping onions, or crushing Sichuan peppercorns, when in walks Jean from the other room. I’ll look at her quizzically and ask, “Where’s Sasha?” I ask this because the last I knew, Sasha was having a bath.

“In the tub,” Jean will say nonchalantly.

And then I’ll sigh, and Jean will know why: Because she’s left our 2-and-a-half-year-old alone in a bathtub!

Look, I try not to be the crazy, overprotective parent. In fact, most of the time, I’m far from it—I ride Sasha around on my bike, stand way back when she’s climbing ladders at the playground, and even give her occasional sips of beer or champagne. But some alarm goes off in my head when I realize Sasha’s alone in the tub, some dim memory of statistics about kids drowning in 2 inches of water in kiddie pools, drowning silently and suddenly, with no splashing or cries to alert adults in the vicinity.

Now, here at my computer, I can actually look those stats up on the CDC site:

• Drowning is the second leading cause of death for kids under 14.

• “Supervision by a lifeguard or designated water-watcher is important to protect young children when they are in the water, whether a pool or bathtub.” Hear that, Jean?

• “Seconds count. CPR performed by bystanders has been shown to improve outcomes in drowning victims. The more quickly intervention occurs, the better change of improved outcomes.”

Mostly, the CDC warnings relate to swimming pools and other large bodies of water, but I still worry. To me, the guy who drags his kid to bars and lets her watch Mad Max movies, there are just some things you don’t ever do, like leaving toddlers in bathtubs unattended. Am I a hypocrite? Yes, probably. But a hypocrite with an undrowned daughter.