Cuckoo for Catholic Puffs

It was the first full morning of school—pre-K for my youngest—and we had been told to go downstairs to the cafeteria, because every morning before class, the Catholic school he’s enrolled in—let’s call it the Church of the Superholy Awesome Ascension—feeds the kids breakfast.

The cafeteria is not an inspiring place. The stairwell down to it is dark and caged off with something that looks a lot like chickenwire. Much of the school, which hasn’t been upgraded since the decades when the Upper West Side and Manhattan Valley were very stabby neighborhoods, has this security fencing inside, as if they have a plan for penning wilding teenagers in if they have to. The cafeteria itself smells like lunchlady at every hour of the day, has big flickering flourescent bulbs, and rickety cateferia benches.

But there, lined up neatly in front of the other per-kindergartners, was something that made me very glad indeed: little plastic boxes of Cocoa Puffs.

This is breakfast at Awesome Ascension. On Tuesdays. On Mondays it’s an off-label cereal called Marshmallow Mateys. I am pretty sure that last Thursday I saw a pancake and a cookie on each plate. On Fridays, I assume, they line up pixie sugar straws so the kids can snort it like blow.

So why would this make me happy?

It’s a long story, but it starts probably from the moment we first got pregnant and began to become, by virtue of demographics alone, a part of one of the most precious and unbearable communities on earth: Manhattan professionals who have children. Our cohort in this group are, to paint them broadly, neurotic and overempowered and hovering and terrified of sugar. If a Whole Foods megastore hadn’t finally come to the Upper West Side a few years ago, I do believe that the hundred thousand yoga moms who were screaming for a way to get more flax in their toddlers diets would have just gone ahead and built it with their own hands, like an old-fashioned barn raising.

These were the people who clearly designed and populated the bloodless, sugar-fearing Montessori school I sent my son to last year. I wrote a little bit about the first hints of oddity from the place here. Suffice to say that things got stranger from there. Enamored with her own sense of order, my son’s teacher rebuffed him when he hugged her, confiscated his jello (too much sugar) and generally was a nightmare of yuppie rulemaking. All at the low price of $19k a year.

So we chose Catholic school. Not because we are Catholic. We are not. My mother-in-law is, but we are unmoved. And I have a beef with any bureaucracy that would harbor child molesters while attacking gay rights inside and outside their church. But there’s another side of Catholicism, one that involves a lot of soup kitchens, righteous stands on immigration, and, generally, lots of mitzvah. Among those mitzvahs, in our neighborhood at least: they offer the only affordable pre-K.

Which brings us to the Cocoa Puffs. I know it’s bad for my kid. Marshmallow Mateys are undoubtedly even worse. My wife was similarly unamused when one of his new teachers suggested that she “pack a few bags of chips” so he would have something to snack on during the long afterschool program.

But there’s something meaningful about all that junk food being presented as breakfast and snack: it reminds me of the schools I was in growing up. I remember thinking this all throughout that long, tetchy Montessori year with my son last year (they had a no refund policy, so we were, quite simply, stuck): screw all this advanced parenting and hyperintentional educating. When I was a kid, I was taught by obese women who loved me. Same with all my friends. We got hugs and little plastic cups of some fluorescent drink they couldn’t even legally call juice. We ate chicken nuggets that probably had no chicken. And breakfast at my public school was always some processed cereal with a little carton of chocolate milk.

In my mind, a little junk food comes with a lot of love. And that, more than a ruthlessly healthy diet, is what I want for my boy.

How to Name Your Goddamn Kid

Three months ago, the editor of a “luxury magazine” emailed to ask if I could, very very quickly, write up an article on the challenges of naming your baby. Sure, I said, and I wrote it up that day. Today, however, I found out that, for mysterious reasons, it didn’t run. Oh well. This happens. But you know, I’ve got this blog here! So, uh, enjoy:

The second time around, pregnancy is easy. Morning sickness? That’ll be gone in a month or two. Strange cravings? A five-pound bag of Gummi Bears is $14.98 on Amazon.com. Big belly making it hard to sleep? Break out the body pillow and—why not?—a glass of wine.

But for my wife, Jean, and me, there’s one thing we simply can’t figure out: what to name our second child when she pops out in September.

This shouldn’t be a big deal. After all, it’s just a name—a few arbitrary words by which she’ll be known, presumably, for her entire life. The name may help determine her sense of self, or it may not. And we’ll probably come up with a host of nicknames that have no relation to her given name. My own mother called me Pumpkin for years. My brother was Peapod. My sister was Bean. I still don’t know why.

And yet we care—all parents care—because the name announces to the world not just who the kid is but who we, her family, are. If she’s a Rainbow, we’re hippies. If he’s a Michael or a John, you lack imagination. If she’s a Wah-Ming or an Aparna, you’re recent immigrants—or maybe third-generation arrivals looking to reconnect with your heritage. If there’s a Roman numeral at the end of the name, you’re tradition-minded. Or rich. Or pretentious. Or all of the above.

Celebrity parents have it easy. They’re not only allowed to give their kids wacky, outrageous names, they’re expected to. In my corner of Brooklyn, Gwyneth Paltrow last October showed up at the local park with her daughter, Apple, alongside Beyoncé and Jay-Z, who will probably return one day soon with their daughter, Blue Ivy. (My friend Tom, whose own daughter Ivy was born a month before Beyoncé’s, claims he inspired the pop stars.) Another neighborhood fixture, Michelle Williams, named her daughter Matilda, which by comparison sounds normal.

But could I name my daughter Matilda? To me, it sounds overwrought. The last thing I want is for anyone to consider Jean and me helicopter parents, so intent on choosing a perfect, standout, special name that we wind up with something—yeesh—precious.

“Precious?” says Jean. “That’s your word. I’m fine with that. How about Mercedes?”

She’s kidding—I hope.

Once upon a time, I imagine, the choice was easier. You picked a traditional name—something Waspy, or Biblical, or lucky. You picked a beloved relative’s name. You chose from a list of common, popular names because that’s what everyone did, and names really didn’t matter as much, since everyone lived in the same context.

Today, context is gone, obliterated. More than a third of Brooklyn is foreign-born (in Vancouver, it’s nearly 50 percent!), and everybody is having kids with everybody else. Traditions still hold some sway, but they, too, have multiplied and crossbred, and Jean and I are prime examples.

Jean was born Ching-wen Liu, in Taipei, Taiwan. Her brother was Li-wen. This was normal, to have the same syllable in siblings’ names—her cousins, for instance, were Ping-yi and Ping-jie (now known as Freesia and Jessie). The big challenge for Jean’s parents was to find characters to write the names—that is, they had to have the right number and kind of strokes to be considered lucky according to Chinese cosmology.

But that’s about it. As far as Jean’s family is concerned, it doesn’t matter what we name our kids. In fact, they’re pretty lackadaisical about the whole process. Li-wen—known to me as Louis—and his wife, Charmiko, didn’t even name their daughter or son at birth. For weeks after delivery, the babies were known simply as Mei-mei (little sister) and Di-di (little brother), until the parents came up with names they liked.

Jean and I do have one concern when it comes to her family. We want to choose names that her relatives, not all of whom speak English, can easily pronounce. Short and sweet is better, while consonant clusters are to be avoided. Lily is nice; Catherine is complicated.

I, meanwhile, am more formally known as Matthew Benjamin Gross, and was given the Hebrew name Moshe, a reference to my great-grandfather Morris Gross, born Moishe Grossmütz in late 19th-century Marijampolé, Lithuania. My Jewish family may be quite secular, but not so much that we’re willing to accept distinctly Christian names, and we still hew to certain Ashkenazi traditions, like not naming babies after living people. This has already caused us to nix Hannah and Leah, since they turned out to be the Hebrew names of my mother, Anne Leslie Gross. For a while, I liked the name Rose—my late grandmothers were Rosalie and Roslyn—but the rhythm wasn’t right, and although Rosalie Gross sounded sweet, the truth is I never really liked Grandma Rosalie. So no Rose.

For people trying not to care too much, we’ve given ourselves an awful lot of rules. But we’ve gotten this right once before. Our first daughter, born in December 2008, is Sasha Raven Gross. Sasha sounds vaguely Eastern European, Jew-ish but not Jewish, and can be rendered in Chinese as Sa-sa. And Raven: It’s artsy, and if she runs away when she’s 16, Jean and I can visit local strip clubs, ask, “Is Raven working today?,” and take our daughter back home.

Frankly, I wish there were someone wise we could consult. Baby-name books are too encyclopedic, and I’m not about to spend upwards of $400 to employ a consultant. The U.S. Social Security Administration’s annual list of top ten baby names is useful, of course, but only because it tells us which not to pick. (At one point, we remember well, Sasha’s preschool had at least two Aidens and a Hayden.) So, sorry, Sophia, Isabella, and… Abigail? Darn, I kind of liked that one.

My close friend Ted, whose wife, Tomoko, is due two weeks before Jean, came up with his new daughter’s name at a yoga retreat in Mexico. “Some hippie dropout said, ‘I’ve got the perfect name for you: Amina!’” he told me. “We went and looked it up, and it means something in Arabic and something else in Swahili, which was nice.” Even better, Tomoko’s Japanese relatives could pronounce it.

“But everybody kept making a face,” he said, “so we switched it to Mena.”

This is great news for Ted and Tomoko, but not for me and Jean. Until we heard their story, we’d been leaning toward Nina—cute, slightly but not overly unusual, and easy on Chinese ears. But Ted’s kid and mine are surely going to be friends, so they can’t have such similar names.

Or can they? Why not Mena and Nina? Maybe it really doesn’t matter to anyone but us parents what we name our children. We all came to terms with our own names—their strengths and weaknesses, their rarity or ordinariness—and few of us chose to change them, though we may at times have been tempted. (In junior high, Gross was not an asset.) And I know one person who for sure doesn’t care: Sasha. Every evening, she’ll wrap her little arms around Jean’s belly and say, “I love you, baby!”

At least that’s what I think she’s saying—she’s speaking Chinese.

‘Can You Blog About That? Like, What the Heck?!?’

Here’s a quickie: After just two days of public school, we’re discovering that all kinds of school activities are scheduled at ridiculous times, like the New Parent Orientation on Monday from 9 am to 10 am in the cafeteria. How can anyone with a job possibly expect to attend that kind of thing? I mean, we’re lucky (uh, I guess) that I have no job, but still, Jean wants me to say, this is stupid, and a problem across the country (not that we’re really surprised by any of it).

“Can you blog about that?” she asks. “Like, what the heck?!?”

Can I blog about that? Yes, I can! It’s not like I have a job or anything to distract me from blogging. And yet I skipped it anyway! Take that, system!

Welcome to Pre-K: I Am Your Disease Vector

A little over a week ago, I was taking Sasha home from day care when we stopped to play in our local playground. After a few minutes of climbing around, however, she started complaining that she was cold, and that her head hurt. Since it was 80 degrees out, I figured something was wrong, and sure enough, she had a fever. I gave her some ibuprofen, and in a day or so her fever broke and she got better.

Two days ago, while shopping with Sasha and Jean, I suddenly began to feel achy all over—from the back of my neck to the soles of my feet. Yup, I had the same thing, and after a sweaty, shivery night last night, I’m finally getting better.

These things happen, of course, but it’s our luck that they’re happening right before the beginning of the new school year. Tomorrow Sasha has her very first day of city Pre-K—yay, universal Pre-K!—and she’ll both be exposing kids to her germs and getting exposed herself. I expect her to come down with something new and annoying early next week. Yay, universal Pre-K.

But what’s even more awesome is that yesterday Sasha had two friends over to play—friends who this very week are starting to go to new preschools (two of the best-known in Brooklyn, as it happens) and who, in all likelihood, will come down with the fever I just got over and spread it around to their new classmates.

Do I feel guilty about this? Maybe a little. I mean, it’s not like it’s whooping cough or the measles. And Sasha, who gave me this bug, surely got it from some other kid at her old school, so maybe it’s that kid’s parents who should feel guilty. All I’m saying is, if you’re looking for Patient Zero, she’s wearing a pink dress and pretending to fly around on a broomstick behind me as I type this.