DADWAGON

One of the potential upsides and drawbacks of my new career as an impending homeless person is that I am now available/able/required to spend more time with my little baby, Ellie. Tomoko still has another month or so of maternity leave, but she is, sad to say, entitled to perhaps just a moment or two of alone time now that I don’t have to be to work each day.

In this light, Tomoko is stealing a few hours in the middle of the day today to venture out into the world. Her goal, laudable if painful for me personally, is try to remember what it was like when she was an actual human and not a milking machine.

Which means it’s just me and Ellie. Alone. In the house. With nothing to do. I keep reminding myself that such moments are among the joys of parenting, the true precious moments, an opportunity to bond, to love, to share…blech.

Let’s get this out in the open: little babies aren’t all that much fun. What do they do? How can they entertain me? Can they discuss the finer things in life (without drooling?) Can they fix me snacks? Can they crack a joke, crack open a beer, crack wise, uh, walk the dog?

Some of them, in fact, most of them, seem to want it the other way around. They want me to do things for them. Feeding, if they get hungry, which they often do; changing of dirty undergarments (which you think they’d look after themselves); entertaining–what’s with the shaking of rattles thing? I’d rather just watch SportsCenter and scratch myself; and then, if I’m lucky, really, really, lucky–they get to go to sleep.

Who comes out ahead in this deal? Not this guy.

Which is why I’ve already reached out to a couple of homebound friends to see if I can lure them to my place to entertain me. I’ve done this, mind you, under totally false premises (“It’s been a while. Let’s catch up. How are you?”)

I’m sure they won’t mind if they discover my ulterior motives (one of them is Matt; think he reads this blog?). Hell, both of them have children that they are stuck with on a miserable, frozen, snowy, nasty, slushy day.

A thought occurs to me, if they say yes, and come by, is it only to have me entertain them?

An economy of needs–nice.

As loyal DadWagon readers know, my wife and I produced children for the basest and most superficial of reasons: so we’d have someone to fetch us beers, to clean the house, to not put us in a home one day far in the future.

Well, maybe it’s because Sasha’s only 2 years old, but we’d completely overlooked a perfectly great reason to have children—so there’s always someone around whose mind you can fuck with. But now that David Ng, one of BoingBoing’s guest-bloggers, has posted about his mind-fuckery, our own eyes are open. Ng’s brilliant idea came at a Star Wars-themed birthday party:

[W]e thought that it would be way more fun if we could convince the kids that if they used the “force” they could get the stereo to stop the music (and therefore entitling them to the act of unwrapping). This, of course, is easy to do since pretty much every stereo these days comes with a remote. Note that, obviously, the Star Wars theme was the music being played during the game.

I tell you: it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen – here you have a group of 5 year olds “concentrating” so hard, and doing the classic Jedi hand gesture at the stereo trying to make the music stop. For a Star Wars fan like myself, it was a brilliant sight to see. And just so that everyone had a chance to do it, we would also consistently get them to use the “force” all together to start the music up again (“On the count of 3: one… two… three!!).

Oh god, it’s all I can do to sit on my hands the next three years until Sasha can even vaguely begin to understand Star Wars well enough that I can trick her like this. Three years! Fuck. Well, until then I can content myself with this Volkswagen ad, also posted by Ng:

Sure, it took a couple of years, but the video companion to my somewhat autobiographical Time article from Havana finally went up at time.com. I’m posting it here because I’m a notorious self-pimper, and because I love the guys I used to play music with there. Geopolitics is a bitch, and it has kept us out of contact for many years, so much so that I got a little misty when video editor Natasha del Toro first showed me a cut of this video. She did an amazing job piecing together several hours worth of b-roll that I shot on my old Panasonic camcorder.

The video is also a bit relevant for DadWagon because there is a great, if brief, child-dance scene from the Havana zoo at around the 1:00 mark (teaser: BomBom the Reggaeton clown pulls some small children from the stage and they know just what to shake).

For as much as I love the islands, and as much as I try to get my children to spend time in Key West, where I’m from, we are just not Carribbean. My bloodline runs through the shtetl and the North German heide (a word that conveniently means ‘a heath or moor’ and “gentile”). As I relayed in my article from Havana, one friend’s assessment of my dancing was simply: you have Carribbean feet, but I have no idea what your butt is doing. My wife is Hispanic, but that’s through Mexico, which isn’t the home of timba either: she used to dance Ballet Folklorico, but that’s way more prim and formal than what the Cubans do these days.

So my children will never dance like the boys in this video (or the older girl, who is the daughter of a friend of mine who is an actual professional dancer). It’s not just genetic (though it’s certainly that). It’s that we fill their time with enriching activities that don’t involve the hips. We spend way too much energy trying to get them to quiet their bodies and minds.

And that’s alright. Because I am pretty sure they wouldn’t know what to do if BomBom the Reggaeton clown had pulled them up to that stage in Havana, but they would’ve had fun anyway.

I’m not about to file a post staking out a position on the “natural” personality traits of boys and girls—that’s bad juju. I will say, based on anecdotal evidence alone, that boys do seem to have a penchant for trains and smashing things, and girls miraculously gravitate toward, well, other things. I’m only now really being introduced to the world of young girl-dom, and my “unassailable evidence” about how they think and behave is rather shallow.

I do, however, have plenty of half-baked theories! One of them relies on a fairly simplistic dichotomy of biological destiny: girls, up to say, 9, are humans, only in miniature; boys, meanwhile, up to around 25, are, in fact, wild animals, a drooling combination of ferret, sloth, wombat, and feral dog.

How this plays out with the young ones, in my highly scientific worldview, relates to sleep. JP, beast of the field, was so inordinately filled with the animalistic urges that he simply refused to take any rest. Crying, squirming, yelling, and fleeing from cribs at the soonest opportunity—making for the woods—was his thing. Ellie, meanwhile, a pint-size version of a female human, takes her slumber seriously. Last night, for example, she went to bed at about 6:45—a polite hour that allowed Tomoko and I to actually eat dinner together while talking—and didn’t wake up until 5:30 in the morning.

This meant that Tomoko and I got a full night’s sleep, which, as most parents know, is a rare and precious gem that colors that world a lovely rosy hue of really nice. JP, who spent the night at his mother’s, I imagine passed most of the evening trying to force a chicken bone through his septum. What do you think his mother’s mood is like this morning?

I bet it ain’t rosily hued anything.

Please direct all I’m-a-sexist comments to Nathan. He handles complaints.