Things I don’t Want to Know So I Share

They don’t call it a blog for nothing, right? Here’s a video from our good friends at Dadlabs, with everything damn you need to know about babies and constipation. Why? Because you should be informed about shit, folks! Having a kid doesn’t make you enough of an expert–you need to know what everyone else knows about poop.

Enjoy.

Preschool of America Sadly Emblematic of America

When I went to pick Sasha up from daycare yesterday, a woman outside the building shoved a flyer in my hand. Tune into WBAI, it instructed, “to hear the real story of what is happening at Preschools of America from the teachers who have been fired for merely expressing their rights.”

The second page went on to explain that teachers at POA, which has dozens of locations throughout the city, had voted on August 2 to form a union. In response (allegedly), five of them were fired. Which (if this is accurate) is illegal. (This politicalaffairs.net story has more details.)

Which is frustrating. As a good little New York City liberal, I’m pro-union (despite the unions’ partial culpability for our current financial mess, a result of their inability/refusal to adapt to changing economic circumstances), not to mention pro-following-the-law, so I feel like I should do something. Fire off an angry e-mail! Text them into submission!

But because I live here, I also have no faith in my power to change anything. It’s like fighting a landlord, and on someone else’s behalf, too: Even if you win, years will have gone by, people moved on, and the next guy in power’s going to do exactly the same thing anyway. Add to that the fact that the fired teachers weren’t at our branch, and so seem almost fictional, like the people you read about in the New York Post.

Plus, there’s paranoia. If I come out publicly on behalf of the fired teachers, will the school’s management deny Sasha a place there? Or, conversely, if I threaten to pull Sasha out if POA doesn’t reinstate the teachers, and POA doesn’t, what do I do? How many bilingual Chinese-English preschools do you know of that operate out of brand-new buildings near the F train?

All of which is just a way of rationalizing my laziness. If someone hands me a petition, I may sign it. I might even work up to an e-mail. But most likely I’ll simply blog about it and save my energy for wrangling the toddler onto and off of the subway.

Jeepers, Creepers, Where’d You Get Those Peepers? (a.k.a. Si ves algo, di algo.)

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman! No, wait—actually, it is a plane.

jet

Spot the airplane.

This, pretty much, is a typical excursion out of doors with Sasha these days. No matter where she is or what she’s doing, she’ll suddenly tilt her head heavenward, point, and say, “Airplane!” And usually, Jean or I will have to squint and follow her finger because the little speck of a jet is so distant that we can barely see it. But Sasha can, or she can hear the roar of its engines and locate it in an instant. It’s amazing.

In fact, the kid is always spotting planes, bird, bugs, squirrels, cats, dogs, and, whether he’s sprawled huge on a distant subway poster or shrunk to a microdot on a discard diaper, Elmo. And so we’re always asking ourselves: Is this kind of seemingly spectacular eyesight normal?

The Internet is, unaccountably, lacking when it comes to information on toddler eyesight. Googling “toddler eyesight” brings up results related to poor vision, not good vision, and asking the Tubes “Do toddlers see better than adults?” leads to wacko stuff about children and ghosts.

Because I don’t want to imagine my kid is Supergirl—and because I don’t want to be dismayed when she eventually gets prescription lenses like her parents—I tend not to believe she has bionic eyes. Rather, I have a theory: When you’re faced with thousands of objects and events you don’t understand, your eyes naturally pick out the two dozen things they do recognize, like airplanes and Elmo. It’s like when I try to read Chinese—95 percent of the characters are gibberish, but the few I know, I can spot right away.

Still, we’re enrolling her in archery and riflery classes as soon as she’s eligible.

On Wanting It to Be Worse

A bit of news came home from school last week: “The kids were exposed to a coxsackie virus.” What that is (I learned) is almost anything, from a mild flulike bug to something that causes nasty sores. Whatever: He seemed fine, didn’t show any symptoms, and (once we confirmed that last week’s biter was not the infectious kid) we half-forgot about it.

Then the vomiting began.

A couple of little spitups, and then, when my wife was comforting him in a big hug, a whopper. She was absolutely covered, shoulders to knees. I dived into the linen closet for towels, and we attempted to scrub down the poor little thing (the vomiter, not the vomitee). Eventually my wife went off to the shower, we attempted to hose off our kid in the tub, we checked with our pediatrician, and we put him to bed on a very thick blanket, in hopes that it would catch any last expulsions. It was dramatic, I’ll tell you that. It was also, mercifully for him, over within a few hours. He managed to sleep a more or less full night, and next morning, he was fine, and even ate a normal-ish breakfast. No symptoms since then.

But it was not, as I was going around saying, “projectile vomiting.” That is something that (apparently) requires more than yakking a couple of gallons of stuff all over your mother with a certain amount of force. No, “projectile” means just that–as one Website put it, “it will arc over the end of the crib.” As impressive as this was, it wasn’t that.

I did come out of this, however, noticing that I like deploying terminology like “projectile vomiting.” It gives an incident heft, importance. If it’s projectile, it is Schwarzeneggerian in its violence and faintly military direction. If it’s just throwing up, it’s just stinky and annoying and generally troubling. No fun at all. Not even eighteen months old, and we’ve already got him on a performance track–and he is, or we are, already falling short. Sigh.