St. Louis, circa 1993

Like Theodore, I have a dirty secret that involves having family in non-cool places. He apparently has to go to some swamp to see his mother. To see my grandfather, I trek to a small town outside of St. Louis to a convalescent home not far from what used to be known as Six Flags over Mid-America.

There’s much to be said about visiting my grandfather, traveling alone with the two kids, and about what kind of asshole I must be that this is the first time I’ve ever taken them to meet him, even though we went, for example, to freaking Hong Kong with Dalia.

But I will save those Maoist self-criticisms for later.

What I will say, briefly, is that it’s very pleasant here. There are more little birds than I thought possible, and unlike the birds in New York, these ones sing more than they shit. Also, there are decks here, and they often overlook trees. In the distance on Friday night, sitting on the deck and eating blueberries, we could hear the cheers as the Eureka Wildcats pounded the snot out of the Lafayette Lancers in high school football.

The weather has also been merciful. My last August visit to this place was a nightmarish mix of 100 degree weather, 100% humidity, and 100% likelihood that some tick was about to crawl out of the woods and feast on your scrotum.

Tomorrow we are going to ride a tiny steam train and then we will eat Super Smokers, perhaps the best barbecue I have ever eaten.

I am feeling something here, not quite love, but a twinge of acceptance. Yes: I accept the Midwest. It is good to be here.

the male child in its environment

I took JP for a play date yesterday at the house of a friend who has three young boys. “Play” consisted largely of wrestling, and I don’t mean the cute, squirming, but ultimately not very violent kind of wrestling. This was the real deal, folks, with tactics that included but were by no means limited to: punching, kicking, choking, scratching, spitting, licking, noogieing, eye-gouging, and yes, a bit of hugging (whenever I told them to knock it off). They weren’t fighting per se, although when I asked them just what did they think we were doing hammering away at each other like that, JP answered, “We’re fighting!” with a huge grin on his face.

None of this is a big deal, really. The kids weren’t being too violent, no blood was drawn, and it wasn’t like the dads were pitting them against each other. This was how they wanted to play (until we made s’mores and turned on Star Wars, at which peace descended from above). They were, and I hate to say it because it sounds so awful, just being boys.

Which makes the fact that my upcoming child is a girl that much sweeter. I have no preference in terms of gender: wasn’t dying for a boy the first time around, wasn’t hoping not to have one this time. But when I look at the female children in the playground, do you know what I see: quieter, better behaved, more articulate, cleaner little people. In short: human beings. Humans!

Meanwhile, the boys remain beasts.

It’s been a while since I’ve checked in with Big Preg at Accidents Will Happen, a momblog I dig (as does Christopher). We both have totally profound reasons for this, like: her baby was born the same day as Christopher’s; and her baby calls grandpa PopPop, which is exactly what my babies do. Also, Big Preg is in the middle of writing a dissertation that “cripples [her] with anxiety and depression”, and her pain is actually quite uplifting to me, because it seems to validate at least one of my many suspect life choices.

My reading recommendation for today is Big Preg’s chronology of a typical day with her kid. It’s quite long and very detailed but very funny and a sort of wonderful way of committing to memory the insanity of raising small children. Pictures and videos are just vignettes, and pretty biased ones at that: my wife and I have somehow made a visual record of the last four years in which our children only ever smile or have adorable milk moustaches. We have totally cropped out the rivers of tears and a mountains of excrement that we were—and still are—trudging through.

One of the ancillary benefits—OK, the only benefit—of writing a DadBlog, I thought, would be that if nothing else it would capture some of the awe and misery of each stage of parenting for our own personal recollection later on. It’s important because even if your children don’t fundamentally change—they are who they are at 18 months or 18 years—the routine changes completely. What Big Preg is going through with her kid now will be radically different in six months. All the more reason to record it in detail.

Big Preg wrote up her list because Ramble Ramble did one and sent out the call for others to do so. So I’ll also urge you: read Big Preg’s list and then go write your own.

If you blog it, send us a link. If you just write it a journal… what is this? 1988? Are you still in middle school? Grow the fuck up. It’s the Internet age. Put it online, and don’t whine about privacy. The government is GPS-tracking you anyway.

OK, at the risk of being a spoiler, I’ll leave you with Big Preg’s final entry:

10:00 p.m./12:00 a.m.-4:30 a.m.: Sleep like the dead. Wake up to the dulcet tones of a small voice mumbling “Poopoo, Mark, airplane.” Start over.

As the end of August approaches, and with it the beginning of a new school year and the promise of increased workplace efficiency, many of us cling tenaciously to the idleness of summer and the hell-with-it-all attitude of vacation.

Which is just a lofty way of saying it was a slow week on DadWagon.

Christopher was apparently spending a lot of time watching cable, Hulu and YouTube, as he broke down Betty Draper’s awful parenting style, compared biting preschoolers to HBO vampires, and took the British-cat-trash-lady video as the impetus for discussing animal abuse vs. child abuse.

Nathan, too, caught the viral video bug, musing on the “talents” of poetry-reciting toddlers, but his mind was, perhaps naturally, more focused on the upcoming adenoidal surgery for his son.

Health issues were big in Matt’s week, too. One day his daughter was sick, another she was addicted to Elmo, and in the end Matt ripped her arm out of its socket on the subway. Or something like that.

Only Theodore was truly on vacation, which gave him the opportunity to miss his son and then to miss his son some more. We all hope his time off ends soon so he can get reunited with JP. Also, because we’re all jealous of his vacation time.