About Christopher

Christopher Bonanos is a senior editor at New York magazine, where he works on arts and urban-affairs coverage (and a few other things). He and his wife live smack in the middle of midtown Manhattan, where their son was born in March 2009. Both parents are very happy, and very tired.

Baby New Year Arrives, Bearing Change

DadWagon is a year old today, and you’ll see much more about that in the posts above and below. But first, a note about the news that Team Dadwagon announced here a couple of hours ago.

The millions of you who visit DadWagon regularly may have noticed that I’ve been posting less frequently of late. My day job has grown more demanding in the past few months, and I’m also writing a heavily researched book nights and weekends. (Self-promotion sidebar: It’s a cultural history of Polaroid, out from Princeton Architectural Press in 2012.) Plus there’s that whole raising-a-kid thing. A ten-month-old is exhausting in many ways, but there were long stretches when he was breastfeeding or otherwise motionless, and they lend themselves to blog-post-writing. A twenty-month-old, most of you know, is all energy all the time. High-speed baby plus paying job plus book plus blog: It’s a whole lot to handle, and something has had to give. The first three are non-negotiable; the fourth has, unfortunately, become so.

What this means is that, with serious regrets, I am going to be stepping off the DadWagon indefinitely. It has been an amazing and educational year for me. Learning to blog has been fascinating. I was used to writing fairly deliberately, and without a thought to the basic currency of online publishing (creating linkbait, sure, but even simpler things, like how to write a Web headline, took adjustment).  This built an entirely different set of skills, ones that I suspect have already come in handy as my day job begins to incorporate bloggy work. And, more important, watching my three colleagues here has been illuminating. I have worked for my employer for a very long time–when I began there, I did not have a computer on my desk–and have come to see journalism very specifically through The Way We Do Things There. It has been a huge pleasure watching Nathan, Theodore, and Matt come at stories and ideas differently, and collaborating with them has done wonders for me.

I should also add that I’ve really liked the DadWagon audience. One might instinctively guess, based on a lot of other parenting stuff on the Web, that we too might draw a sleepy crowd–one that read us but didn’t really engage with our ideas. One would be extremely wrong about that, and both our comment threads and readers’ off-site discussion have made that clear. Your reader comments are often noticeably better than a lot of full-time bloggers’ posts.

And what have I learned? Lots of things, not least that I am apparently the only white guy in New York whose spouse/babymama is not Asian (judging strictly by the DadWagon staff, anyway). Among the highlights: Designer disposable diapers are an actual thing that now exists. I alone among the DW crowd think that nothing says “I love you” like document security.  When you write about Japanese meme boy, your blog blows up in Japan. And, of course, getting drunk with your kid gets you all sorts of attention.

Matt, Nathan, and Theodore will fill you in about their plans for the open chair soon enough. I also hope not to disappear entirely: I plan to become a regular reader (and commenter) myself, and if the other guys will have me, it’s just possible that I’ll drop in as a guest when one of the regulars goes on vacation. Thanks to all.

Our Red (Furry) Diaper Baby

Friday was a sick day for our little guy–a steady fever, and general crankiness. (Much better now, thanks.) He’s now at the point where he grabs onto new words and phrases daily–pointing out an airplane and saying “airplane,” recognizing a number on an elevator button as it’s pressed. My wife keeps his favorite songs, including one by Kimmy Schwimmy called “I Like You,” loaded up on iTunes, and he now calls her laptop the I-like-you.

On Friday, however, he walked up to that machine, and he wasn’t looking for music. “Elmo?” he said, pointing. “Elmo?”

Well, wow. I have explained this before: Our child does not watch television. In his entire life, he’s experienced TV for maybe ten minutes. (Plus some YouTube clips of New York City buses, because buses are his very favorite things, and videos posted by amateur transit buffs are pretty innocuous stuff.) We are not viciously anti-TV; we just want to push it off as long as possible. He’ll get there soon enough.

So, a mystery: Where on earth did he pick this up? Day care? Other kids’ T-shirts? The generally pervasive Elmo-ness of toddler culture, where that red furry face appears on everything from diapers to card games? Unless my parents are sneaking him doses of Sesame Street when they baby-sit, I’m stumped.

Or maybe it was this guy.

The Tantrum: Is Gifted & Talented Evil & Shameful?

classroomShort answer: No, but it’s unlikely to be worth the trouble.

In my childhood, these programs were called TAG, not G&T. (I read the latter abbreviation as “gin & tonic,” which is a lovely summer diversion for parents, less so for 8-year-olds.) Gifted programs were new to the school district, and ours called for a little knot of seven or eight of us to be pulled out of class once a week, for a couple of hours’ Time to Do Creative Things. My memory of those classes is significantly faint. I think there were word puzzles and other brain-teasers. I do remember the first teacher I worked with, a guy named Bob Ginsberg, who was funny and clever and made me feel smarter principally because he talked to us like adults. Ran into him regularly through my high-school years, and I think of him surprisingly often, and fondly.

But I also remember the following year, when Dr. Ginsberg got kicked upstairs to administer something or other, and a new teacher was given the gig. She was an elementary-school lifer, and what I remember was that (a) her classes were fairly uninteresting, and (b) we were a little bored by them, and (c) she became snappish at us because we weren’t Being Creative. And a couple of years later, I recall hearing that she’d stopped running the TAG program, and had even become a little bit embittered by the whole thing–like it had been her shot at a dream gig, and she hadn’t been up to it. In fact, a few years after that, she dropped dead.

Well. Reading this, I suppose I’m painting a more negative picture of the whole experience than it actually was. I mean, I got to step out of class for a few hours and do puzzles. That’s hard to call a bad thing. But I do wonder, given the limitations of the experience I had, whether it’s realistic to expect anything out of such a program. If it’s so dependent on teaching skill, and teachers who can deliver are so thin on the ground that even in a well-funded suburban school system we went one for two… would my son be better off spending more time on the standard everyday curriculum? Would the better G&T program be just an hour on Saturday morning with his dad, sharing the Times crossword? Could be. And neither of us will end up embittered and prematurely dead. I hope.

Well, I Tried It

Well, it took me a few months, but I had the opportunity to try on DadWagon’s favorite small-bore transgression this month. My little family trekked out to Brooklyn to visit friends, and what did we do? We all took our kids (these friends have a three-year-old) to the local gastropub. Yes, friends: I dipped a toe into the babies-in-bars argument that we here at Dadwagon refuse to let die.

It was nice. The pub (Double Windsor, just past the edge of Park Slope into Windsor Terrace) has a raft of beer choices, and a modest menu of really excellent food. It was lunchtime, and the rest of the clientele was child-free until just before we left, but it was uncrowded and quiet, and both kids spent most of the time preoccupied with toy cars and crayons and grilled cheese. Nobody in the bar threw us ugly glances; nobody seemed the slightest bit perturbed that we were there. I had one drink; my friends each ordered a flight of beers.

We left stuffed and not drunk, and the entire experience was what you call civilized living. Nobody sane would say our kids were at risk for a future of alcohol abuse, and I can confidently say that they ruined any grownups’ bar experience that afternoon. Particularly because we wrapped it up by 2:30. An entirely defensible position.

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