Among the Thomasites

Criticize the photograph but consider that I drove two hours to Lancaster, parked in a cornfield, took the boys on a school bus that Oliver enjoyed more than Thomas himself, got stuck in ticket limbo because we'd missed our train, then couldn't get Oliver to uncover his eyes when Thomas appeared because he was so embarrassed, rode Thomas, fed Oliver hot dogs and fries and Alistair yogurt and pre-pumped breast milk on ice, took a school bus back to the car, had everybody and I mean everybody pee in the corn, then played eighteen holes of miniatures golf, all without anyone getting seriously injured.

W.A.S.T.E

Periods do not appear in "waste" on a box at the Philadelphia zoo, meaning it is probably not a mailbox for Thomas Pynchon's alternative postal service in The Crying Of Lot 49, but Oliver did say this about another sign at the zoo:

"F-I-R-E. That's the name of the company that makes fire."

Train Trouble

After failing at my old job to build the Purple Line, a train that would run through the Maryland suburbs north of Washington, I told Oliver that I was now trying at my new job to build more of Philadelphia's Blue Line. "Did you build your blue train today, dada?" No, the Congresswoman who was supposed to come to our Blue Line event canceled at the last minute.

Thinking smaller, I told the conductor of my Amtrak train to Harrisburg that water had been pouring through the ceiling onto the seat next to me. She shrugged. "That's what happens when it rains."

Our new goal is to go see the actual life-size Thomas the Tank Engine in Lancaster next weekend.

Oliver Clears Security

Oliver and I flew to Maine to visit my mother. He loved rolling his suitcase through the airport and watching his car seat being thrown into the belly of our plane and now wants to go on a flight every day.

At security, I was asked to show my ID and our boarding passes twice, take off my shoes, and forfeit a dangerous-looking bottle of grape juice. Confronted with Oliver, our TSA guard didn't seem to know what to do. "Do you have a picture of the boy?" I showed him a photo from two years ago when Oliver was two. "Does he have any ID?" He did not. "Hey," the guard said to him, "is your name Oliver?"

So Uncool

With a permanent mental age of 15, I worry about how uncool I must seem to the three teenage boys next door. Every time they see me, I'm unloading groceries, dragging garbage cans around, carrying one or more screaming children in my arms, pulling vines that are pulling our fence apart.

Oliver thinks I'm cool because I ride the train to work. But, at 4, he's already trying to enforce a no-singing rule on his parents, because it's so embarrassing.

Today Is Tuesday

"Today is Tuesday" read the hospital's doormat on the morning of Oliver's adenoidectomy. This was the last thing the hospital got right for a while--entering his medical history into the wrong patient's file, starting surgery two hours late so that Oliver was still conscious having missed breakfast and lunch, leaving me waiting for more than an hour after the operation while other parents were told their kids' surgeries had gone fine until I forced my way into the O.R. and learned that Oliver had gagged and begun choking under anaesthesia and that his doctor had been forced to paralyze the muscles in his neck, intubate him, and do his breathing for him for about ten minutes.

The doctor, an old man whose bedside manner consists of saying things like, "Ninety-nine bananas," while looking in kids' ears (much better is Oliver's allergist who asks Oliver's permission to look for butterflies in his ears), was still ashen and shaken when I finally spoke to him.

The surgery worked wonders and Oliver can now breathe and hear freely. His sense of humor has sharpened, too. "Does N-O spell yes?" he says.

What does "vorpal" mean, again?

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

What would it be like to try D&D today as a full-grown adult? [...] There is something to said for having to imagine what that Sword of Vorpal Wounding looks like, or how it would feel to face a White Dragon. My question for the Nerds among us is, Have any of you guys tried D&D as adult? Did you just put away the polyhedral dice and say forget it? Do you ever get the hankering to go rooting through the Caves of Chaos?

Make it stop

For the last four years, since the day the fashion-consultant dad asked the lawyer-who-wants-to-be-a-writer dad out to a diner, they have been making the rounds of TriBeCa’s better breakfast spots, a rotating lineup of seven or eight guys, whiling away the morning hours with hash browns and wide-ranging banter that somehow seldom strays far from the locker room.

“It’s like ‘Sex and the City’ with coffee instead of cosmos,” Mr. Katz said.

—NYT

Oliver Rolls A 101

I was a little apprehensive about taking Oliver bowling for the first time, but the technology has advanced to the point where a three-year-old can roll a 101. He was given a ramp for launching his ball. Our attendant stuck a hook into our gutters and raised guardrails that would keep all but the wildest shots in play. Bad shots actually do better as they zig-zag back and forth.

Unable to sit through an entire game of Candyland, and usually indifferent to the concepts of winning and losing, Oliver knocked over three pins with his first roll and promptly pressed the 3 button on the scorer's table, all without me explaining the rules.

Unlike the driving games of my youth, in which you'd crash, be thrown from your vehicle, and laboriously shift through your gears again, the driving game in the bowling alley also had guardrails so that it was impossible to drive off the road.

Double Negative

Oliver was saying no to bedtime and no to getting up and no to the first three or four choices for each meal. "He's saying no to everything," I explained so my mother visiting from Maine wouldn't feel bad about his rejections. Oliver heard this and said, "No, not no to everything." Since that day he has been much more of a yes man.

Ollievision

Oliver was on the news for a second last night, the only kid looking at the camera while every other kid in his class looked at the Labrador to whom the SPCA was teaching them to be kind.

My own debut was on a Portland, OR kids show which featured incredibly violent cartoons and a smile contest which I unbelievably won since I share Oliver's dread of being seen. Crooked teeth, less than perfect skin, and a kid-hating stepfather usually taking the picture or looming behind me are to blame for my failure to win any more smile contests.

All one's needs are instantly met!

Don't get me wrong—I like squirming, drooling, and sporadically attempting to focus on colors and shapes as much as the next guy. But of all the various activities one can choose to pursue in life, crying is tops as far as I'm concerned. In my opinion, I find nothing is more fulfilling than a good steady holler. It takes no experience to begin, and within moments, all one's needs are instantly met! It's my favorite part of the day.

Heck, I'm crying right now!

—Emmet Henson, 2-month-old, "I Can't Imagine Why Anybody Would Want to Stop Crying," The Onion

This morning's question while giving the bottle

"Whatever happened to Joan Armatrading?"

Megasized King Kong Castle Tarantula

This weekend we drove around looking for a playset for the backyard. Someone on Craig's List was giving their set to whomever could take it away. Oliver's first choice was the $42,999 Megasized King Kong Castle Tarantula from Rainbow. Extrapolating from our budget of $500, this set would make sense only if we had 172 children.

Multiple Multiples

Fans of Jon & Kate Plus 8, the TLC show about a family with twins and sextuplets, will have noticed that the couple seem to have driven a better bargain with the network this season and are now being flown around the country for ski and beach vacations. (This viewer began to cry when Jon, after serving eight breakfasts and eight lunches, actually hit the slopes and said it was the happiest moment of his life.)

Toys in the attic

"Parents throw away their children’s toys when the kids aren’t home – the toys that parents perceive as having been outgrown. They do it secretly because they know the kids might disagree. I’ve done it, they all do it, your parents did it to you." —Michael Atkinson

The $300 Popsicle

The last time Oliver was too sick to eat--with rotovirus, for which a vaccine has now been developed--we tried giving him ginger ale, clementines, ice cream, water with a dropper. Finally, we took him to the emergency room and he perked right up when given a purple popsicle, for which we later paid $300.

Now he can self-diagnose: I'm broken. My body hurts. It's hard to cough in the night.

The Dumbing Down of Dad

I'm getting better at the New York Times crossword puzzle, the ideal activity with a baby sleeping on your arm, worse at everything else. Since night-owl Alistair joined early-bird Oliver in our home, I have learned these valuable lessons.

Do not address your co-workers in the same voice you use to keep your toddler from touching the stove or shaking your infant.

Do not park in a way that assumes the driver of the adjacent car is not also a sleep-deprived zombie. I am still finding pieces of the hood for my side rear-view mirror in a garage during the day and gluing them back onto the car at night. (Gorilla Glue is much cheaper than a mechanic.)

Freeze your assets until your baby is sleeping through the night. I won't go into it here, but let's just say that much of my post-partum banking turned out to be illegal.

Literally

A number of years ago, in the fish line at a market on the Upper East Side, I overheard a customer giving detailed instructions to the man behind the counter, telling him in effect to just give her the fish-flesh, no bones or fat. He seemed unwilling to go this route, of course, and the manager soon came by to support him against the customer's unreasonable demands. The fish would be sold the way it was, without further trimming of fat. "That's the nature of the beast," said the manager.

On Tuesday we went to the pediatrician. The assistant weighed Duncan and laughed: "He's off the charts." Literally. The chart only showed weights up to the 95th percentile for every age. Later the doctor called up a more in-depth chart that showed Little D (or, um, big D) at the 98th percentile. Then his computer crashed.

Late Night

I lost the coin toss and am staying up with Alistair. Men are so well equipped for putting babies to sleep. Bony chest, deep, scary voice, plastic nipple, forumla.

Alistair heard his name while sleeping earlier today and smiled for an instant with just half his face, one of the cutest things I have ever seen.

I am meeting more and more Oliver's--you know your son's name is trendy when David Brooks says it is--but we are in even worse shape than I thought. Alistar a girl lives around the corner. My wife met a woman whose baby girl was born a week before our guy and said that her boy name was also Alistair.

Mr. Hendrix's Neighborhood

Little Einsteins is a good show to put on if you've got a toddler and an infant, the toddler clapping along to give the Einsteins' rocket power, the infant listening to the classical music while facing away from the screen.

I watched so much TV as a kid that I began studying cartoons and educational programming for hidden messages, or stories in which the good guy/girl did not win every time. Here is what I found.

The bottom circle in the traffic light in Mr. Rogers's house was definitely blue, not green, and I discovered Jimi Hendrix at a very early age because he sang, "The traffic lights they turn blue tomorrow."

The Really Rottens, the evil team in the Laugh Olympics, actually came in first one week. I am not imagining this.

And lately, I've noticed that old episodes of Sesame Street are labeled "May Not Be Appropriate For Children."

Raisin Cain?

A three-year-old loves getting a pack of raisins for Christmas...but that window is quite brief!

Sense and Seussibility

The writer Ben Marcus told me once that the only books he could really follow as a child were Seuss because they did not make sense. Like zinks in your sink? Zlocks in your clocks and wosets in your closets? Then you will love Marcus's first novel The Age Of Wire And String, in which food is worn, weather rages underground, and "The Ben Marcus" is defined as a "false map scroll, caul or parchment."

Lord Vader in Philadelphia

Lord Vader and about thirty stormtroopers showed up for the opening of the Franklin Institute's Star Wars exhibit this weekend, brandishing pistols and sniper rifles in downtown Philadelphia. Interestingly, Princess Padme and the few rebel pilots in attendance weren't armed, as if only those people who side with the Empire like brandishing fake guns in front of my children.

On a related note, does the Institute really need to denigrate the incredibly successful Mars Rover by pretending to sell it like a used car, claiming it was used for "only" 93 days?

Super Tuesday In Dadistan

Are babies Republicans? Let's examine some of their positions: against choice and birth control, and yet they also favor the Family Medical Leave Act, incentives for telecommuting, and the right to breast-feed in public, so maybe they are really anti-choice Democrats.

Two years ago, I ran for office in Maryland and missed Oliver's bedtime for about ninety nights in a row. Trying to come home during the day, I was not forgiven, O. closing the door on me and saying, "No Dada." He continues to be suspicious of politics and blogs, threatening to take our computers away in the same way that we sometimes threaten him with the loss of his cars.

Live in a Super Tuesday state? Tell us who you're voting for and why.

For the future

Duncan: If I become president...and then you become president...please read this book before taking office.

In the course of this volume Mr. Weisberg argues that George W. Bush’s Oedipal relationship with his father and sibling rivalry with his brother Jeb (who, for many years, was regarded as the family’s rising political star) fueled his transformation from hard-drinking black sheep in the family to dynastic heir. George W. Bush, he writes, had a contradictory attitude toward his father: a “drive to correct Poppy’s mistakes” and a “demand for his admiration.” —Michiko Kakutani, on Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy, NYT

Kids Are People, Too

"I left London one Saturday afternoon in the autumn to make some arrangement about a son going to school."

So begins the last chapter of Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish A Room, the tenth volume of his hypnotic, twelve-volume A Dance To The Music of Time, which I read every night during the twenty minutes when a son's nursing coincides with another son's bath.

Elsewhere Powell refers to his children as "it" or, mostly, not at all. Strange to be a father when so many of my literary role models have no kids, or had kids before kids were considered to be people, too. At the other extreme from Powell, Amy Fusselman writes well about parenting destroying her writing.

Pillow talk

I.
I took a walk with my father and sister tonight. He was telling us about a book he was reading about Confucius, a distant relation of mine. Tangentially, he mentioned that Lao-tze, according to legend, spent 80 years in his mother's womb and emerged a white-haired geezer!

II.
Not long afterward, back at home, I talked to S. about Duncan's sleep habits. Lately he's only content to snooze while in a semi-sitting position, within the compass of a boppy pillow. I joked that pretty soon he'd need to sleep in the circular "body pillow"—ehhh, too hard to explain, but basically it's this huge elongated pillow that you can turn into a circular seating thingy. (S. used it during her pregnancy, and we don't know what to do with it now.)

III.
Annnyway, this amusing dialogue made S. flash back to Jonathan Winters' character on Mork & Mindy—he played Mearth, Mork's child, who was much older-looking, since Morkans age backward.

Which made me bring up the Lao-tze anecdote my father had told me...

IV.
I turned on the radio. Odd sounds issued forth: David Garland's Spinning on Air. DG talks to the Chinese musician...who says her composition is based on a saying by...Lao-tze!

Hymns to the Duncan, Part II

I almost forgot: "And the Feeding Has Begun"

Ollister

Maybe this chart will help me keep my children straight. My wife and I are so sleep-deprived that we've been calling both our sons Ollister. Oliver is three while Alistair was born last month.

Oliver: naps when it's raining or after being asked to spell more than about ten words.

Alistair: naps if you walk around with him in your arms, or turn on the sink.

Oliver: smiles mostly when awake.

Alistair: smiles right after nursing, and a lot when he's asleep.

Oliver: loves Cosmic Collisions, a film at the Franklin Institute, viewable after putting on bulky coats, driving downtown and finding a parking space, and walking through the Human Heart and Space Command, where we first build rover cars.

Alistair: likes it when I spin the blue lampshade by the bed.

Hymns to the Duncan

I have found myself singing to Duncan a lot—sometimes this soothes him, other times he's indifferent, and occasionally it seems to provoke crying.

I suspected I would be singing him a lot of Beatles songs, with their appealing melodies, but for some reason Van Morrison has been on the Dadistan jukebox. The songs are:

"Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile)"
"Beautiful Duncan" (after "Beautiful Vision")
"Sweet Thing"
End of "Cyprus Avenue" ("Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby...")

Will Ferrell double-feature

The TV in the delivery room had a movie channel, so during the long wait we/I watched (ratings are based on how engaged I was):

About half of 13 Going on 30 ***
National Treasure ****
The Bourne Supremacy (I drifted...) *1/2[?]
The Break-Up **1/2
Blades of Glory ****
Elf *

I read:
Nearly all of The New Yorker with the Jonathan Lethem story "The King of Sentences"; it also had the Malcolm Gladwell piece on IQ tests. ****
Nearly all of the Harper's with the Ben Marcus story ****
Some of P.G. Wodehouse's Lord Emsworth and Others ****

Conclusion: Literature is better than movies?

Baby Early, Daddy Late

Never go to Harrisburg two days before your wife is due to give birth. I had walked onto the set of the Harrisburg TV show where I would be talking about dangerous toys (like AquaDots, beads coated with a sticky substance that, when licked, turns into the date-rape drug rohypnol), when I got the Call. It was snowing outside and the only sure way to get back to Philadelphia in time was to take a taxi all the way. My driver fish-tailed before we'd left the TV station parking lot, so I decided to take the train and risk arriving late but safe.

Almost being late: my feeble contribution to Alistair's arrival, which happened forty minutes after we got to the hospital.