Trying

And here I was feeling guilty for not blogging... C. Moore, where are thou?

Once a week, my mother-in-law takes Carly for the night, and we get to sleep until 7:30 a.m. I love Carly 350 percent, but this is an awfully good way to spend one night a week. I have never spent so much time fantasizing about sleeping.

So what shall I urge on my children by way of bucket lists? I am thinking now of climbing the pyramids at Giza, and realizing now is the time we counsel against recklessness. Still...

Things for kids to try

Once in their lives, at least, I think every child should sleep through the night. I dream of this -- until I am interrupted.

Teething teething teething. And regression to the mean by the elder child. When will this end?

great expectations

ok, it feels silly to try to blog right now, 3 weeks into this life. It feels silly in no small part because I'm typing one handed while Carter sleeps across my lap, his relatively full shock of curly-hair cradled in my other hand.  

So I'll just try to entice my erstwhile co-blogger into a simple list that promises to be the kind of reflective and debatable material ideal for a blog, its easy to keep up with, just a sentence every 2 days, stating something, anything, we think our kid(s) should experience.  This list of things to experience can be classically profound (a la great books) or simple (a la Mode).  

So, as a start: I recommend reading Rumi. especially the shorter poems.

tiny footprints

One thought I have, anticipating the arrival of my son, are the footprints we will leave together.

And how, when we look back on our journey, and there is only soft prints in the sand, we will know it's because we left a much lighter footprint.

And what, my friends, do you think I mean, by lighter? I in fact mean our environmental footprints.

Against many odds, we are considering cloth diapering for our kid. The logic is simple.

It's a lot cheaper.

$5000/year less is the number thrown around, which fits with my simple calculations. There are apparently also health benefits, less diaper rash and easier (earlier) conversion away from diaper use. Also, they make stunning dust rags later, and can be used on kid numero 2 if that happens.

But, being a post-sensitive male, one who is attempting to transcend my youth at a small liberal arts college, it is the green arguments that stir the emotions. Apparently a study by the UK gov't found that cloth and disposable diapers have equivalent carbon footprints more or less. Meaning that one is left with a choice between the evils of landfill (disposable) and the evils of water use (cloth).

Disposable diapers generate ton(s) of waste per child.

OK, so lets put water use in perspective. We will probably do ~30 loads per month, one per day (we'll probably do less, but for argument sake). That means 24 gallons times 30 or ~720 gallons per month of extra water. This number is known as the 'water footprint.'

Did you know that each hamburger requires 630 gallons of water footprint, and each cup of coffee is 37 gallons? Put another way, the hamburger is ~a month of wash loads.

So, I here pledge to offset my new water use by eating 1 less burger every month (no comment on how coffee intake will vary). This fact will allow me to return to Oberlin for my next reunion (2011) with a feeling of lightness.

Of course, that light-headed feeling could be due to the dehydration. Or the dizzying logic of all these abstract choices one faces when trying to get ready to raise a kid.

The girl with the arm

OMG. Can I just tell you that my daughter can throw overhand, with equal accuracy using either arm from 8 to 10 feet? That she can catch anything you throw her way? That she can dribble a soccer ball or kick it past me? That she's only 2 years old?

I avoid the bragging ordinarily, but this time I just have to bust out with it. It's not even really bragging really. Maybe you could call it concern. Is this normal or freakish?

Two weeks ago I told her to cup her hands together and I tried to toss the ball so it would land there. I worked on getting her eyes off her palms and onto the ball. With little practice between then and now, she just mastered it. This is the truly fabulous part of parenthood. Zero to the speed of light in no time.

I guess it's the long-awaited reward for profound sleeplessness. The absolute limit of fatigue is setting in at the Suo house, and there are times when yes, you do wonder why the #$%!$ you signed on for this mission. Then little C comes back with something truly amazing or hilarious: like tonight when she started looking askance at us. Yes, looking askance -- eyes down and to the right, conspiratorially, followed by a big giggle.

And the baby is coming along just fine right behind her. Giggling and cooing when she's stared at. Sleeping the rest of the time.

This stuff is hard to beat.

I'll be doggone

OK.  I realize that the average dog might be subject to the 'move ovah for the strollah' mentality of the average new Boston parent.

But, in this case, at least the dog is not average.  

Sababa, at my feet as I write this, is the sweetest mutt on the planet.  She will leave a steak on the floor if I tell her not to touch it.  She has let me clean her (unfortunate recent) surgical wound with complete trust and without complaint.  She is manipulatively cute and does not exploit it (much).  She is not, my friend, one of the things I will give up when our son is born.

It's just everything else, right?

Knowing nothing about this upcoming life other than that it will take all of our effort all of the time, I am curious about just what this means, this loss of privacy and primacy. Sabie did teach me early on that I am not angered when a helpless being needs me in the middle of the night to clean up its...product...all over the kitchen floor. While I hope I do not need to apply other lessons I learned from her case of tapeworms to my son, I definitely learned something small (and surprising) about myself then. 

But it's a really weird thing not to know how I will respond to the rest of it.  I've always held that parents need to be above the fray, above the level of kids, but I know that I'm easily frustrated when people around me aren't logical (where logical is defined as my opinion wrapped in a thin veneer of clever rhetoric).  I'm also pretty selfish about my free time:  I guess if there's nothing to be selfish about there's nothing to fear, but who knows just how I'll react to the demands. 

And, when I talk to something, I want it to talk back, not just gurgle.  

So I guess we'll see, maybe in all your free time you can tell me how you think about the Essential Commitments and how to respond to them.

At least I know one thing, that I'll have Sabie at my side to help clean the floor of any of Junior's extra Cheerios.  If I tell her to.

 

Not to be competitive, but...

Hey. Am I in a vacuum chamber here? I got a baby screaming at me and a toddler who's about to, as soon as she learns that bedtime means bedtime and that spells sleep -- no arguments, no quarter. Yet here I type. Hmmm. Any childless bloggers with write-access to this page want to explain their excuses for not sharing their content with our loyal readers?

Of course, leaving the little one to her screams is probably not sending the right message to the world either. I'd better go soothe her. You're up to bat, C Moore.

Old dads

Chris' riff on veterinarians and pediatricians got me thinking. The honest truth of it, the most profound truth of being a dad or mom, is this:

You know nothing about the meaning of fear until you have a child.

When you have a child, there is, forever after, only one fear -- the one that shall not be named here. It condenses down into one hard, black walnut in your stomach. You have this fear, and your child never will until he or she becomes a parent. This is what Pete Seeger was getting at. At the same time, your own mortality seems a much smaller concern once you're a parent, thanks to your new and bigger worries. I guess that's something.

As for dogs... All of our friends with kids, all of them dog lovers, have abandoned their dogs. Emotionally, that is. I'm not doubting your undying affection for your Cool Dog, but leave open the possibility his star will fade a bit.

Do I make it sound awful? I hope not. My older girl made up her first song yesterday. It goes, "I'm being careful, I'm being careful, I'm being careful, I'm being careful."

so it begins

Steve:

Good to see your voice.  Yes, we've had a few classes.  The one that is teaching us how to give birth--or, that my job is to never seem scared and always have ice chips on hand--is a 'hypnobirthing' seminar.  It's too irresistible not to call this 'hippie birthing.'  That said, for all of my attempts to be a post-sensitive guy, the basic premises are obviously correct.  If you practice being able to relax with someone else helping you, providing a context you can bring with you to the Big Event, and you know what to expect, things will go better during birth. 

Then again, as you point out, what do I know?

As for the real school, that of lived experience, we are already getting our turn at bat.  No Dad-centric discussion would live up to its hype if there wasn't a story about man's best friend right off the bat (nor would it live up to its hype if we didn't use too many baseball metaphors, and who would want to strike out on their first blog post?)  Sababa is our part Lab mutt. Her name means 'cool' in Arabic, like 'chill, ' and she lives up to the name.  She had a thing removed from her leg.  Full Surgery.  Full Anxiety.  Full Cost.  Just learned tonight she is fine, just like the vet thought she would be. The growth, while funky, was benign and unlikely to ever return.  

The thought that dominated both our thoughts, being just 1.5 months from due date, was:  Full f.  What happens when our kid needs a throat culture, let alone surgery?  I was 2 months premature and had 5 (count 'em) Full Surgeries (anesthesia, knife, groin, throat) by the time I was 5.  How cruel was I?  

There's an old Pete Seeger song with the line 'Be kind to your parents/though they don't deserve it/being a parent/ is a difficult stage in life.'  And we haven't even had the kid yet.

Chris

Birthing classes, parenting classes

Chris:

Have you attended any formal educational courses to give you a clue as to what the f you are doing? Fatherwise, that is.

Steve

Welcome to Try, Daddy

This is a blog by two guys who are trying to be decent dads.

Steve and Chris are old college buddies -- Oberlin class of 1990. Steve has two daughters, a 2-year-old and a 2-month-old. Chris has a boy due any day now.

Steve thinks he has things to teach Chris about the Dad thing, because Steve always has lots of advice. But the fact is, if you've raised one newborn-toddler aged kid, you've raised one newborn-toddler aged kid. We are trying to boost our sample size here in hopes of gaining some real data. Steve has things to learn, too.

We both happen to have good dads. Steve's dad told him the secret to fatherhood is finding a partner who's going to be a good mother. We're both fortunate to have done so. On the other hand, while this is a necessary condition for decent father status, it's probably not sufficient. There is some stuff that you need to step up and actually do. This includes making the job of your partner easier, so that she can be the optimal mom, and so that she does not kill you in your sleep.

The great truth we're exploring here is, "What is the minimum condition for being an okay dad?" Of course, if we happen to tell some entertaining anecdotes about our kids along the way, so much the better. What we hope to have eventually is a compendium of ideas for new or incipient dads. By ideas, we mean ways of aiding in your child's development and, more important, demonstrating to your partner that you are not a total loser.

Bear in mind that, as part of quest to be decent dads, we may lapse in our blogging duties from time to time. Never fear. We're thinking about you.

Send us your questions, or your answers to the questions we've raised. We're open-minded. The issue today is this: What's the number one best advice you can offer Chris, who's about to have his first child?