girls and their toys

As a father of boys, I consider myself lucky. When it comes to buying toys for my kids, I know if I get them something I think is cool, they'll be totally happy. Spaceships, super heroes, dinosaurs, pirates — none of this is a stretch for me. But what about all the fathers of girls out there?

I have a friend. A single father of an adorable little 4-year old girl. He loves her, and of course like any father wants her to be happy. He mans up and doesn't balk when she wants unicorns and princesses and frilly dresses and all manner of girly things. So he didn't think twice about buying her a pink princess bubble wand. All hearts and flowers and little stars, it looked perfectly innocent and completely girly. Everything seemed right in her little pink princess world. Then he turned it upside down.

father's day is for idiots

I write a dad blog. It says so right up in the title. (A title which, I realize, is not very imaginative. When I started the blog I called it "The Once and Future Badass Dad." But was both pretentious and totally nonsensical, so now it's just Badass Dad Blog. Which is lame, but tells it like it is.) So I think the fact I write a dad blog means I have to write a Father's Day post. So, here it is.

Father's Day is stupid. As are Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, Boss's Day, Administrative Professionals Day, and Arbor Day. Actually, I kind of like Arbor Day. Trees are cool. But all those other ones are stupid.

First, they aren't really holidays. The word holiday is derived from "holy day," so by definition holidays are days of religious observance. In this way Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, and Labor Day are also not actually holidays, but I give those a pass because they're patriotic and that's almost like religion to some people. But the others, especially Father's Day and Mother's Day, exist for two reasons. Reason 1: To sell greeting cards and gifts. Reason 2: To remind people to appreciate people in their lives that no one should need to be reminded to appreciate.

I mean, c'mon. If someone has to tell you to love your mother and give her flowers and tell her she's a great mom, you are an idiot. She's your mom. She gave birth to you, and raised you, and refrained from killing you at any point during your young life. Rest assured, there were many times she wanted to. And she didn't. She is to be honored and admired.

Likewise with dads. They spent their whole lives loving you and caring for you and playing trucks and trains and dolls and house and catch with you and most of them never even ordered up that DNA test that would once and for all prove you were actually their kid. That's true love. And you need Hallmark to tell you one day a year to tell the guy you love him and buy him a card and an Amazon gift certificate? You suck.

Thing is, I also suck.

I don't call my parents enough. I don't visit them NEARLY enough. They come to us much more than we go to them, which I know makes a sort of sense because they don't have small children to cart around but still, we should visit our parents more. I rarely get them really great birthday presents. I have almost no idea what they would like, and am too lazy to put in the effort to find out. I love my parents and appreciate everything they have done for me through my life to support me and care for me and raise me, and I don't say those things to them enough. Because it's mushy and sappy to say that stuff and how often do you really go there in day to day life?

Which I guess is why we have Father's Day. Do tell us it's OK to go there. It's OK to tell your dad you love him, and you appreciate him, and he did an awesome job because you're still alive and basically doing OK. We shouldn't need the greeting card industry to remind us to say these things, but the truth is we need to be reminded.

So I still think Father's Day is stupid, and is basically a day for idiots. Trouble is, I'm an idiot, so I probably need to accept that in the end, I need it. Crap.

I love you, Dad. And Greg. And Thom. All you guys are awesome dads in your own way. And if it's possible you're even awesomer grandpas to Owen and Nicholas. Those kids love you so much, and seeing how much you love them makes me tear up with the joyful humanity of it all. Like I'm doing a little right now.

Happy Father's Day.

p.s. Also in honor of Father's Day, I was interviewed on It Was A Very Good Year. Have a look and also check out what my fellow dad bloggers have to say over the next few days.

tuesday and everything after

It's Tuesday.

That means I should write a blog post. Tuesday is blog post day.

Why Tuesday?

Well, weekends are out - I'm usually too busy to write, and everyone's too busy to read. Monday is too "back to work" and Friday is all "weekend's here!" Wednesday is "hump day" and Thursday is "almost Friday!" So, Tuesday.

But yesterday was a holiday, so this feels more like Monday. We had a lovely long weekend. I took Friday off and went to see Star Trek with Lisa. Much fun. We had sushi for lunch and had a nice relaxing time with no kids in tow. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were family days. Hanging out with the kids. Seeing friends. Going to the park. Bailing on plans to go to the beach (sorry, Pete). Putting a bench around our tree in the backyard. Other than a marked shortage of naps for me, it was a wonderful long weekend.

Today the California Supreme Court upheld the ban on same-sex marriage put in place last year by Proposition 8.

I 100% expected this, but it still makes me sad.

I expected it because the court wasn't ruling on the merits of same-sex marriage. They did that already. In spring 2008 when they said it was legal under the state constitution for same-sex couples to marry. So a lot of gay couples got married. Friends of ours. And family. Then some folks with lots of money put an initiative on the ballot last fall and changed the state constitution. So gay marriage was no longer legal. So today the court ruled on whether the process surrounding that ballot initiative was legal, and they said it was, so gay marriage is out. But, since it was legal for a few months, anyone who got married then is still married. Which is nice, I guess. Also, confusing.

This isn't a political blog. It's a parenting blog, basically. Which means it's a family blog. And this is about family. Very close friends and members of my family are gay. Some of them are married. So far this has not caused the destruction of a single straight marriage that I know of. I've seen several marriages fall apart recently. It's terrible to watch friends go through the deconstruction of everything they thought they would be doing for the rest of their lives. It's heartbreaking. And sad. And not one of them blamed gay marriage.

Prop 8 proved what I've believed for a long time: the California ballot initiative process is a disaster. Lawmaking shouldn't be left to the general public. Politicians are far from perfect, but we elect and pay them to do a job: make laws. We give them that authority and responsibility to understand the implications of the laws they make and to do the right thing. They screw it up a lot, but it's their job. It's not our job.

Even if you think we should vote on how to spend money or on taxes or bond measures, civil rights should not be subject to majority rule. The very concept of civil rights hinges on protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority. If left to voter approval, we'd still have racial segregation in certain parts of the country. There are many more persuasive arguments for gay marriage than any I could make. I doubt I'm going to change anyone's mind. Sadly, I'm not sure minds can be changed on this issue. I hope I'm wrong. Everyone should have the right to marry the person they love. We need our leaders to lead. This shouldn't be about what people think. It's about what's right.

So, I'm disappointed in California, the only place I've ever lived.

But Star Trek was cool. So there's that.

keeping our kids safe

A friend (who is currently childless, incidentally) sent me this link: Stop worrying about your children! Maybe she thinks I worry too much? It's an article on Salon.com by Katharine Mieszkowski, profiling Lenore Skenazy. Here's the summary:

Kids today are just as safe as they were in the '70s, says "Free-Range Kids" author Lenore Skenazy, and what's really distressing is an alarmist culture that refuses to let them grow up.

I tweeted this link (that's twitterspeak. if confused, see this post) and set off a really active and passionate discussion about how best to keep our kids safe.

What we all seemed to agree on was this: we must strike a balance between raising our kids in a bubble and letting them run wild without constraint. But the space between those two extremes is vast, and enough to leave this parent scratching his bald head wondering what to do.

I don't know the answer, but of course I have some thoughts. Here are a few that came up during the discussion, and after.

I had a lot of freedom as a kid, and spent a lot of time hanging out unsupervised with my friends. My parents worked when I was young. I don't remember exactly how old I was when I started getting myself to and home from school on my own, but I think it was around 10. Well before that I was riding my bike or walking all over the place with my parents not really knowing where I was.

My wife grew up in New York City. She was riding buses alone by age 8 and subways by 11. This was when the crime rate in NYC was much higher than it is today (she'd rather I didn't say EXACTLY when this was), yet many people who read the article thought it was crazy for her to let her 9-yr old ride the train alone.

The subject of sex offenders came up. Are we better off knowing about registered sex offenders in our neighborhoods? At least the ones that have been a) convicted and b) honest about their current location? It is probably better to know than not know, but it's also hard to know exactly what to do with the information. I also suspect it's more important to teach our children how to behave with people they don't know (and those they do) than it is to keep a constant watch on this house or that apartment building.

I want to be logical and level headed about how I raise my children. But I'm terrified that anything bad might happen to them, and want to do whatever I can to prevent that. At the same time, I want them to be self-reliant, independent, and not live in fear.

And that's really the biggest issue here: fear. I think we're much more afraid of all the horrible things that might happen now than our parents were, yet I think the chances of those things happening are generally no higher. In some cases they're actually lower. But what are odds when it's your own kids in question? The chances of getting attacked by a shark are ridiculously low. They're even lower if you never go in the ocean.

Are we more realistic and better educated about the dangers of life, and protecting our kids accordingly? Or are we irrationally influenced by the scare tactics of the media (swine flu, anyone?) into sheltering our kids beyond reason?

I don't know the answer. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please comment.

Edit: After I posted this last night I spotted this story about a mom in New York who spent the night in jail after dropping her kids on the side of the road for misbehaving in the car. It reminds me that in addition to the moral, ethical, and just general right-minded parenting questions this issue raises, there are also legal issues to consider. Jeez, as if we didn't have enough to worry about!

old school

Owen is already learning you can't go home again, even if he doesn't understand that yet.

We've had pretty good child care luck. When Owen was born in 2005, Lisa took seven months off.

(Before you get all excited and start applying for her job, this was seven months without pay. Lisa's an opera stage manager who gets contracted per show. So basically she took no contracts for seven months. So didn't get paid. So we lived on one income, which was not the most fun thing ever, but that's not what this is about.)

As I was saying, we've been lucky. Lisa stayed home longer than many can, and the single income thing didn't kill us

(Although I'm not super excited we may be doing it again soon. And no, Lisa is not pregnant.)

When she did go back our moms each came to help for several weeks.

(Which also didn't kill us, though in some ways came closer.)

And with Lisa's sporadic work schedule and piecing together babysitters here and there (that sounds like we dismembered them. we didn't) we didn't put Owen in daycare until he was over a year old. Having seen many friends hand their kids off to infant care at 6 weeks, we were happy we could wait, and Owen thrived (and continues to, thankfully).

When the time did arrive to start him in daycare, we found a place close to where we work in Downtown LA that we were really happy with most of the time he was there. When we did have issues, they addressed them (mostly. took way too long to get me a new keycard for the security gate.). Their hours were RIDICULOUSLY convenient (6am - 6:30pm. That is not a typo.). The location worked well for us (and was right near the train station which Owen loved). The director and staff were friendly and caring, and the teachers Owen had really seemed to love the kids and what they were doing. Oh, and it was cheaper than almost everyone else I knew was paying. I still don't really know why, but I'm not complaining.

This is the Old School.

(We've always called it school with Owen, even when it was really just daycare. Also, I feel strange posting the name of the place, but if you're in LA and interested email me and I'll share. If you still want the info by the end of this post.)

Owen LOVED the Old School. Once he got over being left somewhere besides home, and apart from the inevitable tough days now and then, he loved it. He made friends before we knew he was old enough to HAVE friends. It was a strange experience visiting friends whose daughter was in his class and seeing they had something going on which had nothing to do with us or time they'd spent together while we were around. They were tight, and that happened all on their time, not ours. He loved his teachers, and often he didn't want to leave when one of us showed up to take him home. How could our house compete with all these toys, kids, and a playground right outside? We saw his social skills blossom, and get this - they basically potty trained our kid for us. No kidding, one day they were like, "start sending him in underwear, he's ready." I felt like tipping them.

Then we got pregnant with Nicholas.

(Clearly, it was my wife who actually got pregnant, but we're a team, so I say "we got pregnant" even though I realize she is the one with the uterus and did all the actual gestating and pushing the baby out and it makes me sound like kind of a new age parenting hippie to say "we got pregnant" but there I said it so whatever. Again, this is not what this is about.)

When we started contemplating how to handle the logistics of a second child, we decided two things: We were getting a nanny, and we were moving Owen to a school closer to home. We'll call this the New School.

The New School is four blocks from our house (Old School: 10 miles). The New School has been lauded by friends since before we had kids as the best thing that ever happened to their kids. It's only slightly more expensive. Having Owen at the New School would allow the nanny to pickup and dropoff (Car Talk, anyone?), and meant he'd be in school with neighborhood kids, some of whom might end up his classmates for years. Also, as Kindergarten started to loom, we wanted him to have a slightly more academic atmosphere than the Old School provided. Theirs was basically structured play, with crafts and stories and circle time, which is great for little ones, but lacked the beginning reading and math we think is important to at least start introducing somewhere around age three.

(This makes it sound like we've spent much more time thinking about educational theory and approach than we have. We basically play this thing by ear and try and do what Owen's ready for. Honestly, the way notes home from his teachers at the Old School were spelled, I was not sure I wanted them teaching my kid to read, sweet and well meaning as they were. Also (and this probably bothers me the classically trained musician more than most), his teachers could not sing. I don't mean they didn't have beautiful voices. I mean they couldn't carry a tune in a fucking bucket. Owen still has trouble matching pitch and I blame them. We sang to the kid, but they had many more waking hours with him in those early days, and how the hell can a kid learn Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when it sounds like there are only maybe 3 1/2 notes in the song and their relationships to each other are entirely arbitrary and vary from one verse to the next? Does that song even have verses? Whatever, you get the point. And again, this is not what this is about.)

So we decided to move Owen to the New School. We thought a lot about timing this move. Knowing he liked his Old School, we didn't want him to associate leaving there with the arrival of the baby (fucking baby you came and I had to change schools and I hate you!), so we decided to wait and move him several months after Nicholas was born, while Lisa was still off work (she couldn't take quite as much time off with #2, further reason why we went with the nanny option). We actually made the switch while out of town on vacation, so when we got home, Owen started in the New School. If he were older I think we'd have wanted him to have a chance to say goodbye, but at 3 we just thought that wouldn't make sense to him. He'd probably think we were saying goodbye for the day and coming back tomorrow.

The good news is I think we succeeded in making the school move not about the baby. Owen loves his brother and has never connected his arrival with changing schools, that we know of. That said, the school move was a little rough at first. The first few days were great. He was all caught up in the novelty of the new school and the differentness of it all. We naively thought we were home free. But about a week later we heard:

"When can I go back to my Old School?"

My heart sank. Because of course he couldn't go back. We'd structured our lives around him being close to home, not to mention paid money to the New School and given up his spot at the Old School. It was time to move on, but how do you tell that to a 3-yr old? We told him the New School was his school now, and he was going to keep going there. Thing is, I wanted him to WANT his New School, and by extension to have fond memories of his Old School without actually wanting to go back there again. Which is totally unrealistic, especially since I also have my moments of pining for my past. And I'm 35 - he's 3.5. I'm a whole power of 10 older than him.

But those moments pass, and before long, he did get past it. Mostly. Pretty soon he wasn't asking about his Old School anymore, and was really having fun at his new school. He made friends, he likes his teachers, he's learning all kinds of cool stuff. And the logistics are working out great and we're really happy about the move.

But now and then, it comes up. We see someone from the Old School - at a birthday party, playdate, etc. - and he asks about going back. But the more time that's passed, the more his Old School isn't really the place he knew anymore. Almost all of his friends have moved on. Most of the teachers we knew and liked are no longer there. And, of course, he's not the same kid he was, either.

And maybe that's the hardest thing to accept.

He's changing.

And it's all good. It's what's supposed to happen. He's growing up. And that is both the best and the hardest thing to watch. He's the same sweet funny cuddly charming kid, but at the same time, he's not. He's different every day. And that is, as much as anything, why none of us can ever go home again. Because not only is home not the place it was when we left, but neither are we the people we were then. We change. And that's what's supposed to happen, but sometimes we think back and sigh a little about who we were, and will never be again. At least, Owen and I do.

do not underestimate the power of the tummy

Owen is obsessed with Star Wars.

Owen is 3 3/4 (he'll correct you if you say he's 3 1/2), and obsessed with Star Wars. He's probably too young for this fairly violent (and completely awesome) series of films (and cartoons - did you know there were cartoons?!). But we love it, and thought he would love it, and he does, so yahtzee! The thing is, I couldn't take much more Diego. Or the Wiggles, oh my god the Wiggles. If you've managed to avoid this particular Australian import, count yourself extremely lucky. I thought we were so clever to have kept Barney out of the house, then the Wiggles flanked us and moved in. Clever Wiggles. Anyway, Owen has now seen all six Star Wars films, the Clone Wars animated feature, and many episodes of the Clone Wars animated TV show. He owns three very realistic, battery operated lightsabers, complete with lights and sounds, and has played Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga on PlayStation3. He's definitely too young for THAT. We're horrible parents.

But that's not the point. The point is, he's most obsessed with particular aspects of Star Wars. Much to my wife's chagrin ("I thought I had more time!") his fixation is primarily on the female characters who aren't wearing a lot of clothing. This includes Leia in the early scenes of Return of the Jedi, Padme Amidala after the arena scene in Attack of the Clones, and Asohka (Anakin's padowan learner) in Clone Wars. All have bare midriffs, shoulders, legs - you get the idea. He also digs Jedi and lightsabers, but likes them best if they are defending (or wielded by) scantily clad females. We think questions about whether he might be gay are pretty much answered.

When Owen wants to watch Star Wars, he usually asks by saying something like, "I want to watch Star Wars, where Princess Leia gets captured by Jabba, and has a tummy." Having a tummy means her tummy is bare. When he sees someone with their belly showing he asks "Why does she have a tummy?" When he isn't wearing shoes and doesn't want to walk on something without them, he'll object, "But I have feet!" We were driving one day and talking about the beach, and how he wouldn't need shoes and could run around with bare feet. From the back seat: "Silly Daddy, not bear feet, KID feet!" So it's just feet. And tummies. So back to that.

The tummy fixation isn't new. He will consistently notice and comment on anyone with a bare belly. He's into observing and pointing out body parts, and tummies are special, I suspect because they're less often spotted than say, heads. Visiting a local motorcycle shop with my stepdad, Owen spotted a poster of a woman in a bikini, leaning suggestively against a motorcycle. He took inventory: "She has legs, and she has a tummy, and she has those, and she has arms ..." That was a few months ago. By now I think he knows what "those" are called (his baby brother is breastfeeding, after all). He's nothing if not observant.

If you aren't already, you should be reading Tanis Miller's blog, Attack of the Redneck Mommy. She's funny, and smart, and Canadian, and often blogs about her boobs. What more do you want? Anyway, I follow her on Twitter and had her avatar up on my screen when Owen walked by. He stopped and looked at the picture for a bit, and then in a slightly shy but impishly smiling way said, "Why isn't she wearing a shirt?"

I think she might be, you just can't see it in the picture.

(Impish smile) "She looks like she's ... captured."

I told Tanis about Owen's comment. She says this is why she'll never change her avatar - according to her, her real photo? So not captured. I suspect we may have planted the seeds for a rich sexual fantasy life for our not-yet-four-year old once he's a bit (read: a LOT) older. I also suspect Redneck Mommy would be proud if that's true.

So, that brings us back to Star Wars, doesn't it? I'm king of the segue.

As I mentioned, in addition to the mostly naked women of Star Wars, Owen likes the Jedi. He wants to be a Jedi when he grows up. He holds out his hand and screws up his face and wonders why no people or objects move around the room from his powers. It's awesome and a little heartbreaking. I've given him no reason to think he can't be a Jedi when he grows up. I hope he never stops believing he can. As Yoda said about not believing, "That is why you fail."

Star Wars creeps into almost every conversation now. Last week Owen asked, "What kind of car does mommy have?" A Honda.

"What kind of car does daddy have?" A Toyota.

"I like daddy's car better ... because it has Yoda in it."

My faith in humanity bolstered, I now think introducing him to Star Wars was a pretty good idea. We're awesome parents.