The Girl arrived May 4th officially making us a family of four. Two kids under two; that’s us. It’s nice when your family planning coincides with a pithy phrase.

When people originally found out we were having another baby so quickly they said things like, “that’s crazy!”, “what were you thinking?” and “why did you do this to me?” People besides my wife were also a bit taken aback.

Though once we found out the second baby was going to be a girl the snide comments were tempered with sentiments of how lucky we were to be having, “one of each.” As if babies were prizes in a McDonald’s Happy Meal and we had managed to collect all two.

Another phrase that kept popping up was, “you’ve won the lottery.” And it’s true, we felt very lucky to get pregnant again so soon and to be getting to experience raising both sexes. It is like winning the lottery. And when our 15-month-old escapes from the bath and takes a crap on the living room rug while our colicky newborn is working on hour #3 of screaming, I remember that people who win the lottery often end up broke drug addicts whose families have tried to kill them.

Coming soon, A Tale of Two Diapers….

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As you may or may not know, there is now a brand new human being in this world depending on me for her very survival; we had a daughter on May 4th. (“May the 4th be with you,” for those who like a good mnemonic device.) This new arrival has, among other things, seriously cut into my writing time. Which is lucky for you; otherwise you’d be subjected to posts about how surprisingly difficult it is to wipe poop from around a vagina. And who needs to read about that? I hope to be up and writing again soon, but until then please enjoy my story from the April edition of, WordPlay.

Remember in the Olde Tyme days when you had to actually write letters or talk in order to maintain relationships with other people? Isn’t it great that you can now keep up the same meaningless and unrewarding friendships with the simple click of a button? Which is my way of saying you should subscribe to my blog. Right over there on the right where it says “SUBSCRIBE TO POSTS.” By email or RSS. Easy schmeazy.

Thanks. OK, now on with it.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this, but when we go out together, TW drives 90% of the time. This is because she gets carsick, a condition which is magnified when she is pregnant. Which, it turns out, is basically all the time. Now I know in most relationships, when the couple is together, the man drives. This is the manly thing to do. Drive your family around town, take the bull by the horns, be in control; even if the bull in question is a lime green minivan with an automatic transmission. Maybe especially then. If we ever throw in the towel on life and buy a minivan, perhaps then I’ll be more compelled to drive as a way to cling to the last vestiges of my manhood. But probably not. Because those things have DVD players and really good cup holders and swivel chairs up front with, like, a gazillion comfort settings. So who has time to drive? There are buttons to play with.

The simple truth is I *love* being driven. Though I feel compelled to point out this is not a euphemism. I just literally enjoy being the passenger. Even when we’re going somewhere that doesn’t serve alcohol.
Part of the reason I like to be a passenger is, of course, getting to fiddle with all the knobs (again, not a euphemism). But the bigger reason is that I have a horrible sense of direction; atrocious, really. This makes driving an exhausting series of almost random guesses.

TW, on the other hand, is like Google Maps (with benefits). You can drop her anywhere and she will sense which way is north, get her bearings and start calculating a way to her final destination, including any Taco Bells that may be on the route. For me, being told which way is north is useless information even if I’m a block from my house. I work strictly in rights and lefts. Which is about as useful as it sounds. I have to start at my house to get anywhere.

I do believe that certain people have an innate sense of direction while others do not. However, I also realize that the stark difference between my and TW’s sense of direction is simply a manifestation of how we see the world. TW is organized, logical and observant. She is a planner and likes to think things through. So it makes sense she sees the world like this:

I, on the other hand, see the world like this:

When I’m in the passenger seat, I’m not noticing landmarks or paying attention to where we are in relation to other things. I’m looking at billboards and wondering why the sun is wearing sunglasses. And if we’re being honest, I’m often that way in the driver’s seat as well. So it’s probably in everyone’s best interest if TW continues to do most of the driving in our family. But if you need to adjust your lumbar support or the volume on the back speakers, you talk to me.

Like most families with a small child, our lives are all about routine. One of ours is the morning negotiation. Once TB wakes up, one of us has to start showering and getting ready while the other gets TB and starts his breakfast; when the showerer is done, we swap.

As any married couple knows, the big question here is which is the worse option. It’s important to know this so the marriage points are distributed properly. Personally, I’ve been saving points for an electronic drum set or a threesome. (*Editor’s note: TW wants me to be clear that the marriage point concept is completely in my head and that her actions are motivated solely by what’s best for our family. She’d also like to point out I couldn’t handle a threesome.)

For a long time, to me, it was a no-brainer which was the worse job; starting breakfast. Ever since TB started eating regular food in his high chair, one of my least favorite parenting duties has been feeding him. Cuddling with him on the couch while he sucks down a bottle is one thing; sitting around while he reenacts the Exorcist with Yo Baby yogurt is quite another.

Things got even worse when he graduated from us feeding him oatmeal and yogurt to him feeding himself whatever piece of food (or food-like object) happened to be on his tray. Since that milestone, TW likes the idea of cooking her son breakfast: eggs, French toast, what have you. So now, feeding him not only involves projectile pre-chewed food but designing a menu and using the stove. Before having coffee. As you can imagine, it’s a fucking disaster; definitely not worth any non-redeemable, imaginary marriage points.

So my preference has always been to shower first and play with TB post-breakfast/banana pancake tsunami. Plus TW actually enjoys the homey-ness of feeding her son a home-cooked meal, so she doesn’t even get that many points for doing it. If there were points, which I’m being told again there are most certainly not. Not that she would let that influence her decision in any way because TW is just a better person than I am. In our marriage vows we referred to this as “complementing each other.” But 3 ½ years in, let’s call a spade a spade.

Anyway, back to my point; as is the rule with parenting, once you get into a routine and have everything figured out, everything changes. And now I’m realizing showering first is the worse deal because TB has taken to enjoying his morning crib time.

Not quietly on his own. No. He still wakes up, throws everything in his crib onto the floor and then peers over the side wondering how it all got out there, like a drunk waking up naked next to his best friend’s sister. But instead of getting all upset about it, he just wants someone to come in and give him his stuff back, at which point he’s content to play in his crib for 10, 15, 20 minutes. If played right, he can pretty much be sitting down for breakfast right when the first showerer is coming out for their shift. So going to TB first is no longer a sentence to kitchen time; it’s a gift of quality morning play time. He’s happy, smiling and has nothing to throw that’s been partially digested. As a parent, you really can’t ask for anything more than that.

We have been doing a bit of room shuffling to prepare for the pending baby. Instead of going with my idea of converting the detached garage into a nursery “we” decided to put the baby in TB’s room and move TB into my office. Which for legal reasons I’m supposed to refer to as “our” office. Though day-to-day it is better known as the answer to the question, “where should I put this crap?”

It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you really don’t put your mind to it. In less than three years, neglect and decisions-by-default have transformed what was supposed to be our dream, mid-century modern office into a look that can best be described as “indecision with accents of denial.” An uncomfortable futon, a rickety bookshelf (maybe they’ll come in handy later), a mandolin, a keyboard (I’ll start practicing again and we’ll play together on Sunday nights while our children dance around us).

But what’s making cleaning out this room especially challenging is that most of the crap in there can’t be so callously classified as give-away, trash or delusional hobby. Where do you put the letters from summer camp? The journal from your trip to Europe? The “save the date” magnet from your own wedding? If you’re like us, you put them in corrugated cardboard boxes labeled “memories” and shove them in the closet of your office until you have to move them to the garage to make way for a new baby that is coming way sooner than you expected and — if you’re being honest with yourself — than you’re ready for.

Just as we were trying purge some memory boxes to lighten the load (“Really, Valentine’s Day cards from two ex-girlfriends ago? Do I need to know she gave you boxers?”), my parents unexpectedly purged some of their own Alan memories, unloading them on me. I guess when your son is almost 40, precious closet space is more important than pretending you actually care about his disquieting armless family portraits.

The we-don’t-care-anymore package included, besides my old high school swim team photo (oh, did I not mention I was on the swim team? Yeah. I was.), a box of all the cards people gave me for my Bar Mitzvah. This, I thought, would at least be an easy decision; I get it, mazel tov, mazel tov. Put ‘em in the trash pile. But then I found out that when my sister had gone through her own pile of purged memories, a $50 bond fell out of one of her Bat Mitzvah cards. So now I can’t just toss them. Instead I have to sift through a box of 27-year-old judaica-tinged platitudes like a fat guy on the beach with a metal detector looking for lost dental fillings.

If it’s not obvious yet, I have a hard time parting with the past. And to make matters worse, my past is unusually well-documented; I’ve been doing stand-up since I was 16 and have the notebooks to prove it. I have a whole bit on the *first* Gulf War in there (“I hear there might be a draft. That is a horrible idea. If you have an important job to do, the last people you want to send over to do it are a bunch of college students. What are they going to do, make t-shirts? ‘We drank like beasts in the Middle East.’”) I can’t bear to trash them and I can’t bear to read them. The only thing more cringe-inducing than reading your old diary is reading your old diary that’s trying to be funny.

Then there are the videos. Boxes of videos. I documented my stand-up career with the gusto of a Nazi war criminal. Even if I could bring myself to watch these videos, I don’t have the spare 400 hours. Or a VCR. Oh, wait, we do have a VCR. In the office closet.

Tossed in with all this comedy documentation are the normal snapshots of a life: photos, letters, a college paper I wrote on NAFTA that I can’t bear to throw away because the teacher’s comments were so complimentary. Even with Econ papers, I’m a needy artist type.

It’s always bittersweet going back through these old memories, packing them away in boxes. But it’s made even more bittersweet now that I actually know who is going to have to go through them when the time comes. I can almost see my water polo team photo yellowing and turning sepia-toned before my eyes. (What’s that? I didn’t mention I was also on the high school water polo team? Yeah. No biggie.). What will TB and TG make of all this? Their kids? It’s impossible to say.

But why should they get all the fun? Because what’s a blog if not a digital memory box? TW wouldn’t let me foist the swim team pictures on you, but here’s something from the old video box. I like to think the audience is laughing at the material, but I can’t rule out the possibility it’s the shirt or the hair.

So things have gotten pretty exciting in our bedroom these past few weeks. I don’t mean to brag, but we have gone back to doing something I thought we might never do again after “the birth;” setting the alarm. It is – and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here – the single most amazing feeling in the world.

Before becoming parents we were big time snoozers. The last thing we did before going to bed every night was math. “I need to be out the door by 8 so… showering by 7:15; out of bed by 7; we’ll snooze three times…set it for 6:21.” The answer was always 6:21 but we did the calculations every night nonetheless. It was our Goodnight Moon.

Then TB came along and for almost a year now (has it really been that long? Cue music) we have been going to bed confident that the incessant screaming of our hungry and scared child will wake us up in plenty of time for work. Surprisingly, it isn’t significantly more grating than morning radio. But there is no snooze button. Initially I thought pressing down on his fontenelle might work, but TW talked me out of trying.

And so it turns out one of the unintended benefits of having a baby is that we were broken of our snooze habit. Who knew we could actually get out of bed right after waking up? Our baby sleep trained us way before we sleep trained him. And he didn’t have to slog through the forced cockney cuteness of The Baby Whisperer.

Once again, he wins.

I used to own this vest with peace symbols spray painted all over it. It was a pinstriped, six button affair – the kind of vest that used to come with sensible three piece suits – senselessly splattered with colored paint. I bought it on Telegraph Avenue in 1988 while visiting my older sister in Berkeley. It became my prized fashion accessory for years. When I was wearing ripped jeans, a t-shirt and the peace vest, I didn’t even need to check the mirror. How could I not look good? I had wavy, shoulder length brown hair and a penchant for wearing mismatched Converse Hi-Tops. In short, I had style.

In hindsight, it is possible that some people meant “style” as a polite euphemism. But still, I knew exactly what I liked and how I wanted to look. I could walk into a thrift store and spot my shirt on a rack in 5 minutes. My fashion inspiration came from rock stars, movie stars and my own imagination.

Now it comes from a mannequin at Banana Republic. I have been beaten down.

The fall from thrift store chic to showing up at a dinner party in the same striped shirt as four guys and one toddler is, as you’d imagine, a gradual process. more »

Now that the holiday season is over and TW’s vomiting has subsided, we are running out of reasons to postpone planning for the arrival of baby #2. It is coming in early May and, contrary to earlier reports, will not be coming with a penis. Baby #2, as most readers (i.e. my family and friends) know, is a girl. The Girl, to you.

We’ve been in a bit of denial about what the arrival of this kid is going to mean for our lives. Not that we’re not excited. After all, this is exactly what we wanted. And we do truly appreciate how lucky we are. But if you want to read inspirational stories about people thankful for how blessed they are, get a Chicken Soup for the Soul book. Or maybe read some more enlightened blogs. This is my blog. And I am easily rattled.

Ideally, we would have put off TG until TB was old enough to fend for himself for a bit longer, like a few weeks or months. (When is that? Around 2?) But it’s not like we don’t know how these things happen. We knew exactly what we were doing when TW got into that public Jacuzzi at the Ukrainian bath house.
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I began this decade pretty close to rock bottom. Not in an Intervention, selling my semen for grain alcohol and two half-smoked Kool Menthols kind of way. But rock bottom for a nice, upper-middle class Jewish kid from the San Fernando Valley.

I was at a New Year’s Eve party with all my closest friends from high school, sporadically employed and the only single person in the room. Starting the new millennium with a pity kiss on the cheek from my best friend’s wife was not what I had been led to believe partying like it was 1999 was all about.

As some of the wives tried to rally everyone for a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit, I nursed my 13th martini and was bitterly reminded of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

In high school they taught us about relativity through the example of a hypothetical man traveling at the speed of light for 10 years. When he stopped, he hadn’t aged a bit. His friends, on the other hand, were 10 years older.

It turns out this also happens if you move to Chicago.
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When TB was born we got a lot of hand-me-down clothes, one of the many benefits of showing up late to the adulthood party. (Which, by the way, kind of lame party. I thought there’d be more cocktail weenies.) Besides being a great money saver, hand-me-down baby clothes give you interesting insight into your friends and family. Like, for example, I found out my sister finds baby boy tank tops much less skeevy than I do. I can’t put my finger on why; they just give me the willies. I feel they’re a slippery slope to baby mesh crop tops, which pave the road for this. But that is just me.

Infant fashion preferences aside, it’s amazing to have all these free clothes. We have bins of them, sorted by size, scattered throughout our house. TW is constantly shifting clothes from bins to TB’s drawers and back out to bins to be used for the next round of babies in our family. It’s exhausting to watch. I don’t know how she does it. And yet she still finds the time to remind me I should be helping. What a woman.

So we haven’t consciously picked out too many of the boy’s clothes. Which may be why, when we do buy him an outfit for a special occasion, we get a little too excited.

What with all the screaming and feces involved in a normal dressing session, “outfit” is way too strong a word for what I normally put TB in. I just grab two things in the same general color palette. On a good day one thing will be a shirt and the other, pants. But that doesn’t mean, given the time, I don’t enjoy dressing the kid up for my own amusement.

This weekend we’re flying back East for some general family visiting and a bar mitzvah. And if you don’t think we’ve had TB’s bar mitzvah outfit picked out for weeks, well, you haven’t been reading this post. Which would be odd. Why are you starting in the middle? What’s wrong with you? Commitment problems?

Not only did we buy TB a special outfit weeks ahead of time; we made him model it one afternoon. And as I dressed my 10-month-old son up like Little Lord Fauntleroy, I realized I’m now one step away from being a person who puts a sweater on a dog. And only a half step from that lady who puts a Santa hat on her cat.

The whole baby fashion industry relies on the fact that parents use their kids to amuse themselves. And especially in those first few months when your kid gives you nothing back but blank stares and bodily fluid, maybe that is a great service. Who knows how many baby shakings a well-placed argyle sweater vest has prevented?

“I love you.” The words echo through our house. “I love you.” “Hug me.” “Red nose.” I live in a fucking minefield of talking baby toys. All on hairpin triggers – god forbid the kid breathes and his toy doesn’t shriek some platitude at him. I’m not sure how this benefits a child; the expectation that everything talks to him or giggles or sings when he touches it. Personally I think it’s setting him up for some big disappointments. And possibly prison time. “I wanted to see what sound she’d make” is not the best legal defense.

When my sister had her first baby 7 years ago, I thought it was pretty funny to buy really loud gifts. A monkey that played the bongos; Chicken Dance Elmo. (I was also partial to animals dressed as other animals, but that’s an obsession I’m not ready to explore.) I’m still not sure what was more priceless, the look from my niece or the look from my brother-in-law.

Being one of the last of my friends and family to have kids, I’m just now realizing that I was kind of an asshole.
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The Boy is about to crawl. It’s imminent. There is a buzz in our house. The biggest milestone a baby can reach short of talking. Sure he’s figured out how to roll over and he puts his foot in his mouth, but those are milestones the same way the “Best OP’er” award I won at camp for always wearing OP shorts was an actual award. I feel like they pad the developmental milestones a bit to give new parents something to compete over during playdates. “Does your baby notice his hands? Congratulations! You’re winning!” I mean, if your kid happens to follow the list, great. But checking off “stares at faces” is about as fulfilling as checking off “put on pants” from your to-do list. (Though, I did never get to that one today.)
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Mommy and Me groups: productive outlet for parental support or fear-mongering brainwash

OK, it’s unfair to single out Mommy and Me groups. Really it’s the whole parenting “industry” to blame. Or thank. I can’t quite figure it out. Because I do appreciate some information. What the hell do I know about being a parent? After diving into a few chapters of Taking Charge of Your Fertility back when we were trying to get pregnant, I realized I barely understood where babies come from, let alone how to raise them.
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“Looks like Mommy forgot to turn the TV off again.”

One of the most underrated things about having kids: it opens up a whole new channel through which you can be passive aggressive.
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The Wife was still in her hospital bed as I wheeled her to the post-partum room. It was the first private, quiet moment we’d had since the birth of our son an hour before. And the last we would share for quite some time. There was so much I could have said. So much I wanted to say. So it’s unclear why I went with, “That was the grossest thing I’ve ever seen.”
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