Category: Fatherhood

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The Things We Do For Love

As a man of equality, there’s not much I wouldn’t, or haven’t done in the name of fatherhood. I know men who didn’t change a diaper until the child was almost a year old. I know other men, like my father, who feel the man’s place in the home is to keep things running smoothly, only stepping into the role of “caregiver” as a last resort, or when all hell has broken loose and a little law is in order. I, on the other hand, pride myself on being a near-equal to CareerMom in all areas of rearing children.

These thoughts were running through my head yesterday, as I stood in CVS talking to a female pharmacist, in front of a row of various “creams” for um…yeast infections for MLE’s diaper rash.

“Yes, this is a very good one here. It has applicators for girls, but since your baby is a boy, you can just take it right from the tube and rub it along the infected areas.”

My mind wandered, as any man’s would, and I couldn’t help but think to myself, “What would I have to do if we had a girl?”

The pharmacist droned on, “Now, are you using packaged wipes when you clean him? Because it’s best if you just use a squirt bottle and then pat him clean with a soft cloth.”

I heard myself mumble, “Well, he’s in daycare all day, so we can’t control what they do, and when he’s at home, we change him on a padded plastic thing, so I can’t really use a squirt bottle, but I do wipe him very gently and then pat him clean with a warm washcloth.” And then I had a “Scrubs” moment and in my head, a vignette played out, recalling how as I have his two ankles clasped in my hand and I lift his legs so that his booty is off the table, how he grins as I press the warm washcloth against his hiney. And I chuckled and immediately feared that the pharmacist would read my chuckle as embarrassment and even further patronize me.

It was clear that she thought this was my first go-round at this fathering thing, and being of Indian origin, I’m pretty sure she didn’t hold in too high esteem, the parenting skills of most men (I’m stereotyping here, I know), but rather than launching into my usual soapbox about how we men are perfectly capable, I just nodded along with her sage wisdom.

But in my head I was just thinking, “Look lady, just tell me which of these creams works best, Vagisil, or the store brand, and then let me get out of here through the checkout with the shortest line so nobody sees me buying it!”

Alas, it was not to be. Luckily, the checkout person was an older man, who had probably seen it all and who gave my feminine purchase little more than a casual glance. And also luckily, there was no need for a public price check over the intercom.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Feeling sorry for myself, care to join me?

epiduralSo this morning, CareerMom and I headed down to my Orthopedic Surgeon’s office and I was treated to two exquisetely painful epidural steroid injections. Actually, when we got down there, they didn’t have me on the schedule and I was this | | close to pitching one of my famous fits, when they came out and said they could fit me in after all. So, that was good. Crisis averted…tantrum, unnecessary.

It’s funny to read the description of the procedure by doctors who have apparently never had these. While it’s true that they numb you up pretty well and that you don’t feel the steroid needle actually go in, but what you DO feel is when they hit the bone…repeatedly…and when the steroid itself starts oozing around in there and doing its magic.

This is the third time I’ve had this done, but the first time I’ve had two at one time…not fun. I think I sweated out a quart of water in the 15 minutes it took to complete the procedure.

So now I’m kicked back at home with an ice pack on my back and jerking every few minutes as the steroid finds a new nerve to bully around, but I’m assured I’ll start feeling some relief in a couple of days!

Yaaah.

Also, three women got to look at my hairy butt this morning, and none of them were CareerMom. Hooray for them!

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Ebert and Roeper would give me a "Thumbs Down"

boredThis weekend, even CareerMom, from whom patience springs forth like the water in Niagara Falls after the winter thaw, had seemingly “gotten over” the constant entertainment requirements of our children. Thanks in no small part, I feel, to Daycare and the constant entertainment provided there, as soon as the kids get home at night, and from the moment they wake up on the weekends, it’s, “What are going to do now?” “Can we go swimming?” “Well, when CAN we go swimming?” “Can I have a snack?” “Well, when CAN I have a snack?”

I tell ya, it’s enough to drive you nuts! Especially when you consider what our kids do today compared to what we did as children. I told MLI on Sunday that he’d done more by 11 a.m. than I did an entire weekend growing up!

When I was a child, the weekends were for “catching up.” Saturday mornings, assuming I beat everyone out of bed, consisted of my watching cartoons for about an hour and then once everyone was up, doing chores until the house was spotless. After that, if I wasn’t helping my dad with one of his many, never-ending projects around the house, I was left to go happily cruising around the neighborhood with my transistor radio hanging from my bicycle handlebars, looking for other kids in a similar plight. What ensued from there was anyone’s guess.

As a comparison, here’s our weekend with the boys:

Saturday

  • Took both boys with us to the gym at 8 a.m. where they played in the huge gym play area consisting of a McDonald’s-like tunnel system, a kid’s basketball court, computers and all sorts of other things.
  • Played with the boys outside for a while. Rode bikes, threw balls, the usual.
  • I ran to Home Depot while CareerMom did something with the kids at home…dunno what…something to do with blocks and cars.
  • That afternoon, I took MLI to a Braves game, via the Atlanta MARTA system. MLI thought riding the train was pretty cool, except that we caught it at its northern most point, and it took nearly 30 minutes to get to the transfer station and by then we were both hot and bored.
  • At the game, we sat down and by the time I got dinner for the both of us, it was already 8 p.m. By the top of the 3rd inning, MLI says, “Daddy, I’m already tired of looking at this!” Determined to stay for a while, we stuck it out till the 5th inning and then made the trip home.

Sunday

  • We’re still in “church transition” so went to the gym again.
  • Played with the boys outside for a while.
  • While I killed all the plant life in the backyard (herbicide), CareerMom took the boys to the neighborhood park for a while.
  • After lunch and naps, took the kids to this new indoor play area with a gy-normous foam filled pool thingy. Was pretty darned cool!

The whole daggum weekend revolves around the kids! By Sunday night, even CareerMom’s nerves were getting frazzled and though we both felt bad talking sternly to the boys, even parents need a few quiet moments.

Oh, and on top of all of this, MLI had been asking for the mailman to bring the DVD “Aladdin” and so I ordered it from my Netflix account. It came on Saturday and I stuck it in the DVD on Sunday.

AladdinDo you see anything wrong here? Did you know that there is more than one “Aladdin” movie on DVD? I didn’t. Why would anyone even bother stocking anything other than the Disney version?

Trust me, this is NOT the Disney version.

Despite the colorful packaging, I’m pretty sure this cartoon was created sometime back in the 80s, before cartoonists began attempting to synchronize voices and mouth movements. It was bad…really bad.

So, in total, my entertainment ideas fizzled miserably this weekend, and truth be told, I think we’re all a little relieved that the boys get to go to Daycare today and we adults “have” to go to work. People always tell me to “treasure this wonderful time when the kids are young,” but it’s funny how the people who tell you this, never seem to have children that young at the time of the telling. I think that by the time you’re ready to say this to someone else, you’ve long forgotten how much work it actually is.

Right now, I treasure the few moments the boys are off playing by themselves…right up until one of them steals the other’s toy, or when one of them pushes the other down and a cry-fest ensues. Those moments are GOLDEN!

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Life in these United States

Memories of a Gen-Xer

custom van Every generation blames the one before…no wait…that’s a song.

Let’s try again:

About every 20 years, another generation is born. Or at least, that’s been the schedule up until couples decided they were making too much money and having too much fun by themselves to have kids. I guess now, a lot of people are waiting 30-35 years, so maybe the generation schedule is widening.

Anyway, what with my decrepitude rearing its ugly head again, I’ve been thinking more about getting old. But not in a morose kinda way, but more in a kinda, “How things have changed” kinda way. A few days ago, some of my more enlightened readers and I discussed a bit how parenting has changed and while there is fodder there for at least a week’s worth of blogs, I’m gonna give it a break for a bit.

So today, I’m offering my Top Five list of things that have changed since I was a child in the 70s and 80s. If you’d like to play along, feel free to offer up your top picks via a comment.

Here Goes! The TOP FIVE Things that Have Changed Since Gen-Xers were kids!

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5. Water used to cost .0000143 cents per gallon: Do you remember when you could turn on the Slip n’ Slide in the morning and the only thing that got you off the thing in the afternoon was either dinner, or someone sliding into an anthill, or catching a nipple on a hidden rock? These days, water is so scarce here in the Atlanta area that we can’t even wash our cars. I suspect that in certain demographics, this is causing quite a social uproar. I remember when the big thing was washing your car in the afternoon so you could go cruising for doughnuts chics later that night!

4. There are no quotable movies anymore!: Just this morning I heard part of “Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail” on my Sirius radio. It was the bit about burning witches, “…and so, if the witch weighs as much as a duck…then she must be made of wood!” It got me thinking about how movies today, while visually stunning, lack a certain wit that we all grew up with. I mean, how many different quotes can the average Gen-Xer offer from Star Wars, or CaddyShack or any of the National Lampoon series? Nowadays, the best kids can do is offer, “Lucky” (Napoleon Dynamite) or “Tattoo on the lower back? Might as well be a bullseye.” (Ok, that one is actually a GREAT movie, but it was really geared more towards us older folk rather than the kids)

3. Cars suck!: On more than one occasion, I’ve lamented the lack of customized vans today! Oh, do you remember those? We had a blue GMC something or other, with a beautiful airbrushed picture of an old sailboat out on the open sea painted on our van. It had a refrigerator, a huge raised bed in the back (it never occurred to me what that was probably used for when I was a kid), and the BEST! captain’s chairs you ever sat in. Oh, and the windows were tinted so dark, that even if they’d had seat belt laws back then, you could have flaunted them while parading around in your skivvies in the back while driving up I-10! Oh, the good old days!

2. Lack of open space: This is one of those things you hear quite frequently from Gen-X’ers; “When we were kids, mom used to kick us outta the house in the morning and we wouldn’t return till dinner time.” And this was when we were like six years old! Nowadays, if a six year old is seen walking around the neighborhood alone, you can count the minutes before Child Services is knocking on doors trying to figure out who to blame. The problem is not that the kids are out without their parents, its that they are out in plain sight! When we left the house, we disappeared man! We hit the woods, or the drainage tunnels, or the big fields with the massive water ditches. You could stand out on our deck and look out over the back of the neighborhood and all you’d see every now and then is a head pop up out of the sand, or a pine-cone bomb being lobbed towards the enemies’ fort!

And the #1 Change is:

1. Weekend activities expectations: Do you remember what you did on an “average” Saturday? I bet it was something like this:

  •  Get up before 8 a.m.
  •  Eat some cereal while watching some cartoons (but not too   many, “We have things to do young man!”)
  • Do chores for the next hour and a half
  • Eat lunch
  • Maybe go grocery shopping with mom, or get some new shoes. Or maybe dad had you hold the flashlight while he worked on the car, or in the attic or something
  • Free play time till dinner
  • Help mom cook dinner (well, I did this anyway)
  • Maybe watch a movie in front of the TV if dad is feeling magnanimous. A Disney special perhaps, or maybe “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” ( sponsored by: Mutual of Omaha, is people…you can count on, when the going’s rough…)
  • Do the dishes
  • Take a bath/ brush your teeth
  • Off to bed

Nowadays, by 7:30 a.m., my kids are asking, “What are we going to do today?”

What are we going to do? I want to say, “We’re going to catch up on all the daddy chores that we didn’t get done this week because we were too busy working in the day, and playing with you kids at night.” But what really happens is that we parents end up dragging our kids from one activity to the next in a vain attempt at wearing their little butts out so they’ll go to bed early, so that we parents can have a few minutes alone that doesn’t cost $15 p/hour in babysitting fees!

So this was probably waaaay too long of a post, but I hope you at least scanned for the good parts. And I’d love to hear your Top 5 or Top 10 changes. It’d be interesting to compare childhoods!