From the Archives - Journal for my Younger Daughter

Introduction

Around the time Lindsay, my second daughter, was born, I started keeping a journal about her life. (I did the same for her older sister, and you can see an excerpt here.) My journal project was inspired by those baby books where you put in footprints, birth size and weight, developmental milestones, etc. Those baby books are typically surpassed only by exercise bikes and crock pots in unfulfilled good intentions. Usually the first couple of pages are diligently filled out, and then the new parents get overwhelmed and the rest of the book is blank. 

I endeavored to do better. The result? A mammoth 400-page document, spanning my daughter’s entire life thus far, which I presented to her when dropping her off at college. Here’s an excerpt, emphasizing episodes I think are funny (but which shouldn’t embarrass my kid, who after all has suffered enough, what with me as her dad).

A note on the text: it’s written in the second person (i.e., “you”) because the journal’s real audience is my daughter. You albertnet readers just get a taste.

(Art in this post is by Lindsay’s Grandma Coral, except one picture by Lindsay.)

September 15, 2004 (age almost-1)

I’d forgotten how messy it is when a baby tries to feed herself. You’ll sit at the high chair happily for twenty minutes or more, grabbing everything on your tray, shoving much of it in your mouth, spitting much of this back out, and dropping a lot. Watermelon is a favorite, as are Cheerios (or “ring shaped oat cereal,” as the parenting books call them), refried beans (cold), little blocks of cheese, pieces of bread, cut-up fruit . . . just about everything except baby food, which you never really took a shine to. I’ll be all stoked at how much you ate, until clean-up time when I discover what looks like at least 90% of it on the floor, in your chair, and in the pouch of your bib (when we manage to get the bib on you, which is seldom). When you’re done you scream and cry throughout the clean-up, just like your sister used to do. Then you want to be held, which is a problem because I don’t want to have to change my outfit in addition to yours.

April 7, 2005 (age 1-½)

When I say, “Where’s your nose?” you grin, grab my finger, and touch your nose with it. Then you touch my nose with it. Then you start moving my hand around to different parts of my head: “That’s my ear,” I’ll say, “and that’s my mouth … that’s my cheek.” It’s not entirely clear how much you’re directing the hand and how much I am; it’s like a Ouija board.

You love throwing things away. Every time I empty the trash I have to watch out. The cat’s dish gets thrown out a lot. You’re just like your mother.

April 3, 2006 (age 2-½)

[Our cat] Misha kept getting on the table during dinner. I admonished her, “Get out of here Misha! Go catch some bugs!” (My point was that she’s supposed to be a hunter, not a scavenger, and yet I wouldn’t encourage her to catch birds.) Well, you and Alexa really liked this utterance. I’m not sure whether you grasped the point or not; you may just have seen it as a stock put-down or something. Anyway, the other day we were getting in the car and you and Alexa had some dispute, perhaps over who got what car seat. With a somewhat self-satisfied air (I think you’d prevailed in the dispute), you said, “Go away, Alexa! Go catch some bugs!” Man, she was pissed ... especially, I think, because your mom and I were laughing at what you said. I think this was your first joke ever, or at least your first joke that actually made somebody laugh out loud. I know plenty of adults who haven’t yet achieved that milestone.

April 11, 2006 (age 2-½)

I was reading No No, Jo to you. It’s about a kitten who’s always making messes by trying to help, and each page ends, “But does Sam [or whoever] thank that kitten? Sam says...” Then you open out a flap that shows the kid reacting to Jo’s mess, saying, “No no, Jo!” The idea is that the child to whom you’re reading the book can provide the chorus, or punch line, for each page. But you weren’t doing it. You’d done it before, but this time you were in a needy, weepy way because you’d just awoken from your nap to find the babysitter was here. You like the sitter okay, but of course you recognized that her presence meant your mom would be leaving. (I would be leaving too, but that’s no big deal for you.) It was tough even getting you to let me read to you to cheer you up. I thought you might be coaxed into helping me say the “No no, Jo!” part, so I prompted you. “What does Sam say?” I asked. “Please?” you whimpered.

April 18, 2006 (age 2-½)

We had Easter at your Grandma Judy’s house up in Oregon. After the egg hunt we had breakfast and then a walk. Your mom was enjoying the walking so much that she asked me to administer the chocolate bunnies to you and Alexa while she and my mom walked some more. This seemed like a fine work detail at first, until I saw the size of the rabbits. They were huge! Probably four inches tall, and solid chocolate. Of course you and your sister were thrilled and started gnawing on them right away. Soon you had chocolate all over your mouth and hands. As your mom was leaving she’d said, “Dana, it’s up to you to keep them from making a mess!” I gave you and Alexa each a paper napkin. I policed the devouring of the chocolate for a long while, maybe fifteen minutes, but man, what a tedious job. At several points I thought of taking the chocolate away because it was just too much, but of course that would be like taking candy from a baby. A lot like that in fact. So I tried to encourage you to save some for later. I gave you each a bag to put your bunny in. You dutifully wrapped the bunny in the napkin and put it in the bag, and then, once the delight of this operation wore off, you took it back out and started gnawing again. Finally I couldn’t bear the tedium, not to mention the ghastliness of it all, any longer and started to pack for our trip home. Your mom returned to discover that you (and/or Alexa) had smeared melted chocolate all over the cream-colored upholstery of one of Grandma Judy’s dining room chairs. Your mom snapped at me, I snapped back at her, my mom was hurt because she’d actually bought the bunnies and they’d cost a lot, and at last we fully appreciated the glory of Christ’s resurrection and the thrilling mystery of the rabbit that lays eggs.

June 7, 2006 (age 2-¾)

You were going to tag along with your mom to your sister’s ballet class, but I got home from work right before they left. Your mom saw an opportunity and changed her plan, leaving you home with me (vs. chasing you around the community center for 45 minutes). Oh, man, you were not happy about this—in fact, you had a complete meltdown. I was so exhausted from work, I went straight to my last-resort solution to the crisis: I put in a video for you, which is a rare treat. Then I put a beer in the freezer (we didn’t have any cold) and set a timer to remind me it was in there, lest it get forgotten and burst. When that timer went off, some 10-15 minutes into your video, you thought I’d set it for you, to limit your video time (a standard practice, but one which frankly hadn’t occurred to me in this instance). To my pleasant surprise, you ejected the tape and brought it to me, without any fuss. After that we seemed to be reconciled. It just goes to show, beer is probably the solution to most parenting difficulties.

September 26, 2006 (age almost-3)

You often use the word “instead” when you’re not actually comparing two options. “I want milk instead,” you’ll say, apropos of nothing. I guess it makes sense, because whenever you propose the having of something you’re also implicitly rejecting the not-having of that thing; i.e., “I want milk instead of no milk,” or “I want milk instead of nothing.” Very philosophical of you.

January 23, 2007 (age 3)

Your mom used code words the other night so you wouldn’t understand an idea she proposed to me. She referred to me as “the paternal guardian” or some such thing. “Call him ‘Daddy,’” you told her. Ah, the power of context (though in this case, for her to refer to me in the third person, when talking to me, should have helped throw you off the scent).

April 4, 2007 (age 3-½)

You call butter “toast,” as in, “I want more toast for my bread.” You call your lacy shawl “my marriage.” You call guinea pigs “bunny pigs.”

April 7, 2008 (age 4-½)

Last night at dinner, you had a bite of your mom’s dinner roll. “I don’t like this,” you said. “It tastes like Play-Doh.” I asked you how you knew what Play-Doh tasted like. You said, quite reasonably and matter-of-factly, “Because of this [roll].” This is a nice example of the logical fallacy of “Petitio Principii,” and you delivered it expertly, even convincingly.

July 16, 2008 (age 4-¾)

I sent in proofs-of-purchase from a cereal box and ordered you and Alexa these “Mommy and me” matching wristwatches (big and small). To my surprise, both you and Alexa wanted the black Hot Wheels watches instead of the pink Barbie ones. They arrived yesterday. They feel like they’re made of rubber. They’re black, with a tire tread texture. I asked if you liked them (and may have asked how you would rate them vs. the Barbie version, I can’t recall). You said, “These are cool. Cool is better than beautiful, because beautiful is just paint.”

August 25, 2008 (age almost-5)

You and Alexa were awake, first thing in the morning, and stayed in your beds, talking. I sneaked the door open, and silently peered in. Alexa asked you, “Lindsay, who’s your favorite person in the whole world?” You replied, “That Otto kid at Dandelion [preschool].” Alexa didn’t like this answer at all; as became evident, she wanted you to say that she was your favorite. She told you you’d hurt her feelings, and lectured you on how family is supposed to be more important than mere friends, but you wouldn’t back down. This discussion repeated itself a week or two later, and this time, though he was still your favorite, you couldn’t even remember Otto’s name. (I reminded you, but you seemed unsure that you’d had this right to begin with.)

December 18, 2008 (age 5)

We bought a new[er] car. I had cautioned you and Alexa to behave during our visit to the dealer, and you and Alexa really did. I had also said, almost as an aside, that it would be better if you didn’t appear too excited about the car, since it wouldn’t help our negotiating leverage for the dealer to know we were in love with it. I was a bit concerned about how excited you and Alexa would be about the built-in booster seats (which really are cool). Not surprisingly, that was the first thing the dealer brought to your and Alexa’s attention. I’m sure he recognized that if he could get you girls jazzed on that feature, we’d have a hard time walking away if he didn’t meet our price—sort of the “threat of tantrum” technique that grocery stores use, stocking every aisle with crappy toys and hoping parents will just bite the bullet and buy them, to lubricate the grocery shopping process.

Well, we all piled in for a test drive, and within minutes you said loudly, “I don’t like this booster!” I asked why not. You replied, again loudly, “It doesn’t have any armrests!” This was going well. The dealer’s implicit “You wouldn’t deprive these delightful children of their beloved built-in boosters, would you?” was being answered with an implicit, “Try me. Your boosters are overrated.” I decided to take a gamble and pretend to try to resolve your misgivings, figuring that you’ve never yet accepted a token bone thrown your way: “But Lindsay, if I weren’t sitting in the middle seat, we could fold down the middle armrest and you’d have that!” You replied, with an irritated don’t-you-patronize-me tone, “I want two armrests! I have two arms, so I want two armrests! I don’t want this booster!” So the booster seats were effectively neutralized as a bargaining tool. Yesssss!

July 22, 2010 (age 6-¾)

Alexa finished a meal recently and instead of taking her plate to the counter, she took it into the dining room. “Alexa, I know you’re licking your plate. Stop that and bring it in here,” I told her. She commented that if nobody sees her, it shouldn’t matter. “God can see you,” I said, just to see what my daughters’ reactions would be. You replied, “Does he care?” This was a departure: at other times, you’d referred to God as a she. I asked, “So God is a he, huh?” You replied, “Yes, God is a he and Goddess is a she.” I asked you who is in charge. You paused for a moment, reflecting, and then said, “They fight a lot.”

June 6, 2011 (age 7-½)

You read more and more picture books by yourself, but with chapter books you still prefer being read to. Right now I’m reading aloud Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now. Every so often I pause and ask you questions to see if you’re catching all the details and subtexts. Yesterday I asked, “Do you think Clarice should have told Betty that she had tickets to the ‘Ruby Redfort’ movie premier, to cheer her up?” You replied, “No, that would make it worse because Betty wouldn’t be able to go—her family is moving away, but she hasn’t told Clarice that yet.” I said, “That’s right, we know something that Clarice doesn’t. And what is that an example of?” Without missing a beat, you replied, “Dramatic irony.” That’s my girl!

July 31, 2011 (age 7-¾)

You and Alexa were complaining about not having enough little Lego dudes to play with. Your mom suggested you make your own little Lego guys out of Lego bricks. Alexa complained, “That’ll never work!” Your mom replied, “Then the Lego set has failed the whole family and we’ll never buy them again.” This infuriated Alexa, who cried, “That’s not funny in the least! We don’t have the right kind of bricks for that!” Always acting in solidarity with your sister, you wailed, in an equally affronted tone, “It’s like trying to do a math problem but you don’t even have a brain!”

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From the Archives - Irksome Little Pony

Introduction

Recently I was struggling (audibly, possibly profanely) with a teapot; I cannot pour from it without spilling.  My wife said, “Hey, I like that teapot—don’t go ‘Diaper Genie’ on it.”  She was referring to when, as a new parent,  I lost my temper over our diaper pail and hurled it down the stairs.  (To this day I feel my action was justified.  A “friend” had given us a lightly used Diaper Genie, which—despite having its original box, so it could be passed off as new—wasn’t compatible with the modern bag/liner cartridge it came with, so in trying to install the cartridge I was unknowingly attempting the impossible.)

As maddening as baby-related accessories can be, parenting itself can be even tougher.  Read on for the tale of how I came this close to executing improper parenting techniques.  This was at Target, where I came into contact with the retail equivalent of an Improvised Explosive Device.

November 8, 2003 - Irksome Little Pony

Today I took Alexa [age 2 at this point] to Target to get a new Diaper Genie.  (The manufacturer stopped making cartridges for our old one.)  I had my wife make a list of other stuff to buy.  “DVD entertainment” was not on the list, but I headed over to the Audio/Video section first thing anyway.  I’m getting tired of Alexa’s meager video library and I must confess, I’ve been so tired lately I’ve been letting her watch non-child oriented fare, like Bond movies.

Of course, the vast majority of Target’s inventory of child-oriented videos are crap, like Barney, the cloying purple dinosaur, and the Teletubbies, those really uncanny, creepy little . . . heck, I don’t know what to call them.  Gnomes, I guess, with TVs built into their bellies.  They give me the willies.  Alexa watches them occasionally at day care, alas, and seems to love them just like the rest of the kids do.  That’s probably the creepiest part.  I mean, I can see why she likes Wallace and Gromit; they’re neat-looking, and there’s lots of action.  But Teletubbies?  These creatures seem barely smarter than cows.  They can’t even talk; they’re just like little pawns.

And don’t get me started on “Baby Mozart,” “Baby Shakespeare,” and “Baby Einstein,” which masquerade as educational fare but actually feature totally dippy, non-name-brand music with the camera panning lovingly over still-lifes of bright new toys, like a damn product catalog.  Over my dead body.  I’d rather put “Dr. No” in again and explain to Alexa, “See?  The woman is sleeping,” and hope that my innocent daughter doesn’t yet understand what gunfire is.

In the video aisle somebody had abandoned a little toy.  Alexa, sitting in the shopping cart seat, legs swinging, immediately became enchanted with it.  I grabbed it, out of idle curiosity, and discovered it was a Poky Little Pony.  I only have a vague awareness of Poky Little Pony.  I’m guessing this toy is an offshoot of a kid’s book.  This one had a fancy mane, made to seem like human hair, and came with a little choking-hazard toy brush and some other stuff.  The accessories were lashed firmly to the packaging, so I figured Alexa couldn’t do much damage to Poky or herself, and I let her play with it while I looked for the video.  (I decided to indulge her partly because she was running a bit ragged; last night was rough, and she was a bit late for her afternoon nap.) 

Alexa struggled in vain to remove Poky from the package.  “Help, Daddy,” she said.  I tried to ignore this, but when she dug deep and came out with, “Help, Daddy, please,” I was so won over by the lessons she’d learned—don’t just scream; ask for help; say please—that I relented and freed Poky.  (After all, some other kid had already ripped open the package and abandoned it in the DVD section.  This was a problem already in motion.)

Man, what a lame toy.  The head didn’t even turn.  No small child could be interested in this toy for more than five minutes.  Or am I underestimating children?  I guess a bright kid could figure out a new, illicit way to have fun with Poky (e.g., taunt a less privileged child with it; try to eat its head; tear out its hair; use it as a spoon; slather it with model airplane cement and torch it).  But of course Alexa loved Poky, and instantly memorized his/her name, turning this name into a mantra as we continued our shopping.

[I guess I should point out that, as I discovered years later, the pony isn’t actually named “Poky.”  It’s called “My Little Pony” and actually there are lots of different ones, with names like Blue Bell, Snuzzle, and Skydancer.  My bad.  I’d seen a New Yorker cartoon showing hip-hop revisions of children’s books, one of which featured Jay-Z fronting The Poky Little Posse.  I thought “Posse” was replacing “Pony” but it’s actually making fun of Poky Little Puppy, apparently some classic children’s book.  So my daughter—oblivious, at this age, of the need to second-guess me—blithely accepted that the horse’s name was Poky.]

After getting the modern Diaper Genie and other items, there was just one more thing to do before checking out:  return Poky.  I vainly hoped Alexa would be excited enough by the new synthetic fireproof blanket I’d put in our cart that she’d forget about the stupid toy, but instead she—adorably—put it to bed on the blanket.  Man.  I can’t think of a more volatile situation than bringing a toddler to the Toys section of Target.  I was tempted to abandon my daughter in some boring aisle, like linens, and then return Poky on my own.  You know, surgical—get in, make the drop, get out.  But this is America, which means if I left Alexa alone for even a second, she would either be abducted, or—worse—somebody would find her, turn her in to the authorities, and I’d end up doing time for abandoning her.

I cursed myself silently for allowing things to escalate like this.  My wife would have never snatched up Poky in the first place.  Heck, she probably wouldn’t have been in the video aisle to begin with—she’d be getting the things on the actual list.  But I’m a softie.  Besides, I’d deluded myself that Alexa would quickly exhaust her joy over Poky, and we as a family would enjoy all the benefits of having actually bought it, with none of the expense, clutter, or model-airplane-cement infernos.  On some subconscious level, I must have convinced myself that if Alexa and I made enough of these shrewd moves, over time, we’d eventually rule the galaxy as father and daughter—Alexa drawing from all the novel stimulation she’d had as a kid, and me drawing from the vast financial empire I’d built up from all the money I didn’t waste.  But instead, I found myself rolling Alexa toward what I feared would be my Waterloo.

I was tempted to employ trickery to save the situation.   But I hate to manipulate a child.  After all, it’s not really fair, given my vast advantage of life experience, to take advantage of young naivety.  Besides, there are so many ways such trickery can fail. 

For one, what if your manipulation doesn’t come off?  That can be humbling.  I’ve tried many times to outsmart the cat—to trick her into coming over by pretending I have food, for example—and she’s looked at me with a feline expression that says, “Exactly how stupid do you think I am?”  Or there was the time I tried to outsmart my niece Lonneke, when she was Alexa’s age.  Lonneke had discovered the TV remote control and was annoying me with it, changing the volume and the channel, etc., so I took the batteries out.  She came after the batteries and I freely gave them to her, figuring that she’d never figure out how to reinstall them in the remote anyway.  I figured wrong.

Another problem with manipulation is that it can give the manipulator, if he’s successful, a touch of contempt for the manipulated.  For example, many times I’ve pretended to throw a stick for a dog, who stupidly runs out to catch it, and then looks all over the sky for it, then starts sniffing all over the ground for it, while I’m standing there still holding the stick, shaking my head.  After the tenth fake throw in a row, as the dog is still gamely running for a phantom stick, I’m completely disgusted with the entire canine kingdom.  I’d hate to draw subconscious conclusions about my own child based on my ability to easily deceive her. 

Third, there’s a guilt problem:  taking advantage of the trust of your own child, and abusing that trust for short-term gain, could easily gnaw on a guy, at least a softie like myself. 

Finally, perhaps most importantly, if you underestimate your kid, a lame attempt at subterfuge could insult her intelligence.  Sure, I might trick the kid when she’s too young to know any better, but that doesn’t mean she won’t remember what happened and put it all together later.  Then she’ll realize what a dick I was, and be suspicious of the more sophisticated deceptions I might be employing later on.

So I stopped the stroller at the end of the Toys aisle (though I pointed it away from the goods).  I asked Alexa to hold the video, and then asked her to hold the fireproof blanket.  Little kids are always so eager to help out, especially when it means holding things.  (I guess the novelty of effectively employing one’s newly prehensile hands takes awhile to wear off.)  Then, Alexa’s hands being full, I took Poky. 

This was the key moment where I forever defined who and what I would be as a parent.  To take Poky without Alexa noticing would be manipulation.  But by distracting her somewhat, I theorized, I could mitigate her sense of loss, and do so without trickery by announcing what I was doing.  “Here, I’ll take Poky,” I said, loud and clear.  And of course she immediately began yelling in protest.  While Alexa yelled, I spun around, located Poky’s clones, reunited “our” Poky with them, and took a moment to satisfy my curiosity about the price ($4.99) before returning to the cart.  Within a minute or so Alexa had basically calmed down.  Sure, the loss wasn’t forgotten; for several hours she kept asking where Poky went, but never did throw the tantrum I’d so dreaded.

I have concluded that Alexa is not (yet) a spoiled rotten brat, but she’s not (yet) a beaten-down, joyless automaton either.  Heck, maybe I actually played the whole thing perfectly.  She derived 90% of the joy and mental stimulation the toy is capable of providing (the other 10% being the use of the hairbrush, which I’d flat refused to remove from the packaging).  I’d survived a battlefield test of my parenting tactics and ideals.  Alexa, for her part, had a not-so-painful lesson in the sad fact that you can’t always get what you want.  And if Target runs out of non-tampered-with Pokies, I’m sure some harried parent will shell out $4.99 for the one with the slightly damaged box.

From the Archives - Diaper Meltdowns

NOTE: this post is rated PG for very mild strong language and insinuations of antisocial acts.

Introduction

The other night was rough. First, our cat Misha—despite getting her typical middle-of-the-night breakfast—continued meowing plaintively and scratching at the kitchen door, a short flight of stairs down from our bedroom. Then our six-year-old, Lindsay, climbed into bed with us, having had a nightmare. (The nightmare was probably my fault; my bedtime story was a bit on the scary side, involving an ancient girl who was terrified at mistaking a helicopter, which she’d never seen before, for a giant dragonfly.)

In our bed, Lindsay did her semaphore routine, all elbows and knees, continually jabbing me, all the while loudly sucking on her fingers. Countless times I dropped back off to sleep only to be reawakened. She kept resituating herself, smoothing down her special blanket or adjusting her special pillow, which she’d brought in with her. When morning came and my alarm went off I was pretty much awake anyway, but far from rested. Of course, following all this Lindsay slept like a baby all morning. Here she is, still lounging in bed with Misha, our other nighttime nuisance, hours later.

Not that I’m complaining! These are the salad days, after all, sandwiched between the terribly difficult infant/toddler years and the dreaded teen years (which I’m told are particularly hard on parents of daughters). What’s a bad night of sleep here and there compared to the rigors new parents face, of night after sleepless night, and all those diapers on top of it? I’ll never forget the shock of bringing our firstborn, Alexa, home from the hospital and faking it as parents as we tried to learn the ropes.

The following stories are taken from an e-mail I wrote to my brothers and parents, probably as a plea for sympathy, when Alexa was about three weeks old. I reread that e-mail with a shudder, and a delicious sense of relief that those tough times are behind me.

Diaper Meltdowns – October 1, 2001

Erin, to my surprise, is handling the lack of sleep much better than I am. Perhaps it’s a new-mother hormone thing, or perhaps she’s just a better person than I, but she has a lot more patience. She does complain a lot about the cat, though, or so it seems. Every few hours she points out another thing the cat is doing wrong, the poor cat who micturates in her catbox and thus requires no changing, and never cries but instead meows rather demurely and sweetly, who is trying to adjust to the new household situation, which includes cruel banishment from the bedroom because she won’t stay out of the baby’s bassinet. But other than her complaints about the cat, Erin is pretty stoic. (Actually, she probably doesn’t complain about the cat all that often, but in my deranged, frazzled state, it seems to me that she does.)

Yesterday morning I pretty much boiled over. I was trying to change Alexa, and the towel we’d put down on the changing table was wet from an earlier changing (she tends to let loose right when you’ve got her diaper off), and so I wadded it up so that I wouldn’t soil her still-dry outfit, and set her down on this wadded lump, and then saw that she had this major boogerage in her eye (clogged tear duct), so I ran to the bathroom, jumping over a massive pile of bedding that was right in my way (it had been torn off the bed the previous night when Alexa had a diaper blowout).

The reason I ran to the bathroom, instead of walking, is that Alexa was screaming her head off, as though I were shoving bamboo beneath her fingernails. Then it took forever, like it always does, to get hot water out of the tap, and the screaming continued, loud enough to drown out my cussing, and then when the hot water finally came out, I knew that the washcloth would never hold the heat long enough to be comfortable because it’s a “baby” washcloth with less fabric in it than a Post-It would have it were made of molecule-thick cloth. Then I realized that the baby was in a precarious place because of the way I’d wadded up the towel on her changing station, and I feared she’d roll into the space heater we have on the table (to keep her warm during changes) and burn herself.

I leapt over the pile of clothes again, cleaned up the eye, changed the diaper, then realized that despite my best efforts, hazardous as they’d been to the welfare of the child, her outfit was in fact soiled, so I had to leap over the pile again to find an outfit from the bureau near the door. We have approximately 300 outfits for Alexa, many of which won’t fit for weeks or months, some of which haven’t been washed yet (we always wash new clothes lest the chemicals used in their manufacture irritate her skin), and some of which are the wrong type (i.e., sleeveless vs. sleeved) for a chilly morning. I finally found one, after a frantic period of searching (frantic because of the screaming, and because of the knowledge that my lovely daughter at any moment might roll into the space heater, which had become a half-ton ball of burning thermite in my mind), and again hurdled the giant pile of bedclothes.

Now I realized that I couldn’t change her on the changing table because of the vast flood of urine that had soaked everything despite my most irresponsibly dangerous wadding measures. So I moved her to the bed, and tried to wrangle her into her fresh garment. It had about 300 or so snaps, and not all of the male pieces are on one side of the garment. You need a degree from MIT to figure out how to snap everything into place. It’s not symmetrical either, and of course no two baby garments have even a remotely similar design. My fury at this point had invaded every cell of my body except from the wrists down, which I managed to control lest I accidentally harm my child. Finally I gave up and shouted “F––– THIS THING!” and hurled the offensive garment to its death. Actually, it didn’t even suffer from the landing, the damn thing, and I couldn’t pick it up and rend it into a thousand pieces, which would have been my choice, because it had Erin’s friend’s initials on the tag, meaning it’s only a loaner and has to go back, clean and intact, to its rightful owner, who can bloody well have it back right now as far as I’m concerned, perhaps soaked in my own urine since this godforsaken garment from hell will never touch the skin of my precious daughter.

So instead of rending the garment into a thousand pieces I did the flip-off dance. [Note to albertnet readers: you’ll just have to imagine this dance. I’m not posting a video.] It only helped a bit. Then I had to hurdle the fiendish pile of bedclothes once again, find another damn outfit from the 600 in the drawer, evaluate it not just in terms of size and laundering status but also in terms of the likelihood that I’d be able to properly fasten all the snaps along its bizarre appendages and whatnot. I found one, hurdled the pile of bedclothes yet again, and put the new garment on Alexa, who had been continuing to scream bloody murder the whole while, at a decibel level that guarantees she has a V0₂ max surpassing Lance Armstrong’s.

Having finally got my daughter changed, I picked her up, carefully ascended the Col du Bedclothes, made it safely down the other side, and brought the squalling youngster downstairs to her mother, who I hoped would be sitting on the couch, boob out, ready to nurse the baby into silence. Instead, Erin was vacuuming, further rubbing my nose in her superior ability to withstand lack of sleep. I sat down with Alexa and bounced her on my knee, trying to calm her down, and then Erin says, “Well, the cat is ruining this expensive rug.” This pretty much put me over. “Well, should we just put her to sleep then?” From my standpoint at the time this response was perfectly justified. Of course, from Erin's perspective—the more lucid one—my utterance must have seemed utterly bizarre. After all, she had given me the night off by sleeping with Alexa in the guest room, and was occupying her short period of respite from the baby by vacuuming, and had made a fairly innocent comment about the state of our handmade Turkish rug, and got shocking vitriol in response. Not a perfect domestic scene.

That’s not my first blowup, nor perhaps my most spectacular. The other night, I was trying to assemble the Diaper Genie, and could not get the damn thing to work. I don’t even want the Diaper Genie, and we’re only using disposables for a short time, but I figured we have it and should go ahead and use it. But I absolutely could not figure out how to install the bags that are supposed to hold the soiled diapers into a long linked-sausage configuration. Finally, after what was really only a couple of minutes, I became furious at it. It had no instructions, and didn’t seem particularly intuitive. The “refill,” which seems like a stupid name for the bag cartridge that was really the very first one ever installed, had directions on it, but they become obscured in step 2 out of 5 when you put the cartridge into the Genie. Now there’s a smart design! I had to keep pulling the cartridge out and reading ahead. It just didn’t make sense. I figured this thing had to be intuitive enough for the least educated, least intelligent trailer trash Diaper Genie owner to use; why couldn’t I, a college-educated Network Design Engineer, get it to work? I beat on the top of it with my fist, and then hurled it noisily down the stairs, much to the amazement and amusement of Erin and her friend, who’d come over to cook us a meatloaf and help out.

I phoned a couple of other new parents, for whom we bought a Diaper Genie years ago, and after a long period of intense discussion and troubleshooting we determined that what I have is an old, small-mouth DG in the box of a new, large-mouth DG, with the “refill” for the new, large-mouth DG. This is why it wouldn’t fit. Probably somebody re-gifted us a barely-used but obsolete DG, throwing in the modern-style refill to make it look new. But that won’t stop me from marching into Target with it and demanding a replacement. If they don’t pony up, I’m going to spread model airplane cement all over the damn thing and torch it right there on the showroom floor.

Baby peripherals aside, child-rearing is a hoot. Alexa is great. She’s getting cuter by the day, and is generally a very sweet baby. She’s a bit gassy, which is a bummer for everybody, and we can’t seem to burp her. But she’s eating up a storm nonetheless. I love to hold her and offer up my index fingers, which she grabs in her fists. We’ve even figured out how to get her, sometimes, to take the pacifier. That’s a big help because I can’t just sit there 24-7 with a finger in her mouth, and she does love to suck.

dana albert blog