To swing or not to swing…
We were definitely the idealistic, principle based parents when we first started dreaming about what it would be like to have a child of our own and what we’d do with that responsibility. Dreaming turned to planning and we tried to figure out what was necessary and what was beneficial, and on the opposite side of that, what could be thrown out with the archaic parenting trash.
One of the ways that we decided we were going to split from the parenting tree was that we weren’t going to do the usually glut of child furniture. The thought of having our beautiful loft cluttered with swings and padded cornes, and bright colored baby playstations sent a chill down our collective spines. The first thing was the swing. They always looked so garish. A huge monster of plastic and frill that sang crappy little tunes. The kind of thing that consumed your living space and made you a slave to repeatedly pushing it’s restart button.
Then we hit the point where we needed a break from constantly holding our baby. Exhaustion, tired arms, just wanting to maybe hold each other instead of the little bundle of joy. Problem is, most babies like to be rocked. To be comforted by motion. So we gave in and bought a swing. As it turns out, the deluxe models of swings are not the only ones on the market. There are also travel swings which are much smaller and simpler. We got on of those little puppies and man was that the best decisions we ever made. Worked like a charm. Didn’t even look like a circus prop either.
I think the morale of this story for us was that you can’t fight system completely. There are reasons all of these things exist and are ubiquitous. However, you can have tiny victories along the way.
They are smarter than you think
Was reading this article and it wasn’t surprising me at all with it’s conclusions. It basically is all about how babies and children are much more intelligent than they are given credit for. It goes over how psychologists have viewed child’s minds in the past and how mostly it was that they were either constantly confused or a blank slate. I think a majority of people feel that way. Babies seem, from the outside, to be dysfunctional adults, almost mentally handicapped. However, I know now, having a 5 month old, that is completely off base. The best simile I can make is that they are like an extraterrestrial crashed to earth and forced to learn how this planet works.
Noam’s mind is incredible. It never ceases to amaze me every day with the way he understands things, picks them up, solves problems, analyzes things. Most of the time its something I can see in his eyes that tells me he isn’t just dumbfounded, but more so perplexed or curious when he sees things that are new or confusing. I’ve come to see children/babies as uneducated humans instead of mentally retarded offspring. It isn’t that he is any less intelligent than I am, he just hasn’t had the time to learn yet.
Baby Bump
I miss the baby bump. And the baby hump. And the baby gargantuan mountain stomach.
If there is one thing that is true about having a baby, it goes by quickly and yet it takes forever. It’s such an immense responsibility at the same time as being this incredible fleeting moment. When I say responsibility, I mean it in a sense that you can’t really comprehend before you have a child, so if you are childless and reading this, good luck. Maybe if you had a pet that you loved and combined that with taking care of your sick grandparent but add in the fact that you created this thing with your bodily fluids, then you can sort of get close to that feeling that this little creature is owning your life like nothing has.
And I’m digressing, probably due to the fact that all of these big emotions and feelings constantly intermix in the wake of a birth. The responsibility thing is probably another post.
But, yes, the baby bump, it was here and passed like a ship in the night. Just like my ability to make fat puns about Hope has passed, she’s already back to her pre-birth weight. Those months where you are pregnant, they are something special. We are at the time when the idea of another child is springing up in conversation. And no, we aren’t anywhere close to saying that is a possibility. The idea just has had a chance to poke its gnarly little head into our realm of contemplation lately, and the key take away is probably that I could see it being worth it just to experience that time where there is a living thing inside the stomach of your beloved and its growing, to have that again and maybe take better care to enjoy it.
Granted, I don’t take too much time to think that we wasted anything, or didn’t experience it enough, that is a fool’s way of thinking. I do think, however, that simply by having a second child you would experience it in a different way because the thing you might have missed before would seem more prominent since you went through it before.
The main thrust of this, though, is that, man, that was a sweet time when the seed was growing and I could just hold onto the both of them simple by holding Hope and wrapping my arms around both of them.
His first shower.
The constant flow of culture
In a recent post to A Whole Lot of Nothing, Matt Haughey made a list of things that he was going to have trouble explaining to his daughter when she was older, due to the fact that the stuff in this list wouldn’t exist any more, having been replaced by newer technology.
“I remember the day we got cable”
“I remember the day I finally got broadband internet”
“The Safety Dance was the first 45 single I bought”
“My brother got one of the first CD players on our block”
“I owned many, many cassingles”
“For ten years, I watched a 19″ TV from across a large room”
“I remember the Tears for Fears CD costing almost $20″
“My first cellphone charged you money just for keeping it turned on”
“I once delivered bundled newspapers as a kid, on my bike, and later in college, using my car”
“There was a time when you couldn’t buy music digitally from any record label, but you could download it or convert your existing music for free”
“When I was 11, our phones had cords and you had to put them onto this device, then tell your Commodore computer to call Compuserve, and it was basically just a crappy text-based encyclopedia and a private message system”
I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately, watching my son grow and mature every day, that soon we’d be talking, and with talking comes explaining the world to him. There are certain things that he’ll never understand fully, and others that my parents might have thought I wouldn’t understand but that I’ve embraced, ie: the record player. I’m sure if my parents would’ve made a list of things they’d have to explain to me when they talked about it since it didn’t exist any more, both record players and 8 tracks would be on there. I own a record player, I’ve never used an 8 track. I think I’ve seen one 8 track cartridge once. Music seems to be the technology where changes happen hard and fast. Noam will probably think CDs are ridiculous. There is nothing special about them like there is about vinyl, and there is no reason for him to choose a CD over an mp3, but who am I to make that prediction? So with that in mind, here is my list, let’s see how it pans out 15 years from now:
- I remember having to disconnect the family phone, plug my computer into a phone line, and dial into the internet company in order to wait five minutes for Yahoo’s homepage to slowly load up.
- I remember playing Atari on the old black and white tv.
- I remember that Joaby was the first of my friends to get a Nintendo after they came out. He only had one controller and we would share back and forth playing mario brothers.
- I remember laser disk.
- I remember having to drive 20 minutes to get “bottled water” although it wasn’t really bottled, you’d take a container and bottle it yourself.
- I remember when there was only one coke and one pepsi.
- I remember stacks and stacks of VHS tapes which were the only way you were going to watch moving pictures if you couldn’t afford to go to the theater.
- I remember toys with tiny tiny pieces.
- I remember being part of the elite group of kids at school that got to be part of the computer club which gave us access to the only computers in the school.
- I remember typing my first school reports, on a typewriter.
- I remember pouring over the encyclopedias that were stored in my room, learning about the world. I didn’t have any other way to look things up when I had a question.
- I remember having to listen to the radio for hours before a song I liked would come on.
- I remember making mix tapes, on a cassette tape.
- I remember having to write in cursive until 5th grade.
- I remember being excited when we got a super long phone cord for the house phone because I could take it out of the kitchen and into the living room and lay on the couch while I talked. Privacy felt great.
- I remember rotary phones.
Sleep when you’re dead, or just sleep now
“Sleep-deprived people lack reason. They are dark shadows of gloom. They become tetchy and irritable. Everyone seems an idiot, and the world is hostile. One friend says he gets into a sort of murderous rage, and he doesn’t realize that his fury is directly caused by his lack of sleep until he finally gets some rest. Sleep is a care-charmer. So follow the Spanish, the Mexicans, the Africans. Wherever people have a greater degree of control over their everyday lives, they nap. Sleep will make you strong and beautiful. We are always banging on about how rich we are in the West, yet we cannot organize our time efficiently enough to allow ourselves a nap in the day. What fools. Let us sleep.”
—Drink as much beer as you can and then lie in bed.
And the main theme here is to nap with your children. Put in the time, put down your shit and play with them. Take a break and lay down with your kid. In the end, everyone is happier. Well rested people are easier people to deal with and before you can blow out your birthday candles three times, they won’t need or want to take a nap with you any more. More than likely, you aren’t missing much anyway.
Family Portrait
We’re getting good at leaving the house, god bless our little hearts.
Pride in Statistics
We recently got Noam’s one month checkup, and as is natural we wanted to hear good news. Just being alone as a couple, spending all of our time with him, you start to get creeping fears that some things aren’t normal. Eventually you start thinking that his snorting and huffing means he has pneumonia. Or maybe that the little flap of skin that sticks out farther than the rest means a botched circumcision. Or maybe even that his fussing means he is the dreaded colic baby. Well, he’s none of those and as per usual, a trip to the doctor usually sucks the drama right out of most health scares.
What he is, however, is large. 95 percentile in height, 75 percentile in weight, and much to our relief, 50 percentile in head size. And from that, I got my first real dose of abstract parental pride. He didn’t actually do anything that he had control over. We didn’t really do anything that made him grow. Hearing those stats though made me glow with pride. Might as well have gotten accepted to Harvard or lifted a Buick over his head. We both felt like we had a super human baby and that he was special. When I think about it, I know it’s irrational and that it just means he’s big, but I’m still proud and I think it boils down to two things:
- He’s healthy
- Magic Parent Fairy Dust that makes you proud of anything that happens with your kid
I can’t wait to cheer him on in all the trivial moments of his life because it seems to me like him tying his shoe will be the same as winning the Nobel prize.
Advancements in Baby Holding and Kissing Methodology
Advancements in Baby Holding and Kissing Methodology from Joshua Tuscan on Vimeo.
We like to play.
Ways to Destroy a Marriage (relationship)
- Be contemptuous
- Bring your work home (emotionally)
- Rush through your ‘family life’ in order to spend time with yourself
- Be painfully honest with friends/colleagues about your relationship
- Communicate through your kids
- Refill hedonistic supplies (”look elsewhere for affirmation of identity”)
This list comes from The Last Psychiatrist in response to an article written by Rob Dobrenski on the subject of what makes marriages fall apart. I’m not married, but I have been, and besides, the nature of any given relationship defines it moreso than any label. Hopefully we’ve all come far enough along to acknowledge that by now.
It’d be good to go to the Last Psychiatrist and read the expanded explanations of each of these points, but I have to say that this list is very much the truth. It takes way more integrity and responsibility to keep a relationship healthy than most people have in themselves. It’s always easier to walk away or build yourself up by pointing out faults, but it’s not always the self empowering action that its made out to be. via Lone Gunman