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Her mother reads in the paper today...
Her mother reads in the paper that they are wrapping the old stadium in demolition fencing; three kids hardly out of their teens drove down from the thumb to pay their last respects, touch it before it was out of reach. "You'd better tell your dad you want to go today," she says. Juniper comes up to my room, up to my ear while I'm still sleeping: "I have a secret," she says. All I hear is "tiger foot prints." For many months we have been driving past it and she always tells me she wants to go see the giant paw prints that adorn the exterior of old Tiger Stadium up close. Despite the rain, today's the day...
Published June 26, 2008 PermaLinkAll Sweet Juniper Posts on /Parenting:
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June 23, 2008
On the way to Cedar Point amusement park...
On the way to Cedar Point amusement park for my eighth-grade class trip, a guy named Alex fell asleep on the bus and my friends and I whittled away the the hours competing for how many potato chips we could balance on his stupendously large lower lip. As an adult, Alex would spend some time in prison and I heard he lost one of his legs...
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June 12, 2008
In San Francisco, I once made the mistake of asking the Korean War-veteran-looking gentleman pushing the child in the next swing how old his grandson was. He laughed awkwardly: "It's my son actually, and he's almost one." When visiting, my 50-something mother-in-law would take the kid to Golden Gate Park and get asked what preschools she was considering for her daughter. We were twenty-seven when Juniper was born, and someone was always around to make us feel like this was scandalously young...
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June 11, 2008
During my wife's recent maternity leave, I always felt like I was running the third leg of a medley relay. It was my job not to lose our lead: to hold the baby, keep him content and quiet for the duration of my leg, and then make sure he didn't get dropped during the hand off to the anchor. Not only did the anchor have working milk ducts, she had that motherly prescience for what was wrong, that wordless, primal bond of murmuring and night. It was this way, too, when Juniper was a baby: I fell into that pattern of fathers who really come into their own when the baby is a bit older, more interactive. Admittedly, I fell hard for her then. But oftentimes, before that, I secretly felt as helpless as my charge... -
June 04, 2008
So we're using cloth diapers with the new baby. I haven't written anything about it, because frankly I'm not sure how to write about it without sounding like a hippie blowhard and I fear just by mentioning it, I'll receive half a dozen reactionary e-mails about how washing cloth diapers is just as wasteful as disposables and how dare I make my readers feel guilty for choosing their Elmo-saturated disposable Pampers, etc. Sure I could go on and on about how disposable diapers reflect our decadent, wasteful American values, and how now that the red Chinese have chosen disposables over traditional splitpants, these two superpowers will soon be embroiled in a new cold war with stockpiled mountains of superabsorbent polymer-based biological weapons. But then I'd have to go to early-morning yoga classes and move to Portland and shop for local organic produce. By bike...
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May 30, 2008
The children's books you wish celebrities would write, Vol. 4: A Metallica Board Book
Thanks to the mother in law, our shelf of celebrity-penned children's books grows with every visit. We've got Julianne Moore's book about the difficulties of growing up ginger, and Jamie Lee Curtis's book about being 50+ and Fabulous. Did you know John Lithgow writes children's books? I read them in a bad British accent (why couldn't it have been French Stewart who dipped his quill into the world of Children's Literature?) They say Bob Dylan is publishing a children's book version of "Forever Young." I hope it's as good as Will Smith's "Just the Two of Us." That song brings a tear to my eye every time, so you can just imagine what it does to me in illustrated form. "I wanna kiss you all the time/ But I will test that butt when you cut out of line." Gah! Waterworks! ...
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May 27, 2008
We're in some store and I pick up a greeting card with this picture of a baby taking a bath in a sink full of dirty dishes. Inside it reads, "Why dads shouldn't babysit."
Now, I'm not into the whole militant reaction to stuff like that. Why not wage a war against lawyer-joke e-mail forwards or sexist beer koozies? Who am I to deny some erstwhile Donna Reed a chuckle at the expense of her philistine of a husband who kept her in the kitchen all those years while he sunk deeper into the a*s groove of his barcalounger? I don't lecture women who say, "Oh, dad's babysitting today!" when I'm out with the kid(s). I figure this says a lot more about them and the men in their lives than it does about me...
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May 22, 2008
I am so tired of trying to write thematically-unified blog posts with not-quite-clever-enough titles and tidy conclusions. And Christ, aren't you tired of reading them yet? I worry that the way I write on this site has become so formulaic. Sometimes I finish a post and then wonder if it's real or if I have just written another parody of myself...
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May 19, 2008
The necessity of low expectations
When we first moved to this terrible, beautiful city, we realized that among those willing to stick it out here, there were two major camps: the misanthropes who wallow in every bit of proof that the city is failing, and the optimists with a perpetually rosy outlook on its vast, largely-untapped potential. We quickly decided that the best course of action was to simply accept this city just as it is, and not to get our hopes up too much. Don't expect the police to show up when you call 911, and when they do, welcome them as heroes. When you hear news about new development, don't expect it to actually happen. Don't expect your municipal politicians to actually be smart liars. If you can learn to love it for what it is, and not get too wrapped up in hope for what it could be, you will find yourself much happier here...
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May 15, 2008
All week I put on my work clothes two minutes before I leave the house. This way I always manage to make it out the door without a single drop of spit-up on my clothes. When I arrive at the office each morning, the first thing I do is take out the box where I left all my heels before I grew too pregnant to wear them. I run my hand across them, flip off my flats and pull out the most decadent pair that goes with my outfit: on Monday, black patent leather. Tuesday: wild orange pumps I picked up at a boutique in Chicago. As I step into the elevator Wednesday morning, heading back downstairs to get a cup of coffee, I feel positively civilized...
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May 13, 2008
One Saturday afternoon before my wife went back to work, she watched the baby while I took Juniper to the art theater to see four Buster Keaton shorts with a live pianist (Daydreams, The Boat, The Balloonatic, and the brilliant One Week). This was her second cinematic experience (her first I wrote about here). We had so much fun together. For days afterwards we talked about all the funny things that Buster did. I never saw a Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin movie until I was in my twenties, but as I started watching them I felt that I had seen it all before: and I had, sort of. The pratfalls and gags of early silent comedy had been recycled again and again by the cartoons I watched as a kid. As a parent I find myself overly concerned with narrative: before we get to cartoons, I want her to start at the beginning...
