Short Baby Poetry

One droplet,

Translucent, rolls downward

As slowly as time.

It shrinks,

Its trail growing longer

Running out of face.

His smile

Betrays neither awareness

Of the leak, or teeth.

I wipe his chin;

He drools again.

A Few of His Favorite Things

Oh, hello there. I thought today I’d use this space to collect together a few of Donovan’s favorite things. Now that he’s almost eight months old and he has more of a personality than ever, he’s changing all the time. Babies are fickle, capricious characters, and what they love today may be forgotten or even feared or despised tomorrow. So I guess I’d better type fast, so I can post this list before it becomes obsolete.

In no particular order:

Screaming. He’s discovered screaming, and he’d probably do it a lot more if he didn’t have to stop and giggle for about a half hour after every shriek.

Dog toys, so very much more than his own toys. My best business idea is probably the one where I go around buying up huge quantities of baby toys and dog toys, but then I market the dog toys to babies and vice versa because the only thing either of those groups wants is what the other has. Dogs and babies have a lot of money, right? A lot of buying power? This is a great plan.

(Really, anything that isn’t his to play with could fall on this list, especially if it’s something fragile and double especially if it’s something that he can use to try and accidentally inflict harm on himself. He can’t crawl yet, but he’s still very mobile thanks to his superhuman rolling ability, so I’d say he spends about 98% of his waking day journeying from one object I’m just going to take away from him to the next.)

Speaking of the dogs:

When dogs fight. Not like actual fighting, obviously, but these two doofuses (doofii?) like to spend just about all their waking hours roughhousing like lunatics, and based on the noises he makes in his sleep I think Miles even dreams about it, too. It’s Donovan’s favorite thing to watch, just about, as they tumble like the goons they are from room to room, landing often on my wife’s feet, to her pained chagrin. And on the subject of roughhousing like lunatics:

Roughhousing like lunatics. I read somewhere that when poppa lions are playing with their cubs, they pretend that the little guys are hurting them far more than they actually are in order to encourage them and build up their confidence in their fighting prowess. I forget where I read this, but it was probably on my Facebook feed, and so it was probably made up by someone trying to promote lion-based memes. Anyway, I don’t care if it’s true or not, so if it isn’t don’t bother to correct me, because it’s pretty adorable, not to mention that it provided me with a model on which to base my own father-son roughhousing paradigm. (I should clarify, in these sensitive times, that I mean roughhousing in only the mildest sense of the term – letting him grab my face, pretending to struggle to get away, etc. He inadvertently tried to play Mountain-and-the-Viper with me the other day, but luckily his little baby thumbs aren’t strong enough to, you know, crush my eyes and skull.) It’s one of his favorite things to do, but it’s also one of mine as well.

The music of Lily Allen. This one at least isn’t a phase. It’s one of the few things that have been constant about him for as long as I’ve known him (all his life). I can’t recall whether I’ve mentioned my son’s obsession with this British singer before on these pages, but my wife listened to her quite a bit when he was still on the inside, and now that he’s out in the world her music is the only one hundred percent effective method of calming him down when he’s fussy. All except her cover of Brittney Spears’ “Womanizer,” which he just hates for some reason and starts crying whenever it comes on.

What’s that, five things? (Not counting that parenthetical I stuck in there.) That ought to do it for now. I was going to close with a joke, but my dog stole my sandwich just now so I’m suddenly too pissed off to be funny right now. I invite you to share your favorite joke, dad or otherwise, in the comments below. 

Some thoughts on teaching my son about justice

So in keeping with my previously-expressed desire to use this space in part to record some of the wisdom (?) I hope to one day share with my son, when he’s old enough for more than sobbing, eating, and spitting up, I wanted to share a few words on the abstract subject of justice. I am a great lover of justice, but I find that in an unjust world it is often more important to love justice than it is to believe in it.

Here’s what I mean by that. Many of us, most of us even – and despite everything I DO lump myself in here, too – tend to have an unspoken and even a not-consciously considered believe and faith in the concept of justice as it should exist in our world. This can be necessary for the preservation of our own sanity, because the alternative is so much worse. The idea that we live in a fundamentally unjust society, world, or even universe – one not simply uncaring for justice but utterly and unknowingly unaware of it – is horrifying. Just as we have a need to believe in our own virtue – as well as that of our loved ones, as it reflects poorly on us if we care for the unvirtuous – we also need to believe that this virtue will be rewarded.

Of course, this is not true. The undeserving prosper, the innocent suffer, and we the witnesses in between attempt to make sense of it all. This, ultimately, is the great flaw in the belief in justice. Simply believing in virtue’s reward for oneself is admirable, even in its naivety, and often leads us to try and be our best possible selves. The problem comes when we project this necessary, sanity-preserving faith onto society, the world, and the universe at large.

When one cannot accept this void of justice, one makes excuses for injustice. This is one origin of victim blaming. When we witness (for example) the rape of a woman, we find ourselves able to “justify” this in our own minds by blaming not the rapist but the woman’s dress, behavior, location, or state of sobriety or lack thereof. While this can be a misogynistic train of thought and usually is, it does not always stem from misogyny itself but rather the need to calm our troubled minds by lying to ourselves that bad things do not happen to good people, and therefor when bad things do happen, those to whom they befall must somehow be deserving.

Therefore, for justice to exist, we must let go of the idea that justice does exist. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a passage from the Tao Te Ching (I’ve misplaced my Kindle so I’m using the Dr. John C. H. Wu translation instead now; I’m not sure which I prefer or really whether I’m qualified to have a preference that means anything), specifically chapter 18: “When the Great Tao was abandoned, there appeared humanity and justice.”

Order does exist, but at such a vastly macroscopic level that it is impossible for us to see, and it does not correspond with the ideals of law or morality to which we ascribe it. Rather, it is the natural order of cause and effect, that one thing flows from many others and many others from it flow, both certain and cosmically calculable, stretching on into the infinity of inevitability.

No joke today! I just want to publish this instead of putting it off any longer.

He is here! (as of three weeks ago...)

As you may have notice I’ve neglected the ol’ Blog and Grill a little bit lately, but those of you with even the most rudimentary powers of deduction can probably figure out why that is. My son is born! 

Donovan Douglas Wiles entered the world on November 20^th at 3:09 a.m. at 8lbs 0.01 oz and 21.5 inches, I think, I’ll have to check. After three days in the hospital and a grueling 17 hours of labor, my wife and I became parents.

Now that I’ve had him for a few weeks I can confirm a few things. I forgot who told me this, or if it was even something a friend said or something I read somewhere, but having a child is both the most difficult and the best thing I’ve ever done. My life is no longer my own, but in the best of all possible ways. The time I spend caring for him when he’s fussy or screaming, changing diapers and fixing bottles, can be a chore but not in the way that I’ve viewed chores before, as something I need to do and get through and finish to get back to the things I want to do, like writing or farting around on the internet or finding some way of wasting my time. It’s a necessity the way my basic biological imperatives are; caring for him is as natural as breathing or eating or sleeping, the things we do because we have to but we don’t mind or resent.

Okay, I’m both rambling and digressing, probably because it’s almost three in the morning and I’m only half paying attention to what I’m writing and mostly listening out for his fuss because he’s due to wake up again any minute. I’ll get back to his birth, at least a little bit. I don’t want to share a linear narrative of his birth story, both because that’s such a personal, vulnerable time and, with the exception of the very end, frankly a pretty fucking miserable one, and most of all because my mind isn’t working very linearly right now. I mean, it never is, but now less than ever. And this blog is less about telling stories and more about sharing thoughts and jotting down memories that I can revisit later.

In that spirit, here’s a few things that for me will always and forever remind me of the time that my wife gave birth to a child. First of all, Dunkin Donuts has this sweet black pepper bacon sandwich thingy that I tried for the first time the first morning I spent in the hospital, when I left to run out to Cumby’s for a coffee for Kaite. I like it a lot, and I got I think two more each of the following subsequent mornings. Since we got back from the hospital they’ve been advertising the shit out of that thing, and every time I see the commercial I remember that anticipatory excitement of driving back to the hospital, knowing that any day now, any hour now, it would happen.

By the way, if you are Dunkin Donuts or Cumby’s, you’re welcome for that free product placement.

Next, we have Adam Sandler and Adam Sandler starring as twins in “Jack and Jill,” no doubt the worst movie I’ve ever not-really-seen as it played with the sound off in the background once the labor really began. Actually whatever channel it was set to played a number of terrible movies one after the other, but this was the one that really kicked off that marathon of shit. And so for the rest of my life, whenever I see Adam Sandler in drag, I will remember the seventeen tortured hours I spent helplessly watching my wife in the worst pain of her life.

And finally (probably not really finally, but it’s nice to do these things in threes) Hitmonlee. Like the rest of the universe I don’t even really play Pokemon Go anymore because it just became such a grind towards nothing, but I fired it up a few times in the hospital waiting for the induction to take an labor to begin. The morning after Donovan’s arrival Kaite sent me out for chapstick, and while I was waiting in line with a stick of Burt’s Bees in hand (again, if you’re reading this, Burt, you’re welcome) I launched that app and hatched a Hitmonlee. Obviously it was… not the most significant thing I received that day, but now whenever I encounter a long-legged Pokemon with rubber bands up and down his arms I’ll remember that exhausted pride and anticipatory excitement I felt as I paid the gas station clerk and thought about everything that was still to come for the three of us.

Okay, that’s good for now. He’s starting to still again, and I need to hand him off to Kaite for her shift. I have to get up early tomorrow for my dentist appointment before work.

Cats and Tao

You know, in the early days of my wife's pregnancy, when the idea of having a child and becoming a father was still more abstract, I always figured there would come a time in the final trimester when the full reality of the situation would hit me all at once, when my impending parenthood would become shockingly and suddenly tangible. 

What I didn't realize is that I wouldn't have that epiphany once, but over and over again. Just about every single day. Sometimes more than once. USUALLY more than once. 

I'll be brushing my teeth (for instance) and think, "Holy shit, someday Donovan will start teething! And we'll have to go to the dentist! And then he'll start losing his baby teeth!" (That last point I hope I can manage to deal with… I'm not squeamish about much, but teeth coming out is something I'm REALLY squeamish about.)

And I'm having stranger revelations, too, things you don't typically think about when you think about becoming a parent. I realized the other day that I've probably named my last pet. Maybe not forever, but at least for the next eighteen years, and probably longer, depending on how many more kids we end up having after him.

Right now Kaite and I have two pets, a dog and a cat, and we've talked about the fact that that's what we'll probably always have. She's a dog person and I'm a cat person, as I think I've mentioned here before, and I kinda like that Donovan will grow up with one of each. Ruby is still a puppy, and while Sammy the cat had a health scare recently she came out of it stronger than ever. She's only thirteen, so she's bound to live at least several more years. 

The next cat we get, then, will probably be Donovan's, which means that he'll pick her name – though Kaite and I will reserve the power of the veto, I suspect. The next dog we get will probably belong to Donovan's hypothetical little brother or sister. 

I know there will come a time, of course, when Donovan and whatever siblings we end up producing for him to play with are grown up, off at college, moved away, and starting their own lives. But until then, if I want to name my own pet, I'm going to have to get another fish for my office. And I'm a bit hesitant to do that, after my complete and utter failure to keep my last fish, Robert Frobisher, alive for more than a week.

Not that this bothers me, of course – it's just kinda funny to think about. 

Before I get to this week's dad joke, I wanted to introduce a new segment to this blog. I often think of advice that I'll want to share with my son as he grows older – practical life advice, philosophical advice, and so on. So, I'm calling this segment, "Advice That I Want to Give My Son When He Gets A Little Bit Older But I'm Afraid I Might Forget In The Meantime." 

I think I've mentioned before that I'm not very good with titles.

Anyway, I've been studying the Tao Te Ching lately (Stephen Mitchell's excellent translation, which I highly recommend) and one thing that's really stuck with me is the Three Treasures or the Three Jewels, which are three basic virtues of Taoism that I've taken to heart: compassion, frugality, and humility. It's the last one that I want to talk about today. 

First, let me just clarify that "humility" is actually just the most concise translation of the third treasure. The full Chinese is not a single word but actually a six-character phrase, bugan wei tianxia xian, more literally translated by Mitchell as: daring not to be first in the world.

I feel like a lot of the traits that we would consider, for lack of a better term, traditionally evil come from the opposite of that – from putting oneself first in the world. Selfishness, greed, a disregard for the wellbeing of others, be they individuals, a community, or the greater whole of humanity. Humility is how we avoid falling into these negative patterns of behavior.

At the same time, though, I think that in the pursuit of virtue it's all too easy to fall into the opposite extreme, which like any zealotry can feel virtuous just through the power of its own enthusiasm. Having a respect for all humanity by definition has to include a respect for one's self. Perpetually putting the wellbeing of others before your own is no more fair, just, or right than the exact opposite.

I personally strive for balance in all things. That is why I would advise my son – or anyone, really – when faced with a difficult moral dilemma to simply take a step back and imagine the situation as happening to someone else, an imaginary third party in whom you have no investment. If you were reading a book or watching a movie and the protagonist found himself in your situation, how would you want him to respond? Usually, the answer will be neither with pure altruism at the expense of one's self, nor with pure egotism and self interest, but a third more nuanced path that balances the two. 

Of course this can be difficult, because we ARE invested in ourselves one way or the other, but it's a helpful thought exercise that works for me at least some of the time.

Moving on, today's Dad Joke of the Week comes courtesy of my father in law, and it's his own favorite dad joke. I've heard him tell it countless times (well, at least two or three, anyway).

Q: Why does a chicken coop only have two doors?

A: If it had four, it would be a chicken sedan.   

So if you like that one, thank me for sharing it with you. If you hate it, blame Bob. Either way, thanks for reading, and I'll see you next week!

P.S. Oh, actually, one more thing! I haven't done much self-promotion in a while, so I just wanted to remind you that if you've been enjoying this blog, please consider taking a look at my first novel, Soapy Animals, available exclusively through Amazon. It's not fatherhood related or really all that child friendly, but a couple people have liked it, and maybe you will too! Find it here!

No Halloween Baby

Happy All Soul's Day, everybody!

I don't think I mentioned this before, but my wife was hoping for a Halloween baby. Not really hoping, because it would be ten days early. More like hoping the same way that, when you buy a Powerball ticket, you're hoping that you're gonna win. Halloween is her favorite holiday and probably my second (after Arbor Day) and we already have about a zillion November birthdays in the family, including mine, so October 31^st would have been kinda neat.

But it's come and gone now, so one way or another Donovan is bound for a November birthday after all. Tomorrow his due date will be one week out… for what that's worth. I was two weeks late myself, so I'm prepared for him to follow in his father's footsteps. Though of course I hope he won't. Kaite is squarely in the "I'm so done with this" phase of the pregnancy, and I hate seeing her in this kind of discomfort. Plus, you know, we really want a baby.

Have you ever heard the old wives tale that girls come early and boys come late? I could have sworn that was a thing, but since the pregnancy began no one that I've said that to has any idea what I'm talking about. 

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about today was this thought that I've had several times now over the course of the past nine months but have never really articulated until now, so here it goes. When you reach a certain point in early adulthood where your friends and former classmates are starting to have kids, the easiest and most natural reaction (besides happiness, joy, etc) is to start feeling old. Even though you know you aren't, seeing so many people, or even ANY people, in your age group moving to the next stage of life is a stark, visceral reminder of the progression of your own aging. Childhood is over, and there's no pretending otherwise anymore in the way we did in college or the years following when our responsibilities began to blossom but hadn't yet taken over our lives.

It's a time of looking back over what has come before, what we've left behind, and what we can never return to. It's a very heavy page to turn. 

I had thought that the impending advent of my own fatherhood would do the same, but in a more extreme, personal way now that it's happening to me. I thought I would feel older and adultier than ever. But what I've found is that the opposite is true. Instead of looking back, I find myself looking forward and reflecting on just how much is still to come. Not just Donovan's babyhood and young life, but his school days, teenage years, and the teacher conferences and inevitable joys and frustrations that come from that. And beyond that, decades into the future, when he reaches the point in his life where I am now and I begin to reflect on becoming a grandfather. As I've said before my own father did not live to see this, but I plan to. 

And thinking about all that makes me feel young… or rather, reminds me of how young I really still am. Before the pregnancy the future was this nebulous and unpopulated unknown, and while of course it still is, being able to see and reflect on all the signposts along the way is an invigorating feeling that shouldn't have taken me by surprise, but it did.

Before I go, here's a classic dad joke for you! A cheeseburger walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve food here."

Ha! I love that one. See you next time!  

A Few Nursery Pics

I'm really sort of a huge dork about this. Lately I have only one default topic of conversation. I can't even go to the town dump without rambling to the dump guy that the reason I'm bringing three carloads of cardboard to be recycled is that my wife and I are expecting our first child, and we just had the shower, and we just finished setting up the nursery…

Speaking of which, the nursery is all set up now! In keeping with the storybook theme we framed the covers of some of our favorite children's books growing up and spent a Saturday hanging them all just right. The final step was putting up the ceiling fans that we bought two years ago and never got around to putting up until just now. My wife's cousin and her husband came over so he could help we with that and what should have been a simple 30 minute task ended up stretched into almost seven hours between Home Depot selling me the wrong equipment and our house's Kafkaesque wiring set up.

But I'll save the details of that for when I launch the Electrician Blog and Grill. For now, I wanted to share some of the pictures my wife took of the end result. So here you go, assuming I'm adding them to this correctly:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hey, it worked! Pretty cool, huh?

So, just some other thoughts, now. My favorite thing about this upcoming election – which is to say, the only thing about this election that doesn't make me want to barf myself to death – is that now that we're in the final weeks leading up to it, any story about it that I read online or hear on the radio is going to include some variation on the phrase, "With only twenty days left," or however many days are actually left. And for me, this has become (close enough) to a countdown to Donovan, too, since our due date is just one day after the election. 

Obviously the accuracy of this countdown is a bit dubious, but it's nice how quickly my internal monologue can shift from, "Grrrr, Trump," to "Oh yeah, Donovan's almost here!"

Last night I dreamed that we found out that the previous predictions and ultrasounds were wrong, and that we're having a girl instead of a boy. Kaite was so disappointed! So many of my dreams lately – the ones I can remember anyway – have involved either Donovan or my own father. My subconscious is rarely so… unsubtle.

Anyway, I'll leave you as always with Jeff's Dad Joke of the day. This is a good one, my favorite knock-knock joke of all time.

Q: Knock knock!

A:

Actually I realized this doesn't really work without you here to participate. That's too bad. Sorry for the disappointing end to this blog post. For what it's worth, it was Interrupting Cow. I was going to tell Interrupting Cow. If you don't know Interrupting Cow go ask your dad. He'll let you.

See you next week!

Bye!