You see, these toys started out as generic labels: bear, puppy, bunny, etc. but for some reason, it has become my habit – nay – my duty to name them all and import, to some of them, a back story.

The newbwife laughs at my almost compulsory need to name them.  And name them I do: Gomez the laughing mutant dog, Tyrone the camouflage tiger, Woody the dolphin from Wildwood, Floaty the toy crab, Augustupus the toy octopus, the finger puppets Claude the Haitian crab and Jerome the Lion with a Scottish accent.

Am I the only one who does this? Maybe the guy who wrote Genesis had the same compulsion and transferred it to Adam:

Genesis 2:19 (King James): And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

Sometime I wish I had the heads up display of The Terminator. Not only for the ability to access vehicle information at a glance, but so I can track and assess the threat level surrounding the newbdaughter.

Having a fairly mobile and exploratory one year old is an exercise in constantly monitoring what she’s doing, where she’s doing it and – here’s the paradigm shift from early baby – where she’s going next.

When she sat happily on the floor, I could control what was within her reach. I knew that whatever she grabbed was staying there and if I moved it, she wasn’t going to go after it. Even when she was crawling, there was a height limit to what she could explore.

Now that she’s standing, that height limit still exists  (if a little higher), but she is almost able to reach over table height and grab whatever catches her eye.  Even that is not the biggest threat to her safety right now. Gravity is.

We adults take for granted how gravity works. We know that the world is full of edges beyond which gravity will pull us. A six inch high curb, to us, represents a very short downward distance.  To my thirty inch high daughter, it represents twenty percent of her body height. You or I could easily catch ourselves if we stumbled over an eighteen inch step, but one-year-olds have no idea how to reverse the effects of gravity. Which means they fall.

A lot.

So when I’m with my daughter, I’m always on the look out for the next thing she’ll fall from, on or into and I’m making sure her landing area is free from harm. For those times she decides to just sit down on nothing but air, I catch her. Every potential fall is identified as either acceptable or in need of intervention.  This means calculating all the possible vectors she could follow as she plunges down every time she moves and then positioning myself to best affect a rescue. I do all of this while trying to maintain an outward appearance of calm reassurance as she looks back from the bottom of my spiral staircase, as if to ask “Can I do this, Daddy?”

Of course you can, darling girl. I’m going to encourage you to explore and I’m going to let you take some falls, but not the ones that will get you really hurt. And hopefully you’ll feel safe enough to make your own way but not so looked after that you feel stifled in your journey.

This is never going to end, is it?

From the moment my wife got pregnant I was suddenly very aware that children are kind of everywhere: at the bagel store, at the grocery store, event at some bars.  I guess this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it was surprising how all of a sudden, I noticed them all the time. Not only that, but I got that kind of goofy warm fuzzy feeling knowing that would soon be me pushing the stoller around the streets of my neighborhood or walking through the bookstore with the baby hanging off of me in the bjorn. Yep, a picture of 30-something breeder happiness that hasn’t worn off yet.

It is possible, of course, that I notice children more often now that I go to places not only frequented by families and children but also at the times that we are out and about.  That’s right, hungover twenty-something brunchers, young parents like their Bloody Marys and frittatas as much as you but our brunch hour is 10:00am, which is roughly four hours after I wake up.  We go to dinner at 5:00 because we’re putting kids to bed at 8:30. We take the subways after or before rush hour so the kid doesn’t get trampled.  Which means our paths never cross.

So, remember that the babies are out there. You just have to know where to look.

You do want your child to be safe, right?  Of course you do, because you imagine what life would be like if you have an accident and something happens to your kid. You know you would spend the rest of your life remembering how you stopped pulling on that strap just because your fingers were cramping up.  Sure, that’s a good reason to risk your child’s life.  Slacker.

Not wanting to live with this eternal guilt, you approach the installing the seat knowing that you will do what you must to complete the task properly.  And then you realize that means standing on the car seat, putting your back against the roof of the car and pressing down, while simultaneously adjusting the straps to their maximum tightness and positioning them to fit within the specific three inches the manufacturer has designated. So you wedge your six feet of grown man into a three foot space and achieve these yogic positions for the better part of fifteen minutes because if you don’t: your kid will die.

Maybe this is all a ploy by the yoga-industrial complex to get more fathers involved.  I’ve been to my fair share of yoga classes and enjoy a good stretch as much as the next guy, but just don’t ever let yourself dress like this yoga daddy.  Really dude, you don’t need to wear the leggings and the beads. Especially the leggings.

1)  a mini bottle of Johnson’s baby powder
2) an empty box of children’s Tylenol
3) an empty diaper box
4) a half-empty water bottle
5) a book, any book

Now don’t get me wrong; we have plenty of toys in the house. From developmental to stuffed. It’s just that none of them have consistently captured her attention like these five have. The lesson? Let her find her own toys, and get out of the way.

From oldest to youngest, the four of us would peel back the bun, fish out the tangy green offender, throw it on the plastic paper wrapper and then make the burger disappear. My father would inevitably take all of this pickled detritus and either add them to his own burger or pop the slices in his mouth as a snack. This was a practice more inscrutable to our child brains than my mother’s act of reading magazines backwards.

This was not the only food we cast aside that my father scooped up. When Easter rolled around and the baskets were surveyed for their jelly bean deposits, the black ones were left laying on the bottom like pyrite in a panner’s sieve. Until Dad got to them. For some reason none of us could comprehend, he seemed to actually enjoy these medicinal flavored jelly treats. ‘Twas passing strange.

Now there may be some biological reason for this change in tastes, like changes in the taste buds or something. But I think there is a specific father thing going on here; while we would probably prefer the red jelly bean or our kids’ fries instead of their pickles, there is no way we enjoy these treats more than our young children. How do you eat a red jelly bean, even when your kid isn’t looking, knowing that will remove that exact quantity of joy from their lives? How do you tell them to eat their pickle when you know that would subtract from the treat you’re providing?  But you certainly can’t let them go to “waste.” So you eat them.

Maybe I’ll learn to actually like pickles and black jelly beans and whatever other foods my daughter rejects. In the meantime, I’ll just continue to eat them and call it an act of love and, apparently, tradition.

And then you send her out in the world. Where she catches the most virulent germs known to man.  You get the call from day care that she’s got a fever or has thrown up; you go fetch her and bring her home to wrap her in a cocoon of love and attention and begin to nurse her back to health. You pay attention to bowel movements like they are some sort of augury revealing  the workings of the universe. You cast about for the perfect food, the best medicine, the right clothes; all so you can heal your child.  And after the twenty daily diaper changes and nightly sessions of screaming her displeasure with your inability to fix her, she does get better.

And then she pays back your hard work and watchfulness by passing the virus on to you.  Now you have to suffer the ignominy of explaining to your coworkers that you have an upset tummy that is somehow bad enough to keep you from going in to the office; the shame of adding yet another person to take care of to your wife’s burdens; the humiliation that you are not bigger than these bugs. They win. Every time.

Buy a hazmat suit.

Stressed out at work? Your baby has no idea what work is – pick her up.
Get a little gaggy at the contents of those diapers? Your baby laughs at your discomfort – change her.
Just want to sit down and watch a game? Your baby isn’t interested – entertain her.
Want to eat dinner with your wife? Your baby is hungry NOW – feed her.

The baby boss is not interested in your reasons for not providing her with everything she needs. She will not tolerate any lessening of the services you deliver. Once you’re in with the baby, you’re in for life.

There is an upside to all of this:

Is your boss at work giving you shit? Your baby doesn’t care – you’re still the best man in the whole world.
Think there’s no good in this world? Look at your baby smiling – instant hope.
Need a laugh? Wait ten minutes – she’ll do something cute to make your whole day.

Just make sure you keep coming up with what she needs. Otherwise, she’ll bust you out like the Bamboo Lounge in Goodfellas.



This came in handy in the early months when every noise needed to be quickly analyzed and appropriately classified into the basic baby categories: needs food, needs comfort and has gas. Take notes when your wife tells you that one particular pitch means one thing and the other means another. Learning this knowledge will make everyone happier.

However, as with all superpowers, there is a downside. You can’t just stop hearing whenever you want to. You hear stuff; it’s not like you can close your ears. Neither can your wife.

So, you and the mother of your child are in the house and the baby makes a sound. Nine times out of ten, that sound is minor and quickly classified as “non-urgent.” But there are noises that require a little more concentration to classify.

Do not attempt to talk to your wife during these moments. Even if you have managed to hear the same noise and have classified it as “the baby is upset but she’ll be asleep in three minutes” and have accordingly moved on, your wife has not. She will spend those three minutes listening to the noise and, in my house, watching the corresponding video on the baby monitor until it ends and the child is back to a peaceful state.

It’s like there’s some genetic switch that makes a mother unable to think about anything else while her child is making sounds of distress. This is a good thing. You want your woman to be as protective of your baby as a lioness to her cub or a eagle to her chick. But don’t compare mothers to animals, aloud. They’ll hear you. And then they’ll come after you in their 70′s track suits and feathered hair.