My in-laws and new nephew are coming up for a visit this weekend. It's about a five hour drive, but will apparently take longer because they need to stop so the baby can feed on the way. When my mother in law heard this, she chuckled and said, "I remember the days when we'd just grab you from the back seat and feed you while we were driving." This kind of story cracks me up, because I feel like we were such a free-wheeling bunch back in the seventies. Things got so... careful after a certain point.

There was an image in a novel I like of speeding down the highway at seventy with the kids jumping up and down on the back seat and screaming their heads off with glee. There is something so lovely and free about it, even though the parenting gurus would bust a nut at the thought. I feel like the contemporary version of this image is the kid sitting in a car seat in the back of an SUV placidly watching a DVD while the parent stays calmly and rationally under the speed limit. They pass by one of those "Your speed is..." signs and adjust accordingly. All is calm. All is well.

I wonder if this shift is unique to child raising, or if it's simply reflecting broader cultural changes that have occurred since I was a kid. Has the need for this degree of safety pervaded other aspects of our lives, or is it just that people have become extra protective of their children, specifically?  Has the significance of children themselves changed since, say, the seventies? Part of me feels like they've become the ultimate accessory in some people's thinking. Babies so in right now. Then again, it could be the fact that people like me are having fewer children, so we've become that much more protective.

Don't get me wrong. There's no way in hell my kid's going to ride without a seat belt. I think that part of me just likes the image as a romanticized image. Simpler times and all that. At least we have iPads now.

How's that for a random finish? Have a great, safe weekend, everyone!

It's not a bad analogy for the way amazing feats work (get it, feats?). You start with something small and unsure, with a definite goal in mind, and you work towards it through persistence, determination, and patience (and a little impatience at times). It's amazing that every person you see walking around was once a teetering, incapable little tot. I know I went straight from crawling to running... into things. It took some time to sort it all out.

What's really cool is that if you pursue the analogy, all of the great leaders and thinkers and entrepreneurs in the world once moved with complete ineptitude. It's only through a whole bunch of trial and error and encouragement from others that anybody was or is able to succeed. As we grow, external motivation is replaced with self-motivation, and parents are replaced with teachers and mentors, but the same basic principle persist throughout a person's life cycle.

I taught university English for a couple of years, and I have to say that nothing was more frustrating than when students had forgotten the baby-step principle. For whatever reason, a lot of people as they grow forget about pursuing a vision. They forget about learning things by small increments. And they forget about the fact that total, abject uncertainty can be the parent of accomplishment. Nothing in uncertainty necessarily foretells disaster. It seemed like half my time was spent convincing students that they didn't already know everything there was to know, and that it wasn't a bad thing. The other half was spent trying to tech them how to use a goddamned comma, but that's another post...

This summer I've written most of a novel, and I think I was able to do it through the simple procedures for learning that I had as a child. I started out with a very sketchy set of ideas and then slowly organized them into a more coherent picture of what I wanted to create. Then I wrote it one small step at a time. I knew roughly what I wanted it to look like, and I proceeded to create it with disdain for every blunder and mishap along the way. I hesitate to use the word "natural" when it comes to describing this process, but I think that we are born with a pretty good idea of how to do great things. The big challenge is remembering that we can still do it when we're older.

There was a debate that went on for me for years while I was deciding if I wanted to have a kid. One of my favourite comedians, Doug Stanhope, encapsulates this debate well when he suggests that his greatest service to humanity was getting sterilized. In his view, the absolute last thing the world needs is another baby sucking up resources. He says if you want to do your bit, get the snip.

So, honestly, why didn't I? I know all about the biological drive to have a kid. It's actually pretty strong, and it's constantly being reinforced by the media, but I'm curious about what stories people tell themselves about why they want to have a kid. How do they resolve the debate about the fact that they might be adding some monster to the earth? Do people even think about it? Do they just have a kid because, and make up the story afterwards? Everybody thinks their kid is going to be an architect or doctor or whatever, but what about the other side -- the one you're not supposed to even joke about?

I know it sounds like I’m being particularly grim here, but it’s definitely not my intention. I just like to explore and share ideas. I like to look at things from all angles. I’m kind of fond of the idea, for example, that my kid will be able to add something to the world. I doubt I’m going to be a high-pressure pageant-dad or anything, not that they add anything besides magictime sparkledust anyway, but I would like to encourage my kid to be the most he or she can be, on his or her own terms.

Doug Stanhope definitely has a point, though, in his decision to forego children. Maybe the universe itself would be better off with humanity’s extinction. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t. I’ve clearly banked on the latter, not because I know I’m right, but because at some point you have to make a call.  It’s true that my kid may just end up being a drain on the world’s already drained resources, but then again, it could be the person that ends up developing a clean energy technology that allows us to strike a better balance with nature. If I’m really lucky, my kid will be the next Doug Stanhope. That dude’s funny as hell.

Yesterday my wife went for a doctor's appointment to check up on the pregnancy, and something amazingly cool happened. I guess because she's on the thin side, they were able to use the Doppler thingamajigy to detect the baby's heartbeat, three weeks earlier than with most. I wasn't there, sadly, but apparently she first heard this low, deep heartbeat, which was hers, and then when they moved the device towards the baby all of the sudden there was this speedy little tickatickaticka coming from junior's thumper (between 120 and 160 beats per minute at this age, I'm told).

We're into the tenth week now, which is just bonkers. I guess the baby is starting to move around, and is now the size of a prune, which for some reason is not as cute as its previous stage as a cocktail olive. I guess we all go through our ugly stages, and I'm loving that kid no matter what. I can't wait until it's an apple. Who doesn't love apples?

Another kind of random thing that happened was that the nurse seemed to want my wife to have morning sickness. Yes, you read that right. Last time she visited and said that her sister didn't have any morning sickness, the nurse emphatically stated that family members are no predictor of your own patterns. This time, when my wife said that she'd lost a pound, the nurse asked if it was because of morning sickness. When my wife said no, the nurse pressed on, almost disappointed, "No vomiting?" Nope. Sorry about that.

I guess we'll just file that one under miscellaneous random stuff that happens to your while you're preggers. I'm imagining the nurse didn't have such a good time with her own morning sickness. As is usually the case, we judge others by the standard of our own experience.

My friend's brother and his partner decided that they were going to keep their baby from seeing any screens for the first two years of her life. That means no TVs, computers, iPads, smart phones or anything else in the house for two years, neither for parents nor child. My friend says the results are amazing. The baby has a daunting vocabulary for a child her age, because everyone reads for entertainment. She's extremely curious and loves to be outdoors. I guess it takes a lot of work to keep up with her, but it sounds like the experiment has been worth it in a lot of ways.

When she is in the presence of a screen now, apparently the change is very noticeable and a little freaky. She immediately zones in on it, and her personality transforms. She stops asking questions. She stops talking altogether. She stops looking for creative ways to entertain herself. It's one of those uncomfortable facts that suggests all of our greatest fears about what we're doing culturally to our kids really isn't in their best interests. So what do we do with this info?

Well, the fact is that while technological overload may end up harming kids' ability to enjoy the world, a good level of technological comfort is also vital to success in so many careers nowadays. The real question for me is how to balance the needs of a kid to be technologically proficient, while still being able to think outside the confines of the screen. When I see videos of two-year-olds zipping through an iPad like they've been doing it for twenty years, I wonder if they'll every be able to delve into the guts of the thing and see it as something that has been built by human hands and thought. I know that I certainly don't marvel at the inner workings of my car every time I go for a drive. As long as it works, I don't care what makes it tick. Is it basically the same thing? If these technologies are essentially our windows to the world, is it important to know how to "open the window", as it were? I wish I had clear answers to these questions, but asking them's a good place to start, I suppose.

I do know that when I see people walking down the street on a beautiful day, fixated on their teeny tiny phones, I think the screenless parents might have a good point about just doing away with all this nonsense or pretending it doesn't exist. There's a question burning through all of this: do screen technologies expand or limit our world? I think when it comes to my kid, I would like to present screen technology as one mere alternative among millions of others. We won't be going screenless, but we also won't be screen-babysitting. I say that with confidence now. I just hope it's still true when the time comes to test it!

When I was going through grad school. I remember a particular class where one of my professors suggested that the process of writing sometimes feels like that of birthing a child. Of course she had never had a child of her own, so I was skeptical of the analogy, but as I fought my way through every gruelling word of my own doctoral thesis, I was often reminded of the comparison. It hurt a lot, at least psychologically, and it went on for four long years (six if you count my course work). I definitely called it "my baby" a few times, though by the end it was the obnoxious teenager I wanted to boot out the door. I wonder, Is there any validity to this analogy?

There's an interesting, and decidedly sexist history of thinking of intellectual discovery as a kind of giving birth. For hundreds of years, old, dead, mostly white guys argued that while women sustained the species in the form of children, great men gave birth to the idea-children that sustained civilization. In a sense, the notion of passing ideas through the generations like so many children was a way of attempting to cut women out of the humanity equation altogether. Even the idea of the patronymic, taking the name of the father, suggests that while the body of the baby may come from the mother, the idea of it comes from the father.

While I'm still skeptical whether the comparison between physical and intellectual pain is valid, it's nice to see that this gendering of the intellect and the body has loosened up in recent years. Ideas are up for grabs now, and while it's still women who give birth to children, families can have any number of parental configurations. While some boring people lament this blurring of traditional roles, I see it as a huge and awesome multiplication of possibilities for our species. Rock that. Sexism obviously still exists, but there have been positive shifts that should be acknowledged as the victories they are.

The reason I also bring all this up was that I was reminded of this birth analogy again this week when the Higgs Boson discovery was announced. One of my favorite images was that of Peter Higgs, the one who first postulated the particle, weeping with joy over the fruition of his intellectual labour. He looked like someone who had just given birth. He may be an old white guy, but his discovery suggests we live in a world where the fundamentals underpinning reality are not as highly differentiated as we have historically made them out to be. Rock that times two.

Deep much? Let me leave it at that, and say happy Friday all!  Hope you have a profound, reality-bending, brilliant (or, barring that, relaxing) weekend!

Ha ha, that title has to be the worst thing I've ever written. It reminds me of this term I came across in academia a few years ago: glocalization. It's, like, when something's, you know, global and local. Ouch on both neologisms, but we'll proceed nonetheless.

So what is imagicnation? (oh God, my eyes!)  Last night I was lying in bed, not falling asleep, thinking about pretty much everything including this wild and crazy baby business that's headed our way. Suddenly, for the first time, I was able to imagine vividly what it would feel like to hold the baby, and see its face. I could picture a living, breathing being that I loved so tremendously it was dizzying, and I saw that this being would be part of the rest of my entire life. Suddenly, as if by magic, there will be this brand new little person right there in our midst.

Imagicnation

Okay, okay, I'll stop with that, even though it cracks me up. All I'm really doing is looking for a way to acknowledge that I had one of those moments that was totally minor and enormous all at once. For lack of a better description, suddenly my baby was real. Now it's back to being surreal, but I felt something change inside, nonetheless.

This was an excellent kick in the pants. I've heard of dads going crazy when their kids are born, suddenly trying to write that entire novel they've been putting off, or compose that concerto or try out for the Mets or whatever. All this miraculous advanced warning made me realize that for my creative projects its now or never (or at least not until I'm retired). I've got the time, but there's pressure.

In fact, I guess you could say it's like a seven-month prexsurcize. Ha ha. I clearly need more sleep already.

I realize that I haven't posted directly on the pregnancy itself for a while, so I though I'd give an update on that front. Basically, all is well! This week junior graduated from an embryo to a fetus, and to the best of my understanding is about the size of a cocktail olive now. Heh. Congrats on the big leap, little one! We have an ultrasound scheduled for mid-July, which is exciting, because the end of July will also mark the end of the first trimester (a moment when we will breathe a huge sigh of relief).

This will be the first ultrasound where we'll be able to make out some of our baby's features, including a profile. That's going to be amazing. I hope I keep it together. Apparently the fetus is now a boy or a girl, though I guess we won't be able to find out which for awhile yet. We have decided to find out the sex in advance, for reasons unknown. Usually I have some big explanation for a decision like this, but I think I'll be mysterious for a change ;)

Physically, my wife says she still doesn't feel anything much yet, except for the occasional massive wave of tiredness. Please don't tell her, but this is no different from her non-pregnant pattern. She also had to stop drinking her chlorella-flax-oil-spinach-powerberry smoothies, because they were making her nauseous. From my perspective this is very unfortunate, because I rather enjoyed them, but I suppose I can be supportive, you know, because of the baby and all.

Other than that, we're starting to look into some natal classes, and just happily ticking along. We're planning to move to the West Coast in the fall, though it's a huge juggling act trying to time jobs and accommodation and  travel and everything with maternity leave and the coming months of sleep deprivation. It's all a big adventure, and definitely uncertain, but when is life anything else?

So for my whole life I've had the luxury of being able to scoff judgmentally at people whose kids are acting up in public places. My high horse was a place of bliss. Alas, all that is about to change (well, in seven months anyway). Soon enough I'm sure I will be the beset and exhausted parent, struggling desperately to recreate the semblance of my shattered adult life by having a gee dee cup of coffee with a friend while my child screams bloody murder at the absolute top of his or her not inconsiderable vocal range.

It used to be that as I sat, pleasurably reading my novel and sipping my chamomile tea, and was suddenly interrupted by the shrieks of a misbehaving infant, I would picture standing up and giving its negligent parents a rather large and loud piece of my mind. I would indignantly tell them all about how they needed to either train their little monster or stay at home. I'd picture doing this in lineups at the grocery store, on airplanes during takeoff, and even at parks, where the wild hollering of children dissipates relatively quickly because of the open air.

Well, as they say, karma's a bitch.

I've seen the most intelligent and hip parents -- people far smarter and cooler than me -- reduced to five-second micro-conversations by the piercing insistence of a three year old's rambling commentary on Curious George's latest and greatest exploits: "George runs! George eats! George FUNNY MAWM!"  I've seen the most energetic, active, lively people crumple into mush mere seconds after they've finally managed to get their toddler to sleep after a ferocious two hour struggle. No more sipping a fine red by the firelight and pondering the imponderables. More like gulping snatches of vodka over the sink while praying to your deity that you've actually cornered two lousy minutes of peace. Fun.

Ah yes, that'll be me and my commeupance. In truth, I'm starting to see how all those failing parents were doing an amazingly good job, and in truth, I'm starting to hope that I'm able to do even half the job they were. At least they were out and being sociable and moving around, something that I would consider a big accomplishment in a be-childrened state. All I have to say is that if you happen to cross paths with me and my screaming kid someday, I really am a totally awesome parent and I would never, ever judge if you were in my position...

First of all, happy belated Canada day to all my compatriots! We spent a lovely day at various coffee shops, reading and soaking in the sun. All in all, bliss.

Yesterday evening we decided to watch a brainless movie we own, The Change Up. It's one of Disney-style switcheroo movies, with decidedly more adult themes. Two friends -- a hard-working lawyer family man and a chronically juvenile, mostly out-of-work actor -- complain one night about how they'd love to switch lives. They do this as they're peeing into a fountain, and, through the magic of the movie gods, they end up in each other's bodies the next day. Shenanigans ensue. Deep stuff.

Anyway, we saw the movie when we bought it a couple of months ago, and it was good fun then, but watching it this time had a whole different feel to it. That's because when we watched it before, we had no idea we were going to be parents. Suddenly all the scenes of screaming children, exhausted parents, and flying baby excrement felt a little more imminent. The movie was still sufficiently brainless for our needs, but I have to say, being a parent looks... challenging.

This has got to be one of the most interesting parts about becoming a parent. Suddenly all of the stuff that you've seen a million times before stops looking so cliche and starts carrying all this weight. It's like this secret code that you're surrounded with but have suddenly started to understand. I do find it annoying when people try to fit everyone into the exact same box (read my post on the What to Expect movie), but at the same time, it's kind of neat that there's this huge cultural reservoir of knowledge just waiting to become useful.

I guess that this is one of the functions of movies in general -- to give people something to identify with -- but until now, this particular parent identification has been off limits for me. You gotta love when a whole new world opens up to you, though hopefully we'll find some way to flying poo to a minimum.


On a more direct than usual note, thank you to everyone for the growing support! There's now a BDB readership in the triple digits. Please think about tweeting the occasional post or two if you like them, and don't go changing (well, unless it's diapers, I suppose).