February 2012
11 posts
6 tags
The CoMOMdrum →
this is a little late, but it’s rare that i feel flattered in regards to being a father. the fact that the props come from the mother of my child just makes me all the more grin-smacked. and, lest you think i’m bragging about something i’ve done, let me correct by saying it’s simply the validation that my spouse understands me, and doesn’t think i’m a deadbeat....
5 tags
Diapers, the video game
All this leveling up makes me feel like we’re advancing in something. When do we get to a boss level? -ms
12 tags
Parenting is culture shock: "What Korea Means to... →
5 tags
Flow
In our search for a new car seat, we keep coming back to this one.
And then I get this stuck in my head.
-bp
6 tags
Watchcompletely, holy-freaking-obvious takeaways:
1. be aware that muscles build over time and allow this thing called “movement”
2. don’t leave your baby on the edge of a table
3. DON’T LEAVE YOUR BABY
-bp
5 tags
Note To Self
Try not to dwell on the ratio of time you spend with a co-worker who despises your inmost being, versus the time you spend with the 8.5 month old that literally chirps when you walk in the door.
-bp
7 tags
New Reclining High Chair Saves Lives
Today the wife and I watched our first 15 minutes of HGTV together since the baby was born. “This is so great,” we kept saying (or I did). But this is just how normal people live. -ms
9 tags
Don't Tell Me We Make Our Own Luck →
In which I write about being a new dad and having bad luck, the sins of fatherhood and husbandhood, and what being Korean has to do with it. -ms
7 tags
Don't Get Too Comfortable
I know by this point the whole “Friday nights are never the same” thing is pretty well-worn territory, but I think there’s some part of me that still doesn’t quite believe/get it. Take tonight. I happened to get out of work early, meaning we could “go out for dinner”—which means at some time well before 6pm where the only other people are babies and senior...
5 tags
When will I ever get to take a bath again sans baby?
«don’t feel manly about this, but can this be my life for an hour? -ms
8 tags
Woody Woodpecker's daughter
She’s starting to bite the wood on her crib. We caught her up there, supporting herself with her teeth. It made me remember I used to bite wood as a child. I would make a ring of teeth marks, all around my bed post. “Don’t worry,” I told my wife. “I did that all the time.” But maybe that should only have been more reason to worry? -ms
January 2012
18 posts
10 tags
What do we do? We're not babyproof!
She’s crawling. For a week now, she’s been climbing our bodies like hills. Last night, I dreamed she could walk. She took a few steps and keeled over. A couple of days ago, I held her up in the air and her head hit the light fixture. My wife wants to get her a baby helmet. Do we need a baby fence, a baby corral? We don’t have gates. We’re not babyproof. Our electrical...
2 tags
I guess no one answered my question because no one out there is Michael Jordan? MJ isn’t on tumblr? -ms
8 tags
Question for Michael Jordan
MS: Remember how you wagged your tongue, MJ, because your dad did it? I have a lot of nervous habits. It’s a problem. How do I stop my daughter from picking them up?
5 tags
Hilarious: Unintentionally Inappropriate Test... →
Here are a couple of examples of this amazingness. Read the rest. They will not disappoint. There is even a ninja in one of them.
6 tags
Mama Joins the Blog-Eat-Blog World →
My wife has started blogging about mommy-town. Meaning, she’s going to make a lot more sense than I do here. Also? It has an awesome name: Young Night Thought (taken from Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses).
And you thought I had a lot to say about sleep issues.
-bp
5 tags
F. Scott Fitzgerald's list of advice to his... →
4 tags
Winning Takes a Lot Out of You
The Patriots are going to the super bowl, and alfie celebrated by immediately crapping his pants. I think that most of New England just did the same thing.
-bp
6 tags
Sleep Fail
Last week, we sorta lost sight of how we wanted to sleep train our son. Most of this is due to the deafening chorus of people that chant sleepthruthenightsleepthruthenightsleepthruthenight like it’s the highest evolutionary peak a human can reach. Sleep at any cost.
Well, when you’re all low on sleep, eventually you cave into pressures, even if it feels so wrong you have a stomachache...
5 tags
Overflowing
I didn’t realize it until I could feel the stool on my arms. Isn’t stool a funny word? It’s a funnier word than a feeling. It’s like she had been storing it up for days
-ms
4 tags
“It looks like Droolie & Droolia in here.”
– me, commenting on alfie’s ever-soaked collar. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just waiting for a chance to say that (and subsequently post it).
8 tags
25 Ways of Thinking About the Holidays →
10. On the coldest day of the year, we take Grace to the mall, to play indoors. As we walk around, I think: the difference between babies and adults is potential. With adults, we can learn to accept their faults. With babies, there are no faults. Any faults they will have as adults have come from us.
11. There are outside forces involved. Think of it like this: in one scenario, you have a...
6 tags
“56253”
– -Through repeated mouth-mashing and finger-jabbing, this is a number that Alfie arrived at on a calculator (which is, oddly, one of his favorite chew-toys. Wait. Is “chew-toy” only applicable to dogs?). And then, he dropped it, I picked it up, reset it (why?), and then when I looked back...
6 tags
The Harvest
Here’s a nice, hyperbolic in-my-own-world kind of statement:
Everyone is having babies.
I knew it was coming. We’ve been in the midst of a wedding harvest for almost a decade, which is about how long we’ve been married. We were 21 and 20—and if you think that’s odd, then perhaps you’ll be even more weirded out to know that were seen as...
The Daddy Complex: An Announcement To The... →
thedaddycomplex:
I’d like to make an announcement to the parenting blogging/Tumbling community:
I have no idea what I’m doing.
I’m Forrest Gumping my way through this fatherhood thing and I’ve set the bar pretty low simply to avoid panic and depression. Seriously, the day counts as a success if my boys aren’t…
7 tags
S&M Baby (no babies were harmed in this...
MS: Do you think we bite our baby too much?
Wife: If you bite her harder she likes it more. She's a sadist.
MS: You mean she's a masochist. You're the sadist here.
Wife: Then we're perfect!
8 tags
“It’s cold outside, but luckily there’s a baby in here warming things...”
14 tags
What's up, Hugo Schwyzer and the Good Men Project?
Hugo Schwyzer resigned from the Good Men Project and posted why on his blog. It was a thing. I didn’t know about it. I heard about it from TheDaddyComplex, and after reading all the back and forth, I went ahead and wrote a response. Now that I’m here again after my winter break from the internet, I decided to post the response myself, since who knows where on the internet it ended up....
December 2011
16 posts
5 tags
“i just got drool in my mouth.”
– -my wife. i’d be lying if i said this was the first time either of us has said this regarding our saliva-prone son.
-bp
The Good Men Project & Feminism →
One day you’re completely immersed in baby world, and the next you look on the internet and things have happened.
thedaddycomplex:
Hugo Schwyzer, editor and contributor for The Good Men Project, resigned last night over moral differences stemming from founder Tom Matlack’s criticism of feminism. On his site, he wrote about why he quit and offered his rebuttal that The Good Men Project...
8 tags
Scared of Santa
We took our daughter to the mall yesterday to introduce her to that bearded watcher of children, Santa Claus. Anyone else notice how any description you can come up with makes Santa sound pretty creepy (always wears the same clothes, puts kids on lists, gives them toys if they’ve been good)?
Before you become a parent, you probably also didn’t realize that PHOTOS WITH SANTA COST OVER...
9 tags
Best of 2011: My Daughter →
Online, people are posting list after “best of” list. In our house, it has been the year of the rash. Our best of list is: Grace. Our worst of list is longer. Rashes are at the top. Before pregnancy, I never knewpeople could be allergic to the cold. I never knew the things a body inside a body could cause. It’s a good thing I didn’t, for procreation’s sake…READ MORE
-ms
6 tags
“Grace is not a careful baby.”
– Matt’s wife, after baby nose-dives into playmat. Baby, that’s what we call understating.
Baby food versus Daddy
I just tried some of my baby’s food. Apple and mushed-up rice. I didn’t want to, but my wife said she wanted to give me some since I never got the experience. I was in an orphanage until I was 2. Besides, she made the food from scratch. It was sweet, I love her, etc. At first she wanted me to eat with the same spotty spoon, but I vetoed that idea. She poured the mush into my mouth like...
3 tags
6 tags
Nog-less Dad
So far, we’ve been invited to one holiday party. One! C’mon people! We’re parents; not lepers!
-bp
Chair
blueburning:
It’ll be a sad day for me when my daughter no longer believes that I’m the most comfortable chair in the house.
7 tags
My kid smells 2
Baby Grace smells like pretzels. I can’t get over it. I’ve even started calling her Pretzel. You know, so I’ll have something else to embarrass her with later. -ms
P.S. It kind of makes me want to chew on her.
6 tags
Crunch
Whenever we lay alfie down flat, his instinct is to lift his head up. He can hold it there for a seemingly unending amount of time. It’s not all that surprising, considering he was holding his head up by Week 2 of his life.
That is, he was holding his head up like that until last night, when my wife held his legs down, and then watched in awe as he sat himself up from a flat position. Then:...
7 tags
My Kid Smells →
I wanted to call this next installation of the column I write for my alma mater’s magazine “Baby Crack,” but given the connotations of what those words mean when you reverse them, I thought better of it. Still: I’m addicted to smelling my son’s head.
-bp
9 tags
Early Childhood Education: How early is too early? →
My wife is educating our 5-month-old baby. Each day I learn something new about learning. I have learned that simply holding a cup is education. I have learned to play “Hot Cross Buns” on a xylophone (with matching arm movements). I have learned that the high-pitched voice people use with babies is exactly what they best respond to. I have learned that babies want badly to learn and never need a...
9 tags
Ahem
Why, every time my wife says the baby looks exactly like me and nothing like her, does it always sound like an insult? -ms
2 tags
Thanks, The Daddy Complex! →
thedaddycomplex:
newdadsstrut:
“You’ll get your life back when the baby turns two.” Heard this recently. Is it true?
No. What you get is to experience your new life more than before. Your kid will be a little more self-sufficient, probably sleep longer, be more of a child than a little fleshy bag of need. That means you get to really explore your post-birth world, which will be nothing like...
8 tags
“You’ll get your life back when the baby turns two.”
– Heard this recently. (Is it true?) -ms
November 2011
14 posts
5 tags
“i have a son. this is still weirding me out.”
– bp, in a minor existential freakout after realizing that the breathing from the other room was coming from a sentient being who is currently in the process of learning how to be someone distinctly his own, and yet somehow shares things in common with me like eye color and complicated DNA strands.
14 tags
I can't leave my baby to #occupy, so I wrote this →
5 tags
Guy's Night
On Friday night, my wife went out for the evening, and so it was the first test of how the boob-less parent could handle the job of sole caregiver (which makes me wonder how on earth single parents do it. They deserve their own…well, anything they want really. Whatever a single parent wants, they should get it immediately).
For the first part of the evening, I was running through lists of...
14 tags
Baby spit = rain
So baby Grace has been doing this thing where she puts her lips to your skin and half-spits half-blows, making a sound like a mouth fart. It’s like blowing a very wet raspberry. Sometimes milk comes out.
We haven’t seen many other babies doing this, so we took it to the streets (by which I mean, my wife asked the other moms at her Korean church.) Rumor is that in Korea, when a baby...
