modern day dad

Holiday gifts. Everyone. Ornament greeting card.

So you just had a baby this past year and you sent out the birth announcements, but your kid is much older now and you want to send a picture with this year's holiday card. You also want to send a small gift to some of your friends and family that's fun and unique without breaking the bank.  If you'd like to kill two birds with one stone, check out this holiday ornament card from 2Peas1Pod. My favorite baby announcement company will custom design a holiday card for you with a picture that can be punched out and converted into a tree ornament. They'll also do regular holiday card if you want, but this might be something a little more special than a fruit cake for the aunts and uncles.

Check out all the holiday card options at 2Peas1Pod.com.
Also on MDD - Birth Announcing.

Welcome Bloomberg readers.

I had a quote in this article in Bloomberg News yesterday (it's towards the end), so there's a chance that some of you are visiting for the first time. If you are, welcome. There's lots of dad and kid related stuff on my site which you are more than welcome to check out, just use the search box on the left or browse through my categories. And if you've got a suggestion or a comment, please leave one in this post. I'm always happy to hear from new people.

KKR, Wal-Mart Bet on Moms' Love of Status Strollers (Bloomberg.com)

Holiday gifts. Mom. Diaper bag.

It's time to start thinking about gifts, so this month I'm going to try to highlight a few things I've found that might be worth checking out.

For your baby's mama: the Petunia Pickle Bottom shoulder bag.

You've already found your perfect dad diaper bag, but what about mom? Even though she might not use it as much, everyone loves having their own baby gear. I was in the pediatrician's office today and I saw a mom with this totally sweet diaper bag. PPB has been making high end diaper bag backpacks for moms for a while now, but I'd never seen the shoulder bags. The black one the mom had looked feminine, modern and stylish, without being another typical Kate Spade bag. It also looked pretty big, which always comes in handy.

Check out the "Samba Roll" diaper bag from petunia pickle bottom.com

Also, check out Diaper Bags for dads at the Modern Day Dad Store.

Looking for single dads in NYC.

I got an email the other day from a single mom who has recently started a social/support group for single parents in Manhattan. She said they had a couple of dads but they would like more (not for "any dating subplot" she promises), and she wondered if I had any ideas where she could let other single dads know about it. I wasn't sure where the single dads hang out in Manhattan, but I said I'd post about it here.

So single dads in NYC, here it is. They meet every other Saturday (the next meeting is December 3rd) in Soho for lunch and babysitters are provided. The only qualification is they're looking for parents who are raising their kids alone, or mostly alone (so joint-custody dads are out of luck). You can contact the organizer at slk@cbsnews.com.

No shirt, no shoes, kids, no service.

A good friend of mine who lives in the Andersonville section of Chicago sent me this article (reprinted from the NY Times) about a restaurant in his neighborhood that recently posted this sign:

Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven

Well, apparently a lot of parents in the area got pissed off and started a big brouhaha. Which isn't surprising, when the owner of "A Taste of Heaven" had this to say about his (former) clientele:

McCauley, 44, said the protesting parents are "former cheerleaders and beauty queens" who "have a very strong sense of entitlement." In an open letter to the community, he warned of an "epidemic" of anti-social behavior.

"Part of parenting skills is teaching kids they behave differently in a restaurant than they do on the playground," McCauley said. "If you send out positive energy, positive energy returns to you. If you send out energy that says I'm the only one that matters, it's going to be a pretty chaotic world."

Ignoring the "positive energy," hippy nonsense, it seems to me that insulting the people that buy your flapjacks isn't quite sound business sense. Anyway, what we're left with is another article in the NY Times about parents vs. the child-free. I got a taste of this from some of the more hardcore child-free a few months ago, and I'm still puzzled by it.

The fact is, I've got no problem with this guy posting a sign about wanting kids to "behave" in his place. It's his business, and he should be able to say what he wants, just like people will be able to stop spending money in his restaurant if they are offended or bothered. But if you ask me, posting a sign asking people to get their kids to behave is just a gutless way of saying you don't want kids in your restaurant. Young children are unpredictable and don't always behave or use their indoor voices, even under the best circumstances. Expecting them to have the same social skills as adults is unreasonable. Also, not every parent is going to discipline their child in the way that you may want them to. If you've got an issue with a particular patron, can't you just ask them to leave instead of alienating a whole group of people?

Say what you mean, and those of us trying to go out to eat with our kids will gladly go somewhere else - no hard feelings.

War on Brats [The Detroit News (reprinted from the NY Times) via Matt]

The bike that isn't a bike.

At what point in this blogging adventure here do I say, OK. Now I've seen it all. I thought I had with the adult pacifier, but this one is close.

Don't be fooled by the picture. What you're looking at isn't a bicycle. It's a "LikeABike." A wooden toy with two wheels, handle bars and a saddle, but no pedals. The idea is two-year-olds want active toys, and could generally use some forward-motion encouragement during walks around the neighborhood. The LikeABike solves this by giving kids a ride they can push forward with their feet Fred Flintstone style. It's beautiful, made out of wood and costs $279.

Is this genius or absurdity? For the life of me I can't decide. At first I was confused. $279 for a bicycle that doesn't work? Seriously? But then I read some of the testimonials on their web site:

It is so true what the LikeaBike people are saying about how easy it can get to walk your child to pre-school… It used to take me forever, now my daughter happily jumps on her bike and we make it in time... no problem. Petra T. (Brooklyn, Park Slope)

Before we gave our son a LikeaBike for his third birthday he had received physical therapy for more than a year... After learning how to ride that beautiful little vehicle his coordination and sense of balance improved considerably. LikeaBikes should be part of every pre-school's inventory. Jenny and Steve N. (Manhattan, West Village)

Now I'm starting to see the genius. Improve your child's balance, get them around the neighborhood, and give them something fun to do all by avoiding the tyranny of pedals. Still, at $279 I think a resourceful dad, an old bike and a socket set could probably come up with something cheaper.

Check out LikeABike at their official site [via Transport Trends.com]

Prepping for Thanksgiving 2005

Thanksgiving is almost a week away, and if you're the cook in your house like I am, it's time to start thinking about what's for dinner. I'm probably going to stick with some of the same recipes I did last Thanksgiving, with a few new twists.

• Turkey. This year I'm probably going to grill the turkey like I did last Christmas. I ended up using this recipe from Alton Brown, and it came out great. The wood smoke gave it a great smokey flavor, but the real trick (I think) was the brining. You can't stuff a grilled turkey, so the dressing has to be made separately. I'm debating making two birds and roasting the other, but I don't think I'm going to have enough guests to justify that.
• Dressing. Last Sunday we had "pre-thanksgiving," where I try out the new recipes that I might use this year, and one of the winners was this Southwest Cornbread and Chorizo Dressing I got from Sunset magazine. It was really tasty, with the salty/savory chorizo balancing out nicely with the sweetness of the butternut squash. I used to make a cornbread and andouille stuffing I got from Emeril, but this one is way better.
• Stock. The only other thing I'm going to try this year is to make my own chicken stock. I know, it's a little over the top, but it's something that goes in a lot of recipes and I'm hoping that the real stuff will make everything taste that much better.

New shoes.

After Madame started walking and stopped crawling altogether, we figured it was time to finally think about getting some shoes on her feet. And like I've mentioned before, it was like sticking her in cement. The shoes we were trying (sneakers that were probably too small) were too heavy and too foreign for her to even consider walking with them. Eventually we found a pair of soft shoes from Nike that had a very minimal sole and a Velcro piece that wrapped around the heel for easy shoeing (who knew "shoeing" was a word?).

Anyway, I've tried to find a link to those shoes but I've been unsuccessful. Then yesterday a friend of mine sent me a link to these - Gucio shoes. Apparently a former design student in Poland tried making the perfect kids shoe for his final project and, after studying shoe making in Italy, it's become a full time business. Each shoe is hand made and designed for comfort and flexibility. The shoes look pretty cool, but handmade kid's shoes from Poland are going to set you back $47.99. And am I going to let my daughter run around the park in handmade shoes that cost $47.99? Not anytime soon.

The good news is I bought a pair of regular kid's sneakers from Nike, and after about two weeks of the first transitional shoes, she graduated to the sneakers and hasn't looked back since.

Gucio shoes available for $47.99 (gulp) at ToddlerTreads.com [thanks Beth].

MDD inbox.

I haven't responded to quite a lot of MDD email in a while, so I figured I'd get some of my housekeeping done here in this one post. Responses/links are in the order of when I received them.

• Julie from new (to me at least) baby t-shirt store Trendy Tadpole sent me a link to her shop to check out. She's got some cute designs that you can put on your choice of t-shirt or one-piece. There are some good ones, but my favorite would have to be the Atari Joystick (I'm old-school like that).
• Manny from d.a.d inc. dropped me a line to say hello and ask when did I find the time to work on modern day dad. Then he posted a blog entry with a similar theme. Honestly I try to blog during nap time or late at night when everyone else is asleep. I am finding out however that the older and more active Madame gets the less time I've been devoting to the blog, and consequently my number of posts has dropped in the last month or so. Hopefully it will be more quality than quantity.
• MDD reader Aubrey tipped me to Kee-Ka, a gift t-shirt store that specializes in kids and pregnant mother t-shirts. I feel like I've seen (and written) about a million of these sites. This one seems geared towards gifts, and the illustrations and designs are playful without being cutesy. This would be a place to check out if you're looking for a quick and unique shower gift.
• And last but certainly not least Dave Caolo recently started his own dad blog "DaddyDaze," and he's really hit the ground running. There's lots of good stuff there - personal posts about his family, a brand new video podcast, and I'll be damned if he didn't dress his son up like Chewbacca for Halloween. That rules me. Check out his blog, I'm predicting it's going to be one to watch.

Telling people you stay at home.

I was reading this really well thought-out post last night on Dadventure about tips for guys thinking about becoming stay-at-home dads. I could only think of one thing to add, and the middle of writing my comment, I realized that I might as well bring this up here too. Is it OK to feel awkward when you tell people that you're a SAHD?

It came up the other day when the DirecTV guy was over installing my HDTV service (the joys of which I'll leave for another post another day). In the middle of the install, he asked me, as most Americans do to people they barely know, "So what do you do?"

Immediately I gave the answer that I've been giving everyone for the past 15 months - "I'm a stay-at-home-dad."

"Excuse me?"

Not knowing if he didn't hear me correctly or that he couldn't fathom it, I said, "I'm a full-time dad. I stay at home with my daughter during the day."

To which he replied, "Oh. That's cool I guess."

To which I replied, "Yeah. It's really cool actually."

Later in the day as I was marveling at the picture quality of my new television, I kept replaying that conversation in my head. Not because the satellite guy was being a jerk, because he wasn't. I just don't think he had ever met a SAHD before (not to mention the fact that the "SAHD" moniker is cumbersome at best and not easily used in casual conversation). The thing I kept thinking about was my internal reaction to the act of explaining to a stranger what I do. For some reason I felt kind of defensive, like I had to justify not going to a normal job every day. And as the explanation was coming out of my mouth, I felt guilty for not having a normal 9-5 job. The whole thing was very awkward.

Admittedly, all of this is a lot of contemplation for a fifteen second conversation with the DirecTV guy, but it got me thinking. Some of my defensiveness was definitely a guy thing - here was this guy doing a very working-guy type of job, and here I am worried if Noggin is coming in clearly or not. And I do have moments sometimes of nostalgia (and envy) when I'm speaking to my friends about their regular jobs, but I think at the end of the day all of this comes with the territory.

Staying home with my daughter is the right choice for our family, and I'm lucky to be able to do it. And just because I feel weird sometimes explaining what I do during the day doesn't mean I secretly wish I was doing something else. I need to get used to the fact that what I'm doing is different, and probably will be until my Madame is out of the house for good.

And who knows, maybe next time the DirecTV guy will go home, quit his job, and make his wife go to work too.