modern day dad

Tip the magician.

So the other night I'm out with my ladies eating dinner, and a table-side magician approached us. Before I had children I would have tried to avoid it if I could, and if I couldn't I would just tell him that I wasn't interested. But now I've got a three year old who, although her experience with magic is very limited, her experience with balloon animals is not.

So after it was all over, it occurred to me that I should give the guy a tip for the floating card trick and the pink dog on a white balloon leash. So I handed him $4, to which he thanked me and went onto the next table. But it occurred to me, how much are you supposed to tip the magician?

As it turns out, I happen to know a guy through a friend of mine who is a magician and who has some experience working table-side, so I emailed him (quite out of the blue from his persepective) to find out what was appropriate. As a magician with an MBA, he gave me a rough frequency estimate of what people tend to tip:

$2 (20%); $5 (60%); $10 (15%); $20 (5%)

He said the high-end would be for tables of many adults where he "freaks them out" for 7-10 minutes, and small families like mine with a few tricks and some balloon animals would be $2 - $5. He also said many restaurant magicians are paid by the restaurant and shouldn't accept tips (I've never seen one), and those that work solely for tips usually work it into their act somehow ("A person wanted to leave me a tip once, but all he had was this poker chip...").

So I guess $4 is a decent tip for the situation I was in. And if you've finished this lengthy post about tipping magicians, chances are you have way too much time on your hands.

(A person was looking to figure out how much to tip the magician, but all they had was this random blog entry...)

[Big thanks to Frank from ConnectWithMagic.com - the best slight of hand guy I've ever seen close up.]

If you can't bribe your kid with sugar, what are you left with?

With the new baby and everything, our normal morning routine has drastically changed around the MDD household. In the old days it was just me and the Madame at the breakfast table, enjoying a little oatmeal and applesauce. But now she's two she'd rather starve than have me feed her, and with that newfound independence also comes a someone who wants to pick out what she's having for breakfast.

I'm generally fine with choice, within reason of course. Her breakfast request two weeks ago for "chips" didn't go over so well. But it seems recently she's less and less interested in eating much at all for breakfast, which is definitely not OK.

Which brings me to the question posed in the subject of this post. Having been frustrated by this for a few weeks, the other morning my wife tells me that she's got the perfect solution, and busts out a box of blueberry Pop Tarts. Perfect, I think. Her favorite fruit these days is blueberries, it's totally a finger food she can eat herself, and it's sweet. It's got icing for chrissakes. Sure, it's not the healthiest thing in the world, but it's fortified up the wazoo with vitamins, and with a cup of milk and maybe a banana it's a breakfast I can live with. So we give it to her and after one bite we get the phrase we're hearing all too often these days, "No like it."

"No like it"?? It's a freaking Pop Tart. Did my kid turn French overnight? Is her palette so advanced the mere taste of this processed, mass produced pastry makes her stomach turn? Or, perhaps more likely, is she just two and trying to be difficult because that's what two-year-olds do? Maybe. But shouldn't super-sweet (borderline) junk food cut through all that terrible-twos bullshit?

I guess tomorrow it's a baguette with gruyere.

Happy Father's Day

So since this Sunday is the day for breakfast in bed (which I'm not a fan of by the way), new neckties and dad's favorite dinner, I'd like to give a personal "Happy Father's Day" to two friends of mine Dave and Brian who are celebrating their first, as well as my own dad, the Modern Day Pop Pop.

Have a great weekend.

I know. I KNOW SHE'S GOT A SCAB ON HER NOSE.

There's nothing like a conspicuous scab right on the tip of your kid's nose to make you feel like a bad parent. Toddlers walk, run, and occasionally fall. And even though it's normal and doesn't mean you're a bad parent, if that scab is on your kid's face it's a constant reminder that somehow you messed up.

So if you see me out and about, and you happen to notice the small scab on the end of Madame's nose that she got from running and falling the other day, DON'T MENTION IT TO ME FOR CHRISSAKES. Do you think I haven't noticed it yet? She might even say "boo boo nose" as she points to her nose, but I don't need to relive it every freaking moment of the day.

And don't ask her "What happened to your noooooose????" What do you think happened? Do you think gnomes sneaked into her room in the middle of the night and roughed her up? Or maybe she intentionally fell down and got a scrape on her nose because that's what all the cool kids are doing these days? Or maybe the goddamn Disney Princesses told her to scratch her nose?

Jesus. Just freaking smile and say hello like you're going to next week after it finally heels.

Man complains about the Christmas-crunch, noone reads (thankfully).

For those of us celebrating Christmas, we're definitely in the home-stretch. This year everything kind of snuck up on me, and although I've gotten a lot done, it still feels like I've got a million things to deal with, and that I'm going to just flat-out forget about 30% of them. Not to make everything about having kids or anything, but my ability to focus on multiple ongoing things has been greatly diminished in the past year and a half.

Anyway, blogging has dropped off as well  - which is OK I suppose because my traffic has dropped off too, and I can think of a lot of better things to do than read me bitch that Christmas is happening way too quickly this year. Plus Typepad (the blog service I use) decided to crap the bed last week, so the time that I set aside to actually blog was in vain. Ugh.

So from here until New Year's I'm not making any promises. Hopefully I'll get a chance to blog a few things, but it's not looking like I'm going to have a lot of time. Of course, I'm pretty sure neither are you.

What I get for shopping at Walmart.

My own parking space. Sweet.

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.

Another "I'm old" moment.

So last night the modern day mom and I went to see Green Day at the local arena.  I was never the biggest fans of the whole "pop punk" thing, but friends of ours had offered last minute tickets so we figured it would be fun. We were right, the show was great and it was a good time (and not just because we got a babysitter and were out on a "school night"). As expected there were lots of young kids there, but the fact that I was closer in age to the parents chaperoning their pre-teens didn't make me feel old, it was the slow songs.

You know that moment in a big arena-rock concert where the band plays the slow ballad and everyone holds up their lit cigarette lighters? The kids today don't do that anymore. Now everyone holds up their lit-up cellphones. Cellphones. Goddamn I'm old.

An impromptu hen party.

Normally I don't write so much about what happens in my day-to-day life, but this Gymboree playgroup thing is screaming to be written about. So thanks for my indulgence. I'll get to more toys and stuff later this week.

So yesterday we went to our second "class" at Gymboree. This time there weren't any dads though, just moms and one female nanny. But whatever. I was cool with it. It isn't a support group, just a chance for my kid to roll around on some cool indoor crawling stuff and maybe get socialized with some other kids.

About a half hour into it the instructor (if you can call her that - really just a girl about 19) gets everyone to come back to sit in a circle with their kids. Then she says, "OK grownups (you're not a parent or a mom or dad or an adult at Gymboree, you're a "grownup"), the topic of discussion is "stress."

What? "The topic of discussion?" Stress? When did this turn into some sort of weird 12 step for parents thing? They didn't do this the last class. Can't we get back to climbing up the ramp and  going down the slide??

Now keep in mind my baby is right in front of me trying to crawl away, so I figure I'll just pay attention to her and kind of hope no one asks me to join in. Some of the moms make jokes about alcohol being a good stress reliever (no argument here), but most complain about their husbands and how they don't help out enough when they get home from work.

Great. I'm pretty sure the closest other dude is the guy making egg rolls at the Chinese restaurant next door, and the last thing I want to do is be the spokesman for men. So I keep on focusing on my daughter, but no amount of ignoring what's going on helps, and finally the instructor looks at me and asks, "How about you? How do you deal with stress?"

In the moment I figured, well, if you can't join them, the least you can do is make them feel jealous. So this is what I said:

"Well actually when Madame's mom comes home from work she's raring to spend time with her, so she takes on most of the responsibility before bedtime. And then on the weekends it's pretty much the same thing, and I get time to myself then too. So it works out pretty well. Plus the baby's perfect so I've got that going for me."

Ha! Take that four moms and one nanny! Your casual laughter at my joke about my kid being perfect belies your true envy. It's not just my kid, MY LIFE IS PERFECT!!!

I have to admit that even though it was all true, it was a hollow victory. Typically I always think of something better to say about a half hour later, and sure enough, on my way back to the car it occurred to me that maybe I should have been more direct (and equally honest):

"How do I deal with stress? Well, I internalize it mostly, and when my wife comes home I pick a fight her. Then after dinner I go upstairs, get drunk and play video games. Oh, and sometimes the next day I'll write about it on the Internet. But that's just me."

Up the water spou... ehh screw it.

Last week I mentioned in my post about taking madame to Gymboree that I'm completely inept at kids' songs, particularly that Itsy Bitsy Spider song. For some reason I couldn't figure out how to do the hand movements to "up the water spout." I told my wife about it later that day, and after some pointing and laughing, my wife explained that it's thumb to index finger, thumb to index finger. I'm happy to report that, with some practice I've got it.

But just in case I forget, or anyone else is also a little cloudy on how to do it, AJ over at Thingamababy has carefully written up and photographed all the hand motions. Isn't the Internet great? One man's moment of idiocy can save countless others from the same fate.

How To: Perform the Itsy Bitsy Spider [Thingamababy]