And now for these messages

This summer has been nuts.

To start it off, we had a dud pregnancy and all the emotional and physical fallout from that.

Then, right about when Carly's body has recovered enough to start trying for the genetic offspring again, she busts her knee on the beach in North Carolina.

The recovery period for her knee was complete about a month or two ago, and right around then, she comes down with West Nile Virus. WEST NILE! Of all things! Two emergency room visits and many, many nights of feverish sweating that did NOT involve sex later, I get sick with some kind of flu thing.

The flu did not deter Carly from enforcing her phone-app dictated sex regimen, and lo! And behold! Carly has the flu.

So we're at the present. A whole summer and most of a fall wasted. Yeah, there's been plenty of fooling around, but none of it particularly productive. So, not much to report on the baby-making front.

In other news, my whole New York world has been cloven in half, as most of my best friends from work have headed for the hills. Since April, all of my core work friends have gone away to some other office or another, and a few more are on their way out. This isn't too big a deal, really, except that it wears away my desire to go to work or be nice to people while I'm there. I'm missing that stress-release valve of bitching with my co-workers over this or that over a beer. In addition, I've just not had any good outlets for creativity or emotions (rage) in the last few months, so it's been hard to sleep or get over little problems. My temper is short, I've gained a bit of weight, and I don't sleep much. I'm an angry bear in winter.

I'll get back to the grind of posting and talking about stuff here, very soon. I miss the routine and my mind has gotten kind of cheese-like since I haven't forced it to think about stuff all that much. So there's that.

A few updates

Not a lot to talk about on the procreation front. So, a few updates:

• Carly's knee surgery is scheduled for the end of July. That's about when we would have been starting the procreation programme once again, so that will be put off for another month or two, after she's off the drugs and her body is healing.
• Our shopping list this week consisted of the following, none of which were related:
• zucchini
• condoms
• batteries
• We have purchased a new, grown-up car! Considering that we will probably need a four-door vehicle to cart ourselves, a dog, and a kid around in, we started shopping around, and the guys at Metro Honda sold us an Insight. We have a fresh, squeaky new hybrid. A grown-up car. Farewell to the hatchback with the rock-and-roll stickers on it! Hello, grown-up car. The receptacle is ready: just insert baby.
• I am fat.

This is the new car: http://instagram.com/p/MircWat5eF/

Independence Day

I was just looking through some Facebook stuff, to make sure I didn't miss anything important (I didn't), and saw a post by my niece, er... half-niece, or something... that made me think about independence in a particularly entertaining way.

First, a little family history:

My father married quite young, as you are often wont to do in small towns in Ohio in the late 1960's, to his high school sweetheart and had two kids. The first of them grew up to be a doctor, have a nice little family and a big house in a planned development. I hear her boys are on their way to be in the little league world series or something. The second child, who carries my father's complete name without a "Jr." attached to it, turned out to be something else.

My half-brother, Tom, will be 41 or 42 this month. So far, his list of accomplishments include: three children born out of wedlock, an intense familiarity with the interior of jail cells in Portage and Summit counties, Ohio, as well as other unknown jails, a string of drug habits, and a self-righteous attitude. He has managed to piss off nearly everyone he's been close to and stolen from just about all of them. He has a strong sense of entitlement and self-pride, but so far has never held a job for more than a year and generally has nothing to show for his strong self image. Oh, and he's got a RAP sheet a mile long, littered mostly with domestic violence and driving while intoxicated arrests.

I can't say that he's totally to blame for his shortcomings. He had a kind of shit upbringing. His parents divorced when he was very young. As he had his father's complete name, he was a reminder of the pain and disaster of the divorce, so his mother took a lot of her frustration out on him. Additionally, it appeared that his father wanted little to do with him. Whether this was because his father really didn't want to spend time with his former family, or was too busy bringing up the new one, or Tom's mother playing the game of keeping Tom from his father's visits and telling Tom that, in fact, his father hated him, I don't know. But I bet it was a little bit of all of those. So he was the subject of physical and mental abuse and didn't have many outlets. He turned to crime and drugs at an early age and never turned back.

When I was about 12, he started dating Odessa, a girl who appeared to have her shit together well enough to keep Tom in line. For all appearances, he was pretty stable and caring, and when they got pregnant, he really looked like he'd started to figure it out. I look back on the pictures from that time, and I can see the hallmarks of drug use in his face, but I don't remember him being much of a problem then. Odessa gave birth to Sidney Corinne Diroll on my sister's 17th birthday. I remember her disappointment! I got home from school before she did and saw the news, posted on the refrigerator. My sister was expecting a nice birthday celebration, as everything had been promised, and then, well, THIS happened. It was hard to be upset--it's not like anyone had much control over such things, and really, it's hard to hate a baby. She got over it.

Things fell apart with Tom and Odessa after that. Tom couldn't deal with the stresses of fatherhood and started on the path of what is now a total cliche. He drank and did drugs and disappeared for days, argued over who knows what, and eventually got arrested for DV and public intox among other things. I think Sidney was about three when Odessa finally got rid of him. Tom has failed to pay child support for, well, ever. She eventually got her life back on track and married a guy, but I guess that didn't work out so well. She raised Sidney more or less by herself and the two of them have a very strong bond, as you would expect.

Before I go much further, I'd like to point out, for the record, that Tom has repeated the exact same pattern with two other women, fathering children he doesn't support, abusing and running around on them, getting into drugs and disappearing. I remember one summer where I had--at the behest of my father--hired my brother to work at the t-shirt shop (again), and we brought in Sidney as summer help so she could earn money for a car. So she must have been 15. Tom was staying with babymama number 2 that year, whom he had reconciled with recently, and their son, who has some pretty severe autism and developmental disorders. He was driving Sidney to and from work and she was staying with them for the summer. Things seemed to be going pretty well. Then, one day, they didn't show up for work. We got a call from Sidney saying that she didn't know where her dad was, and could someone come and pick her up? So we did.

Tom apparently took Sidney to their house, and while she was in the bathroom he said that he was going to go to the store to get cigarettes or something. He didn't come back. The girlfriend worked a later shift, and didn't get home for a few more hours. When she did, she brought a big bag of take-out for what was supposed to be a fun take-out dinner at home. It was a lot more like chewing in silence while they all wondered if Tom would ever come home.

He didn't. At least, not for about a week. From some of his friends, we discovered that he'd been staying at "The Heroin House," the common drug den not far from the college campus. It was where the townies went to get high. He was caught by police for driving erratically, and upon questioning he said that he was "testing out the new brakes on his car." I was pleased because I got to fire him (again) and he got shipped off to jail (again) and was out of everyone's hair. But I could see that something was definitely broken for Sidney and it wasn't getting fixed.

Sidney has had a somewhat rough go of it, herself, but she seems to be managing. I know how hard it is to grow up and pretend that your family life isn't pure chaos. I know what it's like to have burdens thrown on you that you didn't expect. I know what it's like to have daddy issues. But I don't know what it's like to be pregnant at 17, so I can't really judge her on her life so far. I don't know Sid that well, only from my limited interactions with her over the last few years and now through Facebook. But is 20 now, has a job and an apartment, and she appears to be taking pretty good care of her little boy. Which is a hell of a lot better than her father ever did.

So, Independence Day means a lot to me, and I hope, for Sidney. I think she's already got the gist of it. After all, on her Facebook page, she lists her family thus:

Guest Blogger: LibMama

This week, I have the pleasure of introducing my friend, Marlene, who posts here as "libmama." Marlene and I run into each other every few years, usually by accident, when I'm visiting Akron. She's a librarian and an Akronite, is married to a British man (Ian), and has two boys (Blaise and Lux). Her second pregnancy was kind of a nightmare. She has talked about it in the comments on this blog, and extensively on her Facebook page, but I don't want to re-hash a lot of the details. You get a good sense of it from her writing.

When I talked to her recently, I asked her to put together a blog post on this topic: "Why did you decide to have your second child, and after all the craziness, how does it feel now?" Here is her response:

It was never because Blaise was not enough (which Ian cruelly accused me of thinking). So I guess:

• Part of it was due to a strong emotional and biological desire to have a second one. My “baby” was getting older and I would cry when I had to put more of his smaller clothes into storage. He was developing his own personality and didn’t “need” me as much. For example, he would say: “mommy, I’m a big boy now, so I don’t need you to hold my hand anyway [while crossing the street].

• Part of it was due to my mother being an only child and hearing her stories of her lonely childhood – especially after her own mother died when mom was a young age. So I wanted to make sure Blaise would not be lonely if anything happened to Ian or me.

• Another (more shallow) part of it was because I wanted to see if it was possible because of my PCOS, and because mine would feel more like a “proper” family if I had more than one child.

• Finally, another (more arrogant) reason is because I think I’m a pretty good mom: I’m mature, responsible, have a decent job with benefits (including—for now!—college fee remission), and I am making a conscious effort not to make the same mistakes my parents did with me.

However, I certainly didn’t want my second baby to have a near life-threatening heart condition! So at first I was angry and thought it was completely unfair of God (before my recent conversion to atheism) to give me this extra worry after I went through so much grief to get this baby in the first place! The first month in the NICU was horrible, the next few months at home were rough and scary at times, but now I am happy. He is healthy, eats well, sleeps well, becoming independent, always smiling, giggling, crawling, beginning to walk, and even saying a few words. He is also SOOOO damn cute - and I’m not just saying that because he’s my son, but it’s also a fact which many others have confirmed! He’s no longer that mean, screaming, puking, poop machine that I thought (during a hallucination on a particularly awful sleepless night) was sent here by the devil to destroy me! ;p He is a proper little person now who is cultivating his own little personality, and he has now created a permanent niche in my heart that I cannot imagine life without him. When I leave work, pick them up from daycare, take them home and play with them on the living room floor, they are both so happy to see me. They fight for space in my lap. Blaise will show me his toys and drawings (now that he‘s learning to spell many of which say “I love mom” – more heart pangs!) and Lux crawls all over me, puts his head on my shoulder, and giggles when I bounce him on my knee. In my opinion, it is the most blissful feeling in the world! 

It took a little time for this to form, though. I will be honest and admit that I didn’t have an instant bond with either of my kids the very second they came out of the womb. I was confused, in pain, scared, emotional, hormonal, and generally couldn’t think straight. This made me feel like a cold and terrible person, so when I confided to a friend that I didn’t think I loved my newborn baby, she merely asked “would you die for him? Would you jump in front of a bus to save him?” Yes, of course. “Well then, you love him”. That gave me an instant sense of peace and clarity.

I'm Down on Carly's Knees

So, an update on the biological status of the project.

Carly has busted her knee. Again. I warned her, if she busted her knee again, I'd trade her in for a newer model. I have not done that just yet, but she is on notice!

About 15 years ago, Carly wrecked her knee in a skiing accident. Her doctor told her then that she should get surgery. She didn't. So every few years, she's knock her knee out one way or another, including at least one memorable moment, flying kites in a cemetery. The last time she blew it out, almost exactly 2 years ago, she was training for the FBI. True story.

MRI scans revealed that Carly had mangled all the ligaments around her left knee, and the ACL was totally ripped. Surgery was scheduled, small scars produced, crutches bought, and physical therapy ensued. After about 6 months, Carly was allowed to run again, and things were pretty good.

Then she went to North Carolina for a family vacation (I was wise to avoid it), and walked out into the surf when there was a riptide warning. Warning unheeded, she was knocked down by the water, and rrrRRRRIIIIIiiipppp! New ACL is torn.

She saw the orthopaedic doctor today, and he told her that she's going to need surgery again. This time, they're going to use corpse tendons, so she'll be part zombie (I warned her! I have a shotgun!). And this presents a dilemma.

Knee surgery, hell--any surgery--is a pretty intense, traumatic event. Should she get the surgery before she gets pregnant, or after? I mean, we are somewhat on a clock here. Our chances of getting pregnant naturally drop off every year after 30, and if we want to have a kid the old fashioned way, we need to think about timing. On top of that, would she be in danger of greater injury if she walks around, fatted and with calf, on a busted knee? It turns out, there have been a number of studies about this.*

Pregnancy hormones actually make a woman's body more pliable and flexible, and lots of pregnant ladies suffer knee injuries when they're With Parasite.* Carly would actually be in slightly increased danger if she were to get heavy with spawn on a bum knee. So yeah, she should have her surgery before.

But the drugs and therapy and bodily stress will push out our eventual pregnancy date for a bit. And, let's face it, sex with a busted knee is quite limited in the kinds of twisting and flipping that can be done. If you flop one way or the other during a roll in the hay, you could twist that corpse tendon right out of its graft. And then, zombies are running loose--it'll be anarchy!

For a final verdict, the doctor called human nature into the fray: "If you don't do it before you get pregnant, you'll never do it." And he's right. It took Carly 15 years to get the damned thing fixed in the first place, so better do it now.

* I am leaving these unattributed. I am too lazy, today, to find the links again, and I didn't save them. Anyway, google "ACL surgery pregnant before after" and see what comes up. There are a bunch of useless, un-scientific forum posts, but if you sort through it, you'll find the Canadian study I read.

A Good Death?

This is quite deadly accurate in terms of what we went through this year.

The only good abortion is my abortion « Boing Boing

An Example of the Crazy

Since Carly has been off the baby blockers, she's been experiencing the full range of female hormones and their fluctuations. She started taking birth control when she was reasonably young, so I'm pretty sure this is the first time her body has actually been allowed to do what it does. And what it does is break out.

Her skin develops ranges and archipelagoes of pimples without warning. No soaps or creams really work. These are hormonal acne and there's really no cure, just maintenance. So she went to see her dermatologist. In addition to being a bit of a spaz, he prescribed to her a hormonal-based cream for her zits, one that will knock her back to that semi-bound state that she was when her skin was clear. The nurse of course warned her that if she was going to get pregnant, she'd have to stop taking the stuff. The doctor said, like a spaz would say, "Yeah, um, yeah, you can't take it if you're pregnant, but they haven't really done any studies, and um, like, one in four pregnancies aborts anyway, so yeah."

Reading the materials that come with the goo, you get this disclaimer:

8    USE IN SPECIFIC POPULATIONS

8.1 Pregnancy

Pregnancy Category C. There are no well-controlled trials in pregnant women treated with [PRODUCT] Gel. Animal reproduction studies have not been conducted with the combination gel or benzoyl peroxide. Furthermore, such studies are not always predictive of human response; therefore [PRODUCT] Gel should be used during pregnancy only if the potential benefit justifies the risk to the fetus.

No teratogenic effects were observed in rats treated with oral dozes of 0.15 to 5.0 mg adapalene/kg/day, up to 25 times (mg/m2/day) the maximum recommended human dose (MRHD) of 2 grams of [PRODUCT] Gel. However, teratogenic changes were observed in rats and rabbits when treated with oral doses of greater than or equal to 25 mg adapalene/kg/day representing 123 and 246 times MRHD, respectively. Findings included cleft palate, microphthalmia, encephalocele and skeletal abnormalities in rats; and umbilical hernia, exophthalmos and kidney and skeletal abnormalities in rabbits.

Dermal teratology studies conducted in rats and rabbits at doses of 0.6-6.0 mg adapalene/kg/day [25-29 times (mg/m2) the MRHD] exhibited no fetotoxicity and only minimal increases in supernumerary ribs in both species and delayed ossification in rabbits.

Okay, so this says that the drug is a Pregnancy Category C substance, and rightly defines it as something that has risks in animal tests, but may be used if there's a good reason during pregnancy. Those reasons are not well-defined, but I'm betting, "I want to look good in my pregnancy boudoir photos," is good enough.

It then says that no teratogenic effects were observed in rodents given oral doses in excess of 25x the recommended maximum dose for humans. Remember, what Carly is using is smeared on the skin--the rats and bunnies were taking it orally. Teratogenic basically just means "birth defects." It ranges from weird birth marks to extra heads, and so on. The range of things that happened to the bunnies and rats was relatively minor... when exposed to 123 to 246 times the maximum human dose, the rodents had some cleft palates (Hares with hare lips? OH THE IRONY!), buggy eyes or small, lazy, blind eyeballs, and encephaloceles.

That last one is a bit of a scary one--encephaloceles are protrusions of the brain and spinal cord generally caused when the neural tube fails to close completely during the fetal stage of pregnancy. So your brain matter bulges out of your skull. It's really grody, but generally treatable... the matter that's hanging out is usually not functional and can be cut off or packed back in the skull. Some people live their whole lives with that condition, though it is the source of a lot of problems. Very Mutter Museum stuff.

That's not to minimize the deformity--lots of encephaloceles are fatal, non-operable, or end up causing permanent damage to the brain when removed. So it sucks. And lazy eyes and cleft palates are no laughing matter, either. But the point is, the baby websites freak the fuck out about things like this. They tell you to not even think about any kind of acne meds or whatever, even if they don't include any of the chemicals that work in this one, because WHAT IF your baby has a second head??? The problem is that the readers and the writers don't rely on what the science actually says...

It says, if you slather on 200 times more than we tell you you should EVER put on your skin, your baby has a small chance of having a deformity that is very likely operable or at least not fatal or particularly debilitating if caught early enough. If you're the sort of person who overdoes things, you probably should stay out of the drug store, except to buy condoms. Lots and lots of condoms.

Fathers Day

I had kind of been hoping that I'd be able to celebrate this Fathers Day as a prospective father, but alas, the biology hasn't worked out quite that way.

So, I thought I'd subject you all to a video of my parents being themselves, while really just looking at their pets the whole time. I hope you enjoy it.

I Hate My Baby

One of the things I have been researching is how good, upstanding, moral citizens deal with the big life change from being a person to being a parent. I have had the privilege of being in a room with Michael Ian Black, my famous clone, reading from his new book, You're Not Doing It Right.

Here's a thing, ganked from the Onion's A.V. Club:




It's a rumination on how much of an asshole a baby can be, in discussion with the A.V. Club populars.

Dream a Little Dream

I'm a little weirded out by this, but it happened: I had a dream about having a baby.

There are two reasons that this is weird, to me: The first is that I don't dream that often, and when I do dream, I almost never remember it. But this time, I don't just remember the dream, I remember it in kind of specific detail.

I was testing the problem of having a baby. I've never really held a tiny baby, a new one, less than at least 4 months old. All the babies I've held in real life have been kind of healthy, potato-shaped children. I haven't really held the pink, blotchy kind. So I was testing how to hold the thing, where to put the head in relation to my elbow, etc. It was a boy. Just stating that for posterity, not as any kind of prophecy. I know you all take stock in dreams. I don't, not really.

The dream was specifically set in a hospital, something you might see in a medical drama, but generally what I am used to for actual baby parts of hospitals.

The second reason it is unnerving is because when I do dream, I rarely dream about anything in a normal kind of context. It's usually couched in some kind of supernatural or action-oriented setting, like a zombie movie or a terrorist invasion or something. I don't ever dream about regular crap. So this is something, I think.

I figure that I'm coming to terms with the idea of having a kid. It's become something that I specifically want to do, and for a lot of reasons. So now, I am working on the kinds of things that I know I need to know, and hope that I'll have when the merry moment rolls around. Just musing there.

In other news, the procreation thing is on hold for at least a few days as Carly is in North Carolina with her family, on the annual family hootenanny. I failed to go for a lot of reasons, not least of which is work--I've been given a reasonably important special project that needs worked on and I don't want to let it slide right now. But anyway, hard to work on the baby stuff over the phone. Or the internet. But that gives me ideas....

An update on the injury.

So, I'm healing pretty well and I don't think it's broken. Just bruised. A small price for the great reward.

http://instagr.am/p/Lp77oQN5Vx/

Casual Sex

One of the things I love about this whole project is that my irreverence is in very good company. For your Friday entertainment, I offer you Andrea Savage's Casual Sex: Part 1.

The dangers of whoopie!

Just a short update:
While seducing my wife, tonight, I have broken my toe.
This is the third bone I have ever broken. The first was another toe, one that I dropped a piano on. The other was a finger, playing football. This one was a seduction.
The End.

A Shout Out, to My Homies

Now is a trendy time to have babies, I guess. While the rest of my procreating friends are not quite as self-absorbed and outgoing as I am about the whole business, many people are well along the path, even quite successful at it!

• Joel, a former colleague in the Philosophy Department at University of Akron, and his wife, Stephanie, are now expecting. They've got ultrasounds to prove it. It seems like they waited until Joel was about done with his PhD to start trying, as really, there was only slightly less of a chance of him supporting the family as a grad student rather than as a philosophy professor. He recently discovered that the median income for a first-year associate professor is only marginally above the poverty line.
• Josh and his wife, Kate, are well into their seventh month, I think. They had a doozy of a time getting there, as a few rounds of IVF didn't take, and just about when they were ready to give up, they got the good news. They've been off the radar a bit lately, as they're also going though career changes and recently moved, so it's been a bit nuts. When things die down, I want Josh to do a guest blog here.
• My cousin, Kate, whom I believe I mention here extensively, and her hubs, Adam, are doing quite well with their twins. They also had some medical intervention in getting their boys into the world, but everything is going great for them. We recently got to interact with the boys for the first real time last weekend, when we visited them in their neat little townhouse and ate a ton of barbeque. Like you do.
• Former law classmate, Kevin, and his wife, Jill, have recently welcomed their second child, nicknamed Loki, into the world, and from what I see on our weekly Google+ meetings, they're all doing great.
• Now, I hear that our friends Gabe and Anna are on the path, as well. We had a few funny conversations about the breeding program around Cinco de Mayo... the timing, the strange hormones, the half-crazy, half-fun way of thinking about the future. And all the gelato you can stand.
• Some other friends are adjusting to deciding to NOT have kids, as they have decided to go ahead and get snipped. While I'm certain they would have been great parents, I'm glad that they have decided to just cut off this possibility that they were otherwise somewhat fearful of. They're the sort of people who are quite fulfilled as they are. They travel extensively, have crazy awesome hobbies, and love each other and get along so well that adding another mouth to the equation might just fuck it up. That reminds me... there's a blog post coming up about how damned arrogant it is for people to just up and decide to have kids, plan it and so on. More on that, later.

In other news, Carly is still fluttering through various hormonal changes as her body resets, and she complains to me on a daily basis--after much internet research--that she requires different chemical ingredients. Lately, it has been acne meds, as she is "breaking out like a teenager." I say, this is a serendipitous event, as I also need to change the oil in the car. BA DUM, BUM!

And now for something completely different:

BEAR CLAW! RAWR!

Not too much to report on the procreation front. Since the last round of medical procedures, Carly's doctor has put us on hiatus in terms of baby-making. Her body needs time to recover. At least two months. With some of Mandy's more prurient suggestions aside, that means we have two main options:

1. Don't have sex.
2. Use a backup method of birth control.

Carly vetoed the first one right away, so we're left with #2. And lemme tell you, it's been a damned long time since I had to buy condoms.

The one thing that struck me, right away, was how the packaging has improved. When I was a lad, rubbers at the store was easy! You'd just look for the white box with the black label that says, "CONDOMS." Now, well, there's quite a bit of variety.

In the display I was perusing, there were a few I could cross off the list right away. Magnums, vibrating condoms, colored condoms, flavored condoms. These all seemed to get away from my requirements. Then there are the funny ones, like the Ultra-Ribbed-For-Her-Pleasure, Fire & Ice, Ultra-Sensitive, and, my personal favorite, Bareskin. Or, as we like to call it, BEARSKIN! RAWR RAWR!



Carly has got me thinking of THOSE POOR BEARS, with the PENIS-SHAPES CUT OUT of their FLANKS!

And, for those of you who think that it isn't ridiculous enough, here's the actual Trojan Brand Bareskin commercial. Somehow, this sells rubbers. (It did, to ME!)

Sister Wives: the Musings

Carly goes on these weird binges of bad reality TV shows. Tonight, it is "Sister Wives." She claims that she just wants to see what the hype is about, but she goes pretty slack jawed on the things right away and secretly watches the rest of the season when I'm not looking.

This stuff is nuts. This guy is clearly a bit of a stud who likes the attention of women, and is lucky enough to have found a religion that supports his lifestyle. He actually converted to the religion. It's a weird thing. The big reveal in the first episode is that he's going to bring another wife (total 4) into the mix. He's running the idea by his children.

Part of the episode, they prep the audience by talking about how he keeps his wives basically separately, that there's no sexual congress between the lot of them, and so on. But here's something kind of creepy about the situation: in addition to being married to three women, with whom he has 12 or 13 kids, he is out there dating another chick.

I wonder, when the guy goes and proposes to the new wife, is she excited about the prospect of being a 4th wife?

They think of these things in terms of fate and divine provenance, but all I see is a bunch of women being brainwashed into allowing their husband to go out and date other women. You can hear the concern and jealousy and justifications in their monologues... they tolerate the behavior, but it puts them on edge. They know that, despite their relative brainwashing, their husband isn't truly their own. He could leave them all and go set up shop wherever. Three of the wives are not legally married to him, and when he dies they won't get a cut of his estate if wife #1 decides to probate the fucker.

And then there are all the kids. In an age when population growth is more or less the signpost for the apocalypse, how does this guy get away with quadrupling his genetic footprint on the planet? Why, instead of producing a million kids, don't they adopt some needy babies? Does this only work because they were lucky, and none of their kids have genetic disorders or autism or anything else that makes it relatively difficult? What if one wife only produced blind offspring, or all her kids had CP? What then? How would the family deal with that kind of stigma?

I have glanced over the internet about the subject of the show and he just doesn't come off, to me, as a genuine guy. He puts on a good show, but I don't buy it. I think his mommy used to put him in dresses and made him dance when he was little, or maybe he was breastfed until he was nine....

Pronounced with the Ump-T

Now is about the midpoint of my spring adventure. I've been on trains, buses, planes, cars, and I walked over a bridge over the Burning River. Now, I'm waiting to access another public transit system and take another train from Cleveland to DC. While I write this, Carly is driving from Jersey to DC. This is by far the most complicated rendezvous I've had with anyone.

This week is the longest we've been apart from each-other since 2008, when I first moved to New Jersey and she stayed in Ohio for the better part of three months. So it's going to be a nice reunion.

And because of the distance and the craziness of the last week, I don't have much to post in regards to the procreation experiments. After all, there hasn't been any activity on that front in almost three weeks, so I'll give you this:

Part of the trip I got to spend observing Tony and Kendra around their daughter, Elise, in their natural environment. Usually, when I come into town, it's kind of a big deal and time is short. We only get to hang out for a night or so, and then off to the next family function. But this time, I had the better part of two days set aside to just hang around and soak up the normal life.

Of course, the main part of this was just to live and interact with these, my closest friends, and their little family, but a strong bit of it was to observe and take notes. As I've mentioned, I don't have a lot of experience with small children and babies, and I'm never quite sure of how the whole system works.

Elise's life is a little different from most kids, these days, or so I think. She's got a stay-at-home dad who actually chose to stay home and take care of the baby, and she is his full-time job. And Tony has gone native in a few funny ways. He and I always had a kind of self-sufficient streak in us, and we like to experiment, build and make things. We both got involved in making wine around the same time--I bought him his first wine barrel and I like to think that I introduced Kendra and him to the "It's Your Winery" place out on West Market (now defunct, due to some politics). He and I started baking homemade bread around the same time, we both have a proficiency with power tools that borders on the savant, and we are constantly striving to find new ways to make things better, simpler, or cheaper. Tony even makes his own laundry detergent now. I get the feeling that he hides a pile of Real Simple magazines in his closet, under the porn.

I can't say that I've made any judgments or had any insights about their lifestyle, as I'm still processing much of what I picked up, but I have to say, they're doing quite well and everyone seems very happy. And that's all that really matters.

Three Days in the Valley

For the last couple of days, I've been staying at my sister-in-law's new apartment in the Valley, in Akron, Ohio. Chelsea and her boyfriend, Jeff, recently moved to Akron to start their lives after Chelsea graduated nursing school. She's going to take her exams soon and then go out and start fixing IVs and sponge-bathing seniors. Jeff is going to work in a maintenance bay at one of the many car dealerships.

I came to Akron this week to update my Ohio Bar admission status and visit some people. Specifically, I wanted to spend some time with my parents, as I never really get the chance to talk to them by themselves. It's always at a funeral or a holiday party or whatever, and I don't get to just have a real conversation with these people who absorbed so much of my life.

My original plan was to sit down and do a StoryCORP-style interview with my father. He's getting older, you see, and his health has not been great the last few years. He's had a couple of strokes and heart attacks, has been a lifelong smoker and drinker, and has consumed enough drugs (prescribed and otherwise) to stop a small army of rhinos. On top of that, Diroll men have a habit of kicking off sometime in their 60's. It's relatively rare for one of my breed to see 70. The only ones I know of who have made it are from a much earlier generation and I have less in common with them, genetically. One of the deciding factors in our limited longevity is that there is a common genetic flaw in our line which results in fucked up arteries around the heart. If you get it fixed early enough, you could live forever. But if you don't, you'll put your boots up by about 67.

So I want to get some time to talk to the old man and get him on the record. The idea is, when my kids tell me that I'm the worst parent who ever lived and how did I become so mean, I will sit them down and make them watch the interview with the old man. I think it's a fair bet to say that when we do have kids, it's quite unlikely that they'll have much memory of their grandfather.

I didn't really get the chance to prepare for the interview, as the time I set aside for that I ended up having to spend here in Akron, traveling, etc. So I didn't do it this time. Probably some time this year, I will make the old man take some time off work and sit down with me and the camera. Should be entertaining.

Forever and Ever

As I am currently on the lam in Ohio, I don't know if I'll be able to update on time as I set out to do, in the beginning. So, I'll put up short updates and other things as I'm able.

This one goes out in honor of my friend Marlene, who posts here as "libmama," who I got to see for the first time in years, yesterday. Marlene said that, in the process of having her second child, she had two miscarriages, along with other complications. After some testing, she found out that the two children who didn't make it would have been girls, and that she will always kind of miss these daughters she never had.

Well, it turns out, those girls are probably part of Marlene, now. Mothers carry around fetal cells from their children in their blood pretty much forever, even from miscarried fetuses. This Radiolab episode tells an interesting story of the research going into these legacy cells...

Fetal Consequences - Radiolab



Give it a listen! And have a good weekend.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

So, in the process of doing a biological reset, Carly and I haven't been able to fool around for two solid weeks, and the doc said we will have to wait at least two months before we try to hop on the pregnancy boat again. With our upcoming travel schedules, it's probable that Carly and I won't even get a lot of time for the fun stuff.

Which is why I'm simply not allowed to listen to this song:



So you listen to it, instead. And have a good night.

Why Mother's Day Matters

Remember how I went on a bender about how when babies are born, the range of weirdness in anyone's pregnancy falls within a narrow slice of probability, and the chances that things go poorly is really rare? Well, I was one of those. The following is the closest reconstruction of the events of my birth, as far as I can recall from various conversations with my parents over the years.

My folks, circa 1977.

I was born in the blizzard of 1978. I always said that the world knew I was coming and did what it could to stop me.

My parents had recently moved to the white, aluminum-sided mobile home at the northwest corner of the trailer park off of Summit Road, in Ravenna, Ohio, with my sister, who was about two and a half years old. My mother's pregnancy wasn't pleasant. As I grew inside her, she suffered some nasty gallbladder damage, and every time I got the chance, I'd ram my head or elbow or feet into the thing, exacerbating the pain she was already in. The damage caused made her throw up a lot and she had difficulty digesting fatty foods. Additionally, it caused some liver damage and she had difficulty absorbing iron, so she was kind of anemic and had nasty headaches. Her doctor prescribed her to drink buckets of red wine and eat liver to keep her iron levels up.

In the afternoon, on Saturday, January 21, 1978, the snow was pretty heavy, but the storm had not yet reached official blizzard conditions--that would come in a few days. But it was very cold, and a couple of days of snow and ice had packed around the car in the driveway. My mother, being very near her due date, said she wasn't feeling well and waddled down the paneled hallway to the bathroom, past the closet that contained the furnace and water heater. She didn't come out for a while.

After a few minutes, my father got up off the couch and went to check on her. There were drops of blood on the carpet, getting bigger the closer to the bathroom he got. When he opened the door, he found my mother swooning on the toilet--not passed out, but not all there. He made a quick phone call or two and then went out to start the car and cut the ice off of it.

At the hospital, the doctor quickly discovered that I was lodged in, breach, and had stretched out to the point that there was no hope of swinging me around. My feet were firmly planted on her hips and I wasn't moving. My mother's blood pressure had plummeted and all the damage I'd been working was getting worse. After a few hours of observation and attempts to stabilize everyone, they decided to do an emergency C-section and prepped for surgery. A few minutes later, the doctor comes out to give my father the news, and says,

Doc: "There's a chance that we could lose one of them--either your wife or the baby. If it comes down to it--"
Tom: "Save the mother."

Doc: "... what?"

Tom: "Save the mother. I've known her longer."

Approximately 45 minutes later, at 8:01 PM, under the Wolf Moon, I was born, bloody and messy, but well-formed. My father supposedly held me up by my ankle and spun me around, declaring that there wasn't a mark on me (I do not have any discernible birth marks or many freckles or moles). They sewed up my mother and got about the business of stabilizing her.

For the better part of the next month, my paternal grandmother, Minerva June Diroll (nee Lleyshawn), took good care of me in her warm house. My mother was hospitalized for a while and once she recovered from the C-section, they opened her back up and took out her gallbladder. She eventually recovered just fine, but has long-lasting GERD issues, indigestion and so on, which, it turns out, is hereditary and I have it, too.

Knowing that I nearly killed my mother on the way out was a defining characteristic in my life. I was reminded of it constantly, whenever my father would remind me that it is my job to take care of her, or when my mother would comment about what it was like, having to eat liver and onions all the time. The knowledge helped turn me into someone who is fiercely loyal to my friends, always looking for solutions to problems, and ways to help people from slipping over the edge when they're near it. When one of my family or friends are sick, I have been known to stand outside the door like some kind of marble statue, or to prepare massive feasts of recovery food, even things I hate to eat. Though my birthday is my most important holiday, I always celebrate it in honor of the pain my mother went through--it is a celebration of survival, and I call her every year.

I do this because I owe someone something, even if I can't be held to blame for the acts, as I was just a little meatball of twitching instincts, trapped in a rubbery flesh pocket, with no idea of what a gallbladder was, it is my form of Original Sin. So, to pay it back, I take care of my people. I hope you do, too.

Happy Mother's Day, Ma. I'm glad we still haven't killed each other.

What to Expect... Postscript

So, I feel kind of cranky over yesterday's post, and I feel like I should explain it a little.

Due to the way I was raised, I had to learn to not expect too much or get my hopes up about anything. Since my parents were pretty Bohemian-bordering-on-purely-psychotic, I was lucky if anything that was asked for or promised actually came to pass, and it almost never turned out the way you wanted it to. It sounds like a pretty fundamental, run-of-the-mill revelation for a four-year-old, but I mean that it was difficult to predict, sometimes, if anyone was going to make dinner. Or buy toilet paper.

From this, I learned to be self-sufficient from a pretty early age. I learned to cook by age 6, and by 9 or 10 I would walk up to the store (2 miles, along a busy highway with no sidewalks) with change that was dug out of the couch cushions to buy bread. I set my expectations low for other people, so that I could never be disappointed. The flip side was, if anything DID actually work out, I was always super surprised.

With my self-sufficiency, I had to develop the tools to do things that I didn't know how to do. I became an avid reader of instructions. I dug into encyclopedias and how-to books, I memorized lists of things. I watched and observed people around me, doing all the things they did, often uncolored by the need for social interactions. I was a bit moody and awkward, so I didn't have to justify my moods to any friends, and those friends that I did have generally gave me plenty of room and made sure I didn't hurt myself or anyone else. Hell, even some of them were my lab rats.

As an adult, when I decide to get into something, I research it pretty extensively. I don't just jump into anything. I'm patient and cautious about things, and I try very hard to control any of my impulses. I deliberate over major changes and only decide when I'm very sure that I want whatever it is, and that I have the tools to achieve it. The last big one was moving to New York. It's worked out beautifully, and partly because Carly and I did so much thinking and discussing beforehand.

My observation is that most people, when they find out they're going to have a baby, walk around with a bewildered, half-frightened smile plastered on their faces, and while they seem excited and happy about it all, there's a whole lot of "OH SHIT OH SHIT OHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT!!!!" going through their minds. I argue that there's no reason for this. Smart people should be better prepared, even if they weren't expecting to have a kid.

I mean, the whole process, from the time you find out, gives you between 5 and 9 months to get your shit together. I'm not implying that it is that easy, but it shouldn't be a big surprise when certain things come to pass, like the lack of sleep. My friend's comment about "now I know why all those people were smirking at me," tells me that he didn't really listen to them, didn't believe them or didn't pay attention.

I tell you: listen and observe and learn everything you can. Some of it is bullshit, some of it isn't. You should have the time to figure out why they were warning you about it... find out exactly how long it takes to get a kid to sleep through the night. In the book, Bringing Up Bebe, the writer points out that the French manage to get even fussy children on a sleep schedule in less than four months. So, get to work!

Carly and I have been researching pretty extensively since we first saw the signs of her being knocked up. I admit--for the first time in a long time, we forgot ourselves a little and started getting our hopes up about it--but as soon as the light started blinking, we were off to the library. I recommend everyone do the same, whether it is a baby, a car, a vacation, or even a new brand of socks. A little research goes a long way.

I don't want you all to think that I'm judging you in particular, or your parenting style is wrong, or that you're stupid or naive. I'm just trying to suck the mystery out of this thing, for my own benefit and maybe some of yours. The human species has been popping out babies for millions of years, so there's really nothing new under the sun. Of all the complications and strangeness that you might experience in your baby-making cycle, almost all of it falls within a very narrow slice of possibility. So, even if you get your hopes up, the end results are likely to fall close to the target anyway.

What to Expect...

I'm a little perplexed by all the people I know who have had kids and have just been absolutely flabbergasted by the process. I am going to call out Jon on this one. He recently posted on his Facebook feed,

Well, I guess I truly understand what everyone meant during the pregnancy when they would smirk at me and say enjoy sleep while you can.

Jon and his wife just brought their little girl home and I imagine that they are enjoying the insomnia that comes with the first few months of a child not understanding what a sleep schedule is. I understand what Jon's doing here: he's basically validating all the warnings and advice he got when the shit got real. It's a standard response to reality, smashing your bubble to pieces. Good luck, Jon, and congrats to you and yours!

But!

But I have to give him some grief, here. Jon, really? You had a solid 8 months to get ready for this. You're a smart guy! There really should be no surprises. There's a wealth of really good information out there, and there are tons of people who can give you sober, reliable advice on what the whole process of having a kid will entail. Sure, there's a whole host of nutcakes out there, but I assure you, good, solid advice is to be had.

That's what we've been up to, for ages. Though we haven't really gotten serious about having kids until the last six months or so, it doesn't mean we weren't paying attention. Nearly all of my best friends have had a kid or two in the last few years, and almost none of them are crazy fuckers who think that you should inject a pregnant woman's urine into a rabbit to determine the sex of the baby. I've watched all of them go through the process of having kids at various stages (none of the grody, icky, oozy stuff), and I've observed many useful facts. Packed them away for later use.

So, don't be so surprised by all this, Jon! You should be ready. If you're a little overwhelmed now, that's fine, but once everyone settles into a routine, get some books on brain development and first aid and get some life insurance policies and start dumping money into a college fund. If you and your wife haven't gotten wills written up, make sure you do that. Think ahead a little, get prepared for the next couple of waves, and you can enjoy watching it as it unfolds instead of playing catch-up.

And, enjoy those late nights. You've got three to four months of them at minimum! And, for your entertainment, during one of those long nights:

Sitting Alone in a Small Room, Surrounded by Vaginas

It's a Tuesday and Carly has been showing all the textbook symptoms of being pregnant for about three or four weeks, so we have an appointment with her OBGYN physician in Bayonne. She gets the address wrong and we have to drive around a little bit until we find it, but we make it right on time. The building is a low-slung brick thing that used to be someone's house. In fact, the building still has a lot of vestiges of the former dwelling and it really does feel like you're in someone's dining room when you are filling out forms and waiting for the nurse to call you in. A few minutes later, the doctor comes into the exam room and fires up the ultrasound machine. Just seconds into the exam he says, without any deliberation at all, "You need to go to the bathroom!" Carly chuckles nervously, the doctor steps out. She throws on her jeans and exits the room quickly.

Then I'm left, sitting, alone in a small room, surrounded by vaginas.

OBGYN offices are unabashed about showing off the stuff of their trade. There are big, plastic models, posters with bas-relief displays of all the bounty of a woman's secrets. There was an interactive standing thing on the counter that advertised a new form of IUD (inter-uterine device, a contraceptive thingamajig) that has bouncing ovaries, if you jiggle it a little. The illustrations of women with cutaways, showing how the baby should be lodged in her guts, have fantastic breasts.

Then Carly and the doctor come back in, they reset the exam, and start again. After a little twisting and zooming and drawing of lines much like on an AutoCAD display, the doc steps back and says, "from what I see here, and I'm very confident about this... this is not going to be a viable pregnancy. I'm sorry." He doesn't give us enough time for it to really sink in, but Carly and I exchange meaningful glances. "Ah, shit," my eyeballs say. "Fucking hell!" says the corner of her mouth.

The doc goes on to explain that about one-in-three of all pregnancies--all known pregnancies--end up in what is called an "anembryonic" pregnancy, or a blighted ovum. That means that there was an egg/sperm collision at some point, and the thing lodged into the uterine wall, but that was it. Something wrong with the egg or sperm caused a "chromosomal failure," or some other disaster, so the cell failed to divide and that was that. The egg sac that was implanted was just a dark blob filled with some placental tissue and a few dead cells. We had one of those. Based on the size of everything, Carly was about 7-8 weeks along in the pregnancy, and there should be a little creature in there with a heartbeat and budding arms and legs and a head (no fingers yet). Instead, we got nothin'.

It's a bit of a bummer for us both. We'd gotten our hopes up quite high. Everything was textbook, it was all so damned easy! We should have known better... if it appears to be too good to be true, it probably is. But Carly and I have been lucky to find each other, we've not had to worry about our relationship like I'm sure almost everyone has in their lives, when everything is going well, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. We were optimistic. We'd forgotten our ingrained cynicism for a little bit. And... our expectations were dashed.

So, the doctor says, we have to do a reset. After this one is done away with, Carly's body will take about two months to go back to normal and we can start "playing Russian roulette" again. That was the doctor's phrase for people who get pregnant without much planning, just firing into the dark. I corrected him by saying that we prefer to think of it as "letting nature take its course."

The good news, however, is that all of our parts appear to be working in proper order. The doc said that, based on our history, Carly got pregnant with the blighted ovum within a couple of days of going off the birth control. He says that the people he worries about are the ones that can't get pregnant at all--blighted ova or not--and that we are going to have no problems getting pregnant again. The anembryonic pregnancy is just pure statistical probability, and if things work out the way he expects, the next time we are ready to get a baby in there, it should be no problem.

So yes, statistical probability may have stopped the coming apocalypse for now, but HA HA HA, fuck you, world! It is inevitable.

One Lonely Beastie I Be

It's been a long week, and it is ending on a mixed note.

For your listening pleasure, in honor of one of our culture's greats, a man from a band that shaped my life in many ways.

RIP MCA.

Doctor Lawyer

This has been a pretty hectic week, and it's going to stay that way for a bit, so tonight, I'm going to keep the post short.

One of the things that is always stressful, especially when you move to a new location, is finding a new doctor. When we moved to NJ, I finally got some decent health insurance and started to go to a new doctor who, after two visits in a calendar year, asked, "Are you a hypochondriac?" Apparently, I was wayyyy too healthy to be going to see him more than once a decade.

Carly hasn't bothered to find a general practitioner for her general health care, as she gets her fill of the medical profession with annual pap smears, her knee surgery, and so on. Nevermind none of those guys managed to check her blood or her liver or anything, she's fine. FINE! FINE, I SAY!

So, the process of finding a proper OBGYN for the eventual babymaking business is it's own kind of adventure. Carly doesn't want to get a particular strain of female doctor because she's concerned that the doctor will be part of the CRAZIES, and will tell her that she can't sit near open doors or look at cats. She wants an old school, grizzled old man doctor who will smoke and drink to steady his hands when he goes for the specula. Kind of like the doctor from Battlestar Galactica.

Going through the lists in our insurance plan, we're just amazed at how many doctors have unfortunate names. For example:

• Doctor Lawyer
• Doctor Fleischhacker
• Doctor Doctor

And it made me wonder, how many doctors have even worse names? I thought of a few potential horrifying Germanic names for OBGYNs, but the only one I saw fit to print is this one:

DOCTOR KUNTZGRABER.

And that should do it for today.

Pregnancy Patterns

With all the baby crazy in the world these days, I think it is funny that most of our friends who have had children ended up being whoopsies!

In one case, the couple had been dating for maybe a month or two and BAM, kidneys. They've been married now for about 8 years. Another couple had been dating for years and years and were in a band together, then they took a trip to NYC. It was in a lovely hotel in Manhattan that their little boy was created. Another just happened to get pregnant when some antibiotics interfered with the birth control. All of the whoopsies! that I'm aware of are really pretty happy with the whole process and have been quite exceptional parents.

On the flip side, some of my friends and relatives have really wanted to have children for a long time and have had a shit time of it. For whatever reason, my cousin and her hubs were having difficulty, so they went the IVF route and came up with twins. They managed to have them just in time for her mother to get to know her grandchildren before she passed away last month. Another couple I know has some history of genetic disorders on his side of the family, so they went with IVF and a donor. That's a story unto itself, and maybe I'll ask them to do a guest-blog sometime.

Other people I know have semi-planned to have kids and it didn't work out quite the way they expected. My sister and her hubs planned to have a child and decided to start after he completed his first triathlon. The very next day, some of his boys had another successful swim and BAM, new triathlete in the making. This is pretty much how Carly and I have envisioned the process. We just decided to start trying without much in the way of preparation or planning, and right now seems like a good time to do it.

Most of the pregnancy books and websites out there say that if you want to have kids, you should start gearing up at least six months before you actually start. That is great and all if you want to go through that whole planned pregnancy thing, and you don't deal well with disappointment, but I say, fuck that. I mean, hell. We already have a back up plan if this whole kid thing doesn't work out--we're getting another dog and a Fiat 500. I get to buy the Lego Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer. So there's something in it for us if we don't get pregnant.

The books go on to say that you should work out, get in shape, start eating healthy, quit smoking, etc. These are all good ideas even if you're not looking to get infested with a big ol' parasite. But the one that really sticks in my gullet is that even the most calm and collected books say that you should abstain from alcohol for months before you get pregnant.

FUCK. THAT.

My niece, eating marshmallows that she did not roast.

I mean, isn't alcohol the thing that actually gets people pregnant? Almost all the whoopsies, the planned ones, and the semi-planned pregnancies I know of involved at least a little bit of boozing. Hell, when my sister told us all that she thought she was pregnant, we were all downing beers at the bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. And my niece? Fucking brilliant. To wit:

My niece, playing with fire. Like you should.

Now, that doesn't mean we're not doing anything. I mean, even the more liberal pregnancy books say don't have more than one or two drinks a week while pregnant, and most warn you away from alcohol for the first trimester, as the critical growth and development happen in that time, so yeah.... been doing some research. I'll probably be posting a lot of "FUCK. THAT." stuff as this thing develops, basically blowing apart the logic of pregnant people who want you to live in a bubble and eat only burned Tofurkey.

So yeah, we're not going to do anything too silly. Here's what we're doing right now: we're both exercising quite a bit--she's running, doing yoga and weights, I walk about 5-6 miles a day on average, lift a lot of beer glasses. She's cutting back on alcohol and taking some vitamins. Oh yeah, and she's keeping track of our sex life on her phone. [It turns out that this is a hell of a lot more common than I thought--a co-worker who is not trying to get pregnant keeps track of her adventures as a matter of course. With her, I think it's actually a locker room tally. I dunno.]

Friday Night and Saturday Morning

The regimen I've set for myself on this blog seems a bit too light. I feel like there's a little too long between Wednesday and Sunday posts. So, I'm going to start some kind of weekly thing on Fridays. I feel like it should be a themed Friday, and it should be entertainment. Because Fridays are for entertainment, yo!

This week's thing will be a YouTube playlist that I'm working on that has the rough theme of "songs that make you never want to have kids." Because if there are three pieces of advice my parents have given me, it is these:

1. Don't bring home anything you've got to feed or cure.
2. Question everything; take no shit.
3. Never get married, don't have kids.

So here you go: Never Have Kids.




If you have any playlist suggestions, I'm happy to hear them. Please, keep your selections to things that have to do only with people killing their kids, kids killing their parents, kids killing each other, heartache, abuse, and torture. Oh, that reminds me, I have songs to add.

On Disparities

I haven't collected my thoughts properly for this post, so it's just going to be a generalized rant, disassociated from much intense research. But the main thrust is, the disparity between being a man and a woman in a relationship that results in a pregnancy.

I will paraphrase my good friend, Tony, who said, in regards to his existing child, "My wife had a baby. I didn't do shit." He will then qualify somewhat, talking about sperm and fucking and all that, but he's reasonably self-deprecating when it comes to the whole process. I tend to agree. However, I don't discount that WE will have a baby someday, even if SHE is the one who carries the poor, rotten bugger.

I bring this up because of some of the weird shit that comes up when you start telling people that you're trying to have a kid. I mean, anyone who's ever been pregnant gets all googley and moogley about the prospects, as though having babies is the best thing ever. As though they don't have enough fucking babies of their own...

Anyhow... There's a co-worker of mine who is now the father of two kids. When he and his wife birthed their first offspring, they determined that wifey could still work. When number two rolled around, it didn't really work out. Wife's income didn't even offset child care, and number two had some minor medical issues, so having her take care of the rugrats and not working made a lot of sense. At least, for the time being.

However, the wifey doesn't have the skill of Driving (zero dots, or -10 untrained), so hubby would be required to drive to any doctors' appointments for any kids. Hubby, my friend, put in for the opportunity to work from home for a few months (I think the request was for six months) so that he could drive the fam to the doctor if needs be. His commute is a pretty long one, so it seemed to make a lot of sense. The requirements for working from home include, but are not limited to, that you must have a private space to work from, you must have a computer, and you will not do any child care while you're at it. During your shift, you've got to work. No breast-feeding, even if you're a fella. My friend fit all those criteria, and his request seemed reasonable.

Unfortunately, he was denied that benefit. For whatever reason, it wasn't deemed appropriate. I'm not sure he was given a reason. Anyway... Shortly after his request was denied, at least three women were granted the work-from-home option after birthing their young. It seemed a bit shitty to me, and, in fact, smelled of gender discrimination. Ladies had babies, so they can stay home (despite the prohibition from doing actual child care--other than incidentals--during the day), while the big, buxom fellow cannot. Fuck. That.

There happens to be a court case rattling around the federal courts right now, Erhardt v. LaHood, I think. Look it up. It's a doozy.

I have gone on the record fighting for the rights of Middle Class White Dudes in the past, but I don't really go to bat for the class that I tend to fit in. I mean, it's tasteless to say that white dudes get a raw deal when we make about 15% more than our female counterparts and don't EVEN get me started on brown people. It's a shit world and sadly, I have a genetic marker that makes it a hell of a lot easier for me to get by than most people. However, I enjoy the idea of an equality standard, and I think that in some ways (not many), white dudes get a raw deal. And in my co-worker's case, I think he's been handed one. So there.

I bring this up because Carly and I are discussing the logistics of having a kid, and how we'll manage child care and time off and all that. And so help me Hunter S. Thompson, if I get denied medical leave to take care of my kid because I didn't pop the baby out of my own scrotum, HOLY SHIT, I will kill a guy.

That's all for now.

Sexy Time

It's a little weird, looking at my wife's calendar, and seeing a little mark for every time we've had sex in the last month or so. That is apparently one of those things you have to do when you want to get knocked up. No, not the sex--that's not important. What's important is keeping track of things, apparently.

Carly and I really decided to start the baby dance about three or four months ago. We have been decidedly unscientific. We originally planned for her to go off of birth control on April Fool's Day. We thought that was awfully funny. But then there were quirks. She missed a period in March and decided, fuck it, why wait?

Carly had been on birth control of one sort or another since she was a teenager. In fact, she's pretty much never missed a pill. There were never any concerns about accidental pregnancies with us, and we were tested and clean, so other forms of contraceptives were not required. Depending on the kinds of birth control she was on, Carly's sex drive would either be in overdrive or in park. The last prescription she had put her pretty much in the menopausal category, and she'd rather have a glass of sherry and read a magazine than get naked. It wasn't a chore, but it was definitely me who initiated sex during that time.

This is what gets me in trouble.

In January, Carly's new doctor changed her prescription to something low-dose, and the changes were instant and quite dramatic. I remember one night--it was a typical Wednesday--I was sitting at the table around 10:00PM, doinking around on my laptop, and Carly goes and jumps into bed. She asks, "What are you doing?" I told her I was playing a game or something. "Why?" she asked. Again--I was used to Carly going to bed meaning that Carly was going to bed. 10:00 was early, but not that early. So she ultimately croons, "You should come to bed. Now." And I did. It's been a fun couple of months.

But in March, she missed a period. We had already decided to start the kid process, but hadn't really done any planning, prepping, or anything. The idea was to just stop with the birth control and see how it goes. If there were complications or if we weren't able to have kids, we'd just adopt another dog and get a new Fiat. Seemed like a solid thing. Carly took a couple of pregnancy tests and they came back negative, so no big deal.

But it was a big deal, actually. In those two or three days when she was wondering why she missed her period, we started to mentally prepare for the possibility of a child. And in Carly's estimation, we'd waited long enough. After she took the pregnancy tests, she stopped taking the birth control. I should mention that she didn't tell me for a day or two, and when she did, it was in passing conversation. She said, "oh, I haven't taken them since Thursday," and I was like, "WHUUUUUUUTTTT???" Especially considering that we'd gotten all sloppy that morning. And the night before. Did I mention that Carly was suddenly a teenager? It was awesome.

Anyway, the biological barriers have been down since mid-March. And now my sex life is plotted out on some calendar in some app in her phone. A more serious tally than in any high school locker room on the planet. Indeed.

Why We Want to Have Kids

Carly and I don't particularly have a strong drive to have children. Neither of us grew up wishing that we could be parents, and for our relationship, it's been just a vague thing out on the horizon--something to do when we got older, maybe. We'd talked about it, considered what we'd name our imaginary children, but ultimately we were pretty cool just being ourselves. For us, having kids is just one of a number of fun projects we could do in our lives. That's why we're approaching it not as a mission, but as an adventure.

So, why have kids? Why now? We're just barely getting settled into our jobs. We are just now paying off all of our credit, and we still have a heap of other debts to go. We could just sit back, coast and get down to a happy zero balance on everything before we start the whole kid adventure, right?

Well... there is evolution. When it comes down to it, we are just big piles of genes and cells and hormones. Piles that have been conditioned over millions of years to enjoy the hell out of the procreative process, and piles that are designed to match up pretty well as easily as possible, considering our relatively short fertility range and long gestation cycles. Yeah, there are some incompatibility issues, and things don't always bake up the way you want them, but more often than not we turn a night of drunk fun or a morning pipe-cleaning romp into another pile of genes and cells that will one day manage to crash your car into a ditch trying to pull off a stunt from Fast Five (the physics in this movie are stupid). So, considering all that, we're kind of starting to feel the urge to procreate. Our genes are starting to tell our higher selves that it's time to do the evolution.

We also just kind of think it will be a fun experiment. Can we screw a kid up worse than our parents did us? Can we make the kid eat things that we never ate when we were kids? Can we learn things from some runt that we never thought of teaching them in the first place? Rotten buggers, always getting in your skulls: babies. Huh. What? Where was I?

And, of course, there's the societal stuff. If we're going to have kids, we don't want to be those people who are walking their kids down the aisle in a walker, or whatever. I want to have the energy to actually do all the things I want to do in the experiment. Considering that my body is engineered basically to shut off around age 68, I want to make sure I can torture my poor offspring for as long as possible.

The last reason is my favorite: my kids will be SUCH assholes. I mean, they'll be snotty, know-it-all jerks. And they'll turn out at least as snarky and horrible as I was, probably worse. I really, really, want to subject future generations to the kind of wisdom that can only come from a smaller, meaner version of me. I want it to be rotten.

Things to Think About When Thinking About Having Kids

One of the things that I strictly want to avoid in this adventure is the Crazy. With a capital C. In my estimation, lots and lots of American parents overthink the whole thing. They worry and listen to half-truths without really considering what is really important. I don't want to be one of those people, so I have been doing some research. And I've been reaching out to the things that I trust. To wit:

Freakonomics Radio - The Economist's Guide to Parenting



The question of the show is, "do parents really matter?" When it all shakes out, how does obsessive parenting really affect a child's ultimate earning power, education, etc.? There are other issues, but the punchline is, "not all that much." Obsessive parenting just doesn't do much for a kid's development. Give it a listen. It's good stuff. It's especially funny to hear the economists talk about all the dumb helicopter parenting shit they do, then say, "Yeah, that doesn't really matter all that much, and I'm happier when I don't do it."

The Plan

The plan for this blog is to update it religiously--that means, only on Wednesdays, Sundays, and major occasions. Each post will have some kind of pertinent media attachment, like a photo, video, or link to a podcast. I will try to keep them to a few paragraphs in length, and even the appointed days where I don't have much to say, something will be added.

Carly started referring to the blog as "our blog." I had to correct her, it is MY blog. This isn't to say that I don't want her involved in the thing--the adventure is very much more hers than mine--but this will be a frame for my own experiences and how my particular psychology works out through the whole thing.

So, for those of you who feel like maybe I'm being mean, here's a reminder of why I'm involved in this project in the first place:

 

Yep, that chick right there.

Bellyotes & Bowolves

Typical night at home with me and Carly.

Every now and then I get the urge to start a blog. Now, I think I might have a good reason to. You see, Carly and I have decided to embark upon the journey of parenthood. We decided this rather deliberately, and not out of any particular dream of "having kids someday" or "wanting to be a parent." No, we think it will be a fun experiment and want to see how well we could do at this thing. Sure, there's probably a bit of evolutionary conditioning in there, and not a small amount of parental and social pressure, but I like to think that none of those things weighed heavily on our decision. Rather, it seems like an interesting venture, we have all the materials we need to get started, and we think that there will be some prizes at the end.

This blog will generally track my experiences and observations in the procreation process, a place to vent if needs be, and room to wax philosophical whenever I like.

The name derives from Carly and my words for the sounds that your guts make when you're hungry. Those long, howling whines that come up from your belly and sound like coyotes are bellyotes (pronounced belly-OH-tees). Bowolves (prounced BOW-wolves). are the sounds of growling and grumbling sounds of a wolf deep in your bowels. These concepts apply directly to the idea of having a child--a little monster in your guts, declaring its horrible intent.

So, Bellyotes & Bowolves will be the theme for that thing that will very likely be rumbling in Carly's guts over the next many months. I hope you enjoy it.