So what if I only watch sports during playoffs? It's better than when I was younger, when the type of people who played sports were the type of people I avoided, along with people who drank. Now my life has changed, and I actively distrust people who don't drink.
Here is Harrison after the Celtics' 131 to 92 rout of the Lakers. The kid's exhausted.
I don't know what to do with my free time now that the Finals and Battlestar Galactica are over. I think I'll have to replace that reading lamp I broke with a golf club when I was drunk.
There comes a time when a child must leave her father's website, so I have created a subdomain for Marisol, the former ACI. It's not yet finished, but you can see a video of her singing Happy Birthday to herself better than anyone in her class. Here it is.
We had a drugged versus natural birth with Harrison, as opposed to Marisol, and that has made a great deal of difference. TAARG is ready to go to the natural childbirth class we attended for 12 weeks pre-Marisol and tell them she wants her money back. I felt it then, but the militancy of the "natural" childbirth contingent and its own campaign of intolerance of, say, pain avoidance, is as damaging to expectant mothers as thalidomide is tasty.
I asked our birth team this time around, oddly enough the same group as were there last time, if they could now admit that couples walking in with "birth plans" irritated them as much as I thought it might.
"Oh yeah," the nurse said.
Sleep has been available in doses larger than I expected. Still, my eyes feel like Krispy Kreme doughnuts microwaved for 15 seconds.
The cats have been spotted trying to suck Harrison's soul through his nostrils several times, each time being forced to put it back. Note to readers: the soul looks like mucous.
It is not lost on me that the birth of each of my children so far has resulted in a World Series win for the Red Sox. The Red Sox currently have the best record in baseball. These are facts.
For evolutionary purposes, the "stamp of paternity" is very important. I have yet to see myself in any of my son's features. The stamp of paternity, it is said, prevented prehistoric fathers from dashing their babies' brains out. It is interesting that whenever the verb "dashing" is used, aside from "dashing through the snow", it shows up followed by "babies' brains out".
He has three months to develop horrible eyesight, is all I'm saying.
But since I only shop at Costco, and since Costco does not sell a Kirkland Brain Dashing Stone, my son is safe.
The Moro Reflex is present in most infants. It describes the sudden spasming of the arms during sleep. We like to say, "Harrison has the horrors again." The stamp of paternity would surely be evident in my son believing beings from Geometries Beyond Time were going to get him, thus his horrors.
The pictures above show Marisol tricking us into believing she loves her brother, the former in her Red Sox jacket the night they won it all in 2004, a month after she was born, and Harrison's early reading list, preparing him for a life of British oppression.
Harrison Gray Barrett was born today at 2:16 p.m. (PST), weighing in at eight pounds, 12.5 ounces. Rebecca pushed mightily for about 15 minutes after a labor of fewer than three hours. Aaron Copland's "Billy the Kid" Suite was playing as he emerged. I cut the cord, letting him know that I would do it again no later than his 18th birthday. Everyone concerned with the blessed event is raring to go.
Researchers have determined that infants who view "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby"-type videos are less verbally adept than their peers whose parents substituted TV time for actually talking with them.
I believe watching these videos, with their vivid colors, morphing shapes, and absence of words are the equivalent of cats watching an aquarium. Can my cat talk? No she cannot.
More than 1,000 parents took part in an assessment of their children's skills as judged by the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI).
Among infants (age 8 to 16 months), each hour per day of viewing baby DVDs/videos was associated with a 16.99-point decrement in CDI score...
...some children could not identify the word "cookie", indicating that parents hoarded all the sweets while they parked their children in front of the TV.
This is why we only let our daughter watch Baby Geddy videos. I asked Marisol what she thought of this.
"One likes to believe in the freedom of music," she said. "But glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity, yeah."
"That doesn't make any goddamn sense," I said, enunciating each word clearly so she understood. "You are a horrible disappointment."
TAARG noticed that the food critic/Alan Rickman character in Pixar's Ratatouille (played by Peter O'Toole) recalled the food critic in T.C. Boyle's short story "Sorry Fugu" from a 1989 collection.
In the movie, the merciless critic Anton Ego caves in to a simple peasant dish that he remembers from his childhood. In the short story, the critic's boyfriend is kept at bay with burned steak and peas, "shanty Irish" food his mother used to make.
The critics in both stories find it easier to dismiss things than embrace them.
"To like something," Boyle's critic says, "to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I'm wrong? What if it's really no good?"
Ratatouille's critic says, "But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new."
This was the first movie the three of us attended at a theatre, and our 2.5-year-old took the movie like a champ while other kids around her shrieked and kicked their chairs. Ours was the child that made single people and childless couples want to have children, and both TAARG and I had to fend off proposals to create children.
"No, really," TAARG said. "I'm already pregnant."
"Sure, when?" I said. "I've got a 3:00 and a 3:15 available."
Ratatouille's animation was brilliant but the story required a little too much of the audience. It wasn't a matter of giving the audience too much credit, it was a matter of not knowing when to stop teaching us about individualism and following one's dreams and listening to one's heart. There were too many ingredients in the stew.
And the density in one area was a deficit in another. While it's not very interesting that "anyone can cook", we would like to know how the human protagonist suddenly is an expert rollerblader and customer service representative when before he couldn't ride a bike or keep a job. The story needed simpling up, but visually it was rich, and the ending was very satisfying.
Are churros sold at Florida's Disney World, or is that treat strictly a Disney Land option?
I could research this, maybe even visit the Disney World website, but that would seem intellectually lazy. A far more vigorous thing to do would be to wait for people to respond to this post.
For TAARG's umpteenth birthday this week we traveled to Disneyland. I like to think I am not a cheap bastard, but I made sure we packed a lunch rather than pay $11 for a child-size peanut butter sandwich at Minnie's Crust Hollow in New Orleans Square.
As TAARG got in free because she got a gift pass for her birthday, here are our expenses:
Parking: $11 Adult admission (with $5 Southern California resident discount): $78 Child under three admission: Free A hat, a keychain, some lollipops: $34 A churro and a small bottle of Aquafina water: $5.75
Cost of the same churro and water at Costco: $2.75 Cost of the same churro and water at 7-11: $3.25
Non-Disney expenses:
Two Subway foot-long subs, with chips: $14.75 Four bottles of stupid Vitamin Water, from Ralph's: $4 Two Hostess pies (Ralph's again): $3.75
If we had purchased those items at Disneyland, based on the 103 percent over-Costco markup: $50
I can only imagine how much Disney would charge for gas if it could be worked into the narrative that Goofy owned a Chevron.
I love Disneyland. It is more of a local attraction for California residents than Disney World is for Floridians. It is just run-down enough to get away with being charming, even if the ridiculous prices do a good job of sucking the charm out of the place.
The American Girl (she has graduated from ACI status) spent over an hour in Disneyland's various splash parks, outlasting successive waves of children. Her mother and I were both strangely proud of this, even as our daughter looked like a waterlogged piece of bread by the end of it.
As you know, I am a racetrack sharpie. Here are some horseracing terms I know:
spavined canter hung like a horse parimutuel Charles Bukowski
When ACI was inboard, we read the book Seabiscuit to her. Seabiscuit's historic race against War Admiral was held at Santa Anita racetrack, which we visited the other day for dollar hot dogs. We have no doubt that the dollar hot dogs were made from underperforming horses, as this past weekend ended Santa Anita's season.
Seabiscuit's injury and recuperation, we thought, were emblematic of ACI's own early struggle, as she spent the first two weeks of her life in the hospital, pinioned with tubes.
So when we went to Santa Anita we thought it would be a moment of closure.
"Do you remember my reading Seabiscuit to you when you were in the womb?" I asked.
"No," she said, watching the racetrack Zamboni.
"What about all those Beatles songs I played?"
"I don't remember," she said.
"In your opinion," I asked, "Do you think that the trend toward fetal communication is about as useful as talking to a plant, based on the fact that you have no affinity toward Seabiscuit and you have been flinging yourself to the ground since we got here?"
"I believe that to be correct," she said.
Adding insult to injury, I have now been disabused of the notion of the supernatural wisdom of children, as espoused by Stephen King and C.S. Lewis. ACI missed the superfecta and tore up her ticket in a rage. Then she put out her cigar in a jockey's eye.
"Nuts to you," she said.
In related news, the Kentucky Derby and Cinco de Mayo fall on the same day this year. I am going to be making my mint juleps with Mexican sugarcane.
The other day we headed down to a medical establishment and took some shots of the being currently growing inside TAARG. Note that I have added an eye to personalize our fetus, so that onlookers might not mistake his reticence for inhumanity.
He is due August 29.
We have not yet arrived at a name, though having only recently arrived at a gender we are confident that the name will come in time.
Marisol, the soon-to-be-former American Crib Imp (ACI), when asked what we should name her little brother, immediately dubbed him "CAMPY."
This is why we leave the naming of children to professionals and law firms that specialize in branding.
"That's a really stupid name, Marisol," we said behind her back.
For a little extra cash that we paid to some guy hanging around the Beverly Hills clinic where this photo was taken, we found that the tot had no chromosomal abnormalities, aside from ZOSOmy 4, a variation of the fourth chromosomal pair that indicates young Campy will like Led Zeppelin.
So what if I only watch sports during playoffs? It's better than when I was younger, when the type of people who played sports were the type of people I avoided, along with people who drank. Now my life has changed, and I actively distrust people who don't drink.
