I'm not one for sensationalism, but the fact that these boys are the same age as mine kind of freaked me out. I love the mother's excuse, "I was sleeping in the back room," like it's a situation that could happen to any responsible parent.

Video appears to show brothers, 2 and 5, smoking pot

You know how people always say, "You have to take a test to get a driver's license, you should have to take a test to have kids," well I think they should legalize non-physiologically addictive drugs but make people go through psychological testing to see if they are stable enough to handle them. I'm tired of teenagers and idiots serving as examples of why, "all drugs are bad," I know so many people that used recreational drugs responsibly (i.e. once they got serious responsibilities in their lives like kids & mortgages they either quit or drastically decreased their use), it's annoying that much of the public can't decipher the distinctions between, using, abusing and being addicted to drugs.

Master of his domain

I've read about fetuses masturbating in utero, and I wouldn't be surprised if my two year old son started before he was born, it's like his hands are magnets and his penis is made of metal. Every time I change his diaper he's fondling himself. Sometimes when I'm changing his diaper and cleaning his business, he gets an erection and looks a little too happy. I've noticed that sometimes if he's freaking out and fighting me because he doesn't want his diaper changed he'll totally chill out after gaining access to himself. In the tub the other day a killer whale rubber bath toy with an open mouth was being put to use in a way I never would have dreamed, and after that now all toys with orifices are open game, as it were, is that a pun or am I just tired, all I know is that we're going to need more than one upstairs bathroom by time puberty hits.

LABELS

I'm trying to make use of the "Labels" attached to each entry, I've gone back over the past 10 months or so, and will try to have every entry labeled over the next few weeks, any way here's the key:
whining = posts that primarily deal with my mental and emotional state
complaining = posts that deal with actual things that happened, outside situations (schools, taxes, the guys who shovel out the snow came late) not just me mentally tripping out on something
knowitall = posts that are informational like links, or where I get up on a soapbox and speak as if you could actually benefit from my vast pool of knowledge
the things they do = growth benchmarks, cute, funny and/or gross things my children do

How to Stop Whining in 4 Easy Steps

I suck

Man, I hate when you read something or come across something that makes you realize, "Man I really fucking suck."
I was just reading the Paper and there were two articles in particular that brought this home for me, one about a poet who lives in my town that just published a book about leaving the city to raise a family in Montclair, and another article about parenting blogs.
Why would these things make me realize I really fucking suck, well because they made me re-realize what a quitter I am, I use to constantly write poetry, but rather than working at my craft to get better, at some point in college I decided, ah fuck poetry, the only people interested in my poetry are women who want to sleep with me, being in a band is a better way to reach people with my ideas and feelings.
Now of course I didn't stop writing poetry & prose I just never worked at it any more, the first draft was now the only draft and I stopped showing it to people, it's not even like I got any devastatingly bad feed back, I just gave up the ghost.

As you obviously know by the fact that you are reading this I right a stay-at-home-dad blog,
and I've been doing it for a number of years, though I have ideas for it almost daily I have to force myself to post once a month, it's a lot like my ideas for bands, I'd come up with a concept, write four or five songs, demo two of them and be like, "ah no one wants to hear stripped down trashy blues punk, why bother continuing with this project?" Then two years later the White Stripes start making waves doing that exact same thing, and few years after that go on to fame and fortune. Now I'm not under the misguided notion that I have nearly as much talent as Jack White, but a band breaking big doing what I wanted to do just shows that there was interest in the world out there for it. And again, my band got some good reviews, but a combination of me being lame, and having an inability to focus on one artistic endeavor at a time ends up with me being an artistic jack of all trades, master of none.
So basically if I had three blogs instead of seven I might have written more entries for this blog, and hence might have been noticed by the author of the article in the paper, and had my blog listed in the article which would have lead to my blog getting more hits, and that some how would make me feel what? More valid as a blogger, a person, a parent, or what, why do I even care? I'm often confused where my healthy Buddhist/Taoist not giving a fuck about the trappings of life intersects with my unhealthy fear of failure, and what role my socialist desire to not deem myself a commodity and therefore not participate in capitalist society plays in it all.


Product is the Excrement of Action

Join the Resistance: Fall in Love

from crimethinc http://www.crimethinc.com/library/english/join.html

since i haven't posted in forever here's an excerpt from one of my babbling emails ...

"... I know about the old, boring, uninteresting, uncreative, crappy career angle, it's why people have midlife crisises and why otherwise unsleazy men cheat all the time, (that is if there are any unsleazy men).
Society has been set up to bore us to death, we have to try to keep challenging ourselves, I know on the one hand, my kids keep part of me on my toes, but they help to kill another part of me, a similar part that is killed by straight jobs, marriage, taxes, worrying about retirement, fear of death, etc., the freak, not just the inner child but the actualized and free adult that many of us were on the verge of attaining before our decadently extended adolescence forcibly came to it's end either by love, procreation, or being sick of sharing crappy apartments with strangers and not having enough money to go on vacation without running up credit card debt ... right now at best I can keep in touch with this person who I had planned to become by being a weekend psychic warrior, basically exposing myself to people on the street, no I meant to say exposing myself to either challenging or spiritually uplifting art (like Forest Gump and that wonderful artist that paints those quaint scenes of overly decorated snow covered houses, tchk-chk-BOOM, wall full of brains), basically anything to get you outside of yourself and your grind that will still allow you to get back into it in a timely manner, so no work is missed or bills paid late, with the hope that these respites will allow you to keep that part of you alive that you wish to flourish at some point in the future no matter how unforeseeable that future is. Obviously exercise, yoga, taichi and mediation are all probably more effective ways of doing the same thing.

This reminds me of something I read about some point in the distant past in some region of India where such high numbers of young men were devoting themselves to spiritual studies that it was hurting the economy. This prompted "them" I guess them that come up with the grand ideas that society is based on to decide that men should spend their first 20 years devoted to learning, both the secular and spiritual, their next 20 years devoted to operating in the secular and physical world, ie. making money and making a babies, and the next 20, which at that time for most I'm sure meant the rest of their lives, living as a spiritual being, be it a wandering aesthetic, a monk, etc.
and basically now that applies to both men and women, and we are all in the suck it up and deal with it stage of our lives, and we haven't had the proper spiritual training to get through this stage, we just have to find a way to keep one foot out of the rut so we can keep it on the proverbial Path."

My 4 1/2 year-old's favorite things

Sports Teams:
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Houston Oilers
NJ Devils
Rutgers University Scarlet Knights
NJ Nets
Music -
:Bands:
Arctic Monkeys
the Damned
the Clash
Monster Magnet
Mudhoney
Stereolab
:Genres:
Rock (punk, stoner, classic)
Drum and Bass (which he calls "crazy music")
Jazz
Foods:
Mac & Cheese
Pizza
Peanut Butter & Jelly
Tacos
Tater Tots
Friends:
Taj
Hollen
Beck
Ethan
Colman
Mallory
Sports:
Football
Basketball
Soccer
TV Shows:
Curious George
Peanuts / Charlie Brown
SpongeBob Square Pants
Wonder Pets
Backyardigans
Colors:
Blue
Pink
Green
Superheroes:
Spiderman
The Flash
Power Rangers
Zorro
Superman

Kindergarten applications?

My oldest son will be going to kindergarten next year, and in our town we have a magnet school system so WE HAVE TO APPLY TO SEND OUR SON TO KINDERGARTEN!!! Seems a bit much to me. There are six schools to pick from all with different specialties or slants on education (one is next to the local University and uses the Univ. resources, college students as teaching assistants, and has courses designed by Univ. professors, another is a Montessari school, a gifted and talented school, a school of global studies, another is focusing on family and environmental studies, and lastly a science and technology school).

One of my many problems with this set up is how can we judge our 4 year olds learning style after one semester of full time preschool? Ever try asking a preschooler what their favorite things about school are, "Besides playtime, yes not including imagination station, your favorite things besides playing, no mac n' cheese is your favorite food not a subject at school ..."

My main concern in choosing a school is at this young age do I pick what he likes, what I like, what will prepare him for the world or what will prepare him for 6th grade? Some schools seem to have a non-competitive vibe "cooperation and collaboration, not competition, are emphasized," which is really great, but will that be preparing him to be crushed in an extremely competitive capitalist society, plus he'll be getting enough commie indoctrination at home, just like he'll be exposed to the arts at home, should he be going to the science and technology school?

It comes down to this, should we be choosing a school that reinforces our values and interests of being open minded, creative and socially conscious, or one that teaches him things that he won't be getting at home? I don't have a fucking clue ...



We're just coming out of two weeks of 104.5 fevers and missing Thanksgiving at all three grandparents homes, no more than three hours of straight sleep due to being awoken because of our congestion, runny noses and sore throats, and in the 22 month old's case, being miserable and not having the vocabulary to express how shitty you feel.

Mothering show questionnaire

A friend put me in touch with a mothering show that's on cable I think called Surviving Motherhood, if they can get some other stay at home dad's they may devote an episode to our plight. If you live in the North East and are a stay at home dad who would be interested in being interviewed for TV contact me and I'll pass your information along. Below are some of the questions from the show's application:

1. Do you work? If so, list occupation and hours: No
2. If applicable, partner's age: 38
3. Interest/hobbies:
Music, Internet radio, politics, sports; I use to be into movies and wine but that's pretty much died off after having kids.
4. Would you (along with your children) be willing to spend portions of 3-4 days participating in a women's discussion group?
Yes for a stay at home dad's group, so long as it doesn't interfere with my four year-old's school.
5. What are the major challenges currently facing you as a mother/parent? (list and explain): House work, cleaning up after the kids, the whole homemaker part of being a stay at home parent just isn't apart of my dna; Personal time, I mistakenly thought that being home with the kids would allow me to work on my music and writing, it is also hard to find time to exercise and meditate; Time alone with partner, if the kids don't get to sleep on time there's no time for us to be alone, and even when they do get to bed on time, we only have an hour or so; Working on my career, spending so much time being a caregiver and support system to my wife and two children I have little energy left to look into grad schools and plan for my life after both boys are in school full-time.
6. Describe your last desperate moment(s) as a mother/parent:
We were down the shore on the boardwalk and my oldest had to go to the bathroom, he's only recently become fully potty trained, and I had no idea where the nearest public bathroom was, and was given not so great directions to the restroom, so I carried my son to a pier in hopes of letting him relieve himself into the ocean, but of course the pier which was empty an hour earlier had about 20 people on it, so when he couldn't hold it any more, I took him over to the side, held him so no one would notice and told him it was okay and that it wasn't his fault, but all of us grown ups because none of us asked if he had to go earlier, nor did we find out in advance where the bathrooms were.
7. Do you belong to any parenting groups? If so, please list. No
8. Have you ever, even for a fleeting moment, regretted becoming a mother? Why or why not? Yes, the lack of free time, having gone from someone who had time to travel, work on art, be physically fit and meditate and with a disposable income living in the city, to being semi-broke, tired most of the time and living in the suburbs has been hard to deal with at sometimes.
9. What would you like to discuss with other moms?
Not sure, how they balance their time.

The International Conspiracy to Make Me Late

I’ll start with last night, though this has been going on for a while, at my 4 year-old’s suggestion we ordered Chinese, and everyone is enjoying their food, we usually eat in our dinning room, which is really like 1/6 of our great room/ living room. I was making my own peanut sauce because I don't really like Chinese, so I got my fried tofu & broccoli sans sauce, so my wife was in charge of feeding the kids, now my 21 month old can feed himself, but he’s not proficient with utensils yet and mostly uses his hands, which is cool for finger sandwiches, chicken fingers and cookies but not the neatest way for him to eat vegetable fried rice, but my wife insists on letting him feed himself so about 50% of the food misses his mouth, 25% on his lap, 25% on the floor. I tell her to remember that if she’s going to let him feed himself that she’s responsible for cleaning up after him, and next time to feed him in the kitchen rather than the dinning room because no one wants food tracked all in the living room, in theory she has no problem with this, cool.
My four-year-old finishes his dessert, asks to be excused from the table, and goes to the bathroom to wash his hands, all good, but on the way he knocks the tray off of his booster seat adding a handful of brownie crumbs to the ¼ pint of vegetable fried rice his brother put on the floor, great game 7 of the Mets pennant series is already underway, no problem I can watch the game while I’m cleaning up the food off of the floor and my wife can take the kids upstairs and start getting them ready for bed, I’ll even help her out since I’m already on the floor and clean up the toddler’s mess. But then the four year old gags as he’s having a cup of milk and yaks up his beef stick & brownie in the hallway and then in the kitchen, great now I’ve got a good 20 minutes of cleaning to do, which usurps the time I was planning to spend putting away laundry, which means extra time trying to pick out his outfit for school tomorrow, so I tell my wife to take the kids and I’ll take care of the floors (this just made me remember that I have my sons puke spittle covered slippers in the washing machine waiting to be washed).
So I wipe all that shit up, mop the floors and thank god that we don’t have wall-to-wall carpeting.
I hear my big boy crying about something upstairs and my wife calls me up, he’s saying he wishes he could go back in time to a day a few months ago when he turned down an offer to go to Target with me saying, “You don’t need me to keep you company, you’re not going to be alone you’ve got your bones and muscles to keep you company.”
Wow, kind of a creative way of saying keep your own damn self company, I didn’t mind that he didn’t want to go shopping and that he wanted to stay home and hang out with his mom (shopping solo is way easier than with a kid in toe), but I explained to him that that wasn’t the nicest way to turn down an offer to do something.
So now months later he wishes he had gone and is sorry that he hurt my feelings, my wife and I both tell him it’s totally okay, you just have to realize that when you make a decision to do one thing it often means rejecting another thing, so make your decisions carefully. This does not make him feel any better, I think this was triggered by his realization that now that he’s in school full-time I do many things with little brother and without him, like a recent trips to Target and Costco. He basically wants me to come upstairs to and get into bed with him and my wife, which means leaving cleaning up the dinner dishes until some mystical time in the future, which means I’ll probably be doing them sometime tomorrow which means I may not have the bottles and containers I need to pack his lunch the next morning, which means I’ll have to hand wash them, which means I’ll be late getting him to school again, which means I’ll be batting 1000% for lateness this week, but he’s upset so I get into bed with them until he falls asleep and it makes him really happy.
I leave my wife and son asleep in bed and move the 21 month old in his crib, go downstairs to watch the second half of the game and clean up. The game is totally stressful and tight at 1 to 1 all game and the baby wakes up crying so I go get him and let him fall back asleep on my lap, so I’m not cleaning up during the commercials as I planned but honestly I probably wouldn’t have been done so anyway.
So of course being part of the international conspiracy to make me late the Mets can’t just loose in quick fashion but hold on until the 9th inning to give up a two run homerun, which I didn’t actually see because I could see the writing on the wall and nervously kept turning the channel when it looked like a Cardinal was in good position to get a hit. (In my channel surfing I saw part of a porno documentary on HBO where they interviewed some couple that started off as Christian Missionaries in the outer islands of Alaska, then moved to LA and wound up getting mixed up in the porno business, which they now have been doing for 25 years, talk about going from one end of the spectrum to the other, I have cognitive dissonance from going from someone who was barely employed and got high everyday, multiple time a day to an corporate employed urban hipster to a painfully sober suburban stay at home dad, I guess there’s always someone who’s done more and stretched themselves more than you have.)
So the Mets loose, I’m bummed I get to bed after midnight which means I’m getting like 5 ½ hours sleep again for about the 12th night in a row.
Baby wakes up at like 5:45 AM, I change his diaper, change his clothes because his diaper leaked through, put on a Bear and the Big Blue House video and get back into bed, not going back to sleep though.
Moving forward to 7:30 AM I make the kids bottles, my wife leaves for work, I bring them downstairs for breakfast, the baby’s highchair is still covered with food, my wife never cleaned it up and it’s raining outside so there’s no easy way to clean it up (I will often just take the chair outside and turn it upside down to get the food off), so I have to waist time picking sticky rice of chair and out of its crevasses, making us later.
I’ve taken to telling my preschooler to go potty rather than letting him wait until the last minute as he often does. So I already had him go but he didn’t poop, so I know that’s on the horizon.
One thing you don’t realize while the little ones are in diapers is that once you get them potty trained you still have a bunch of work to do because they don’t wipe themselves very well, they forget to wash their hands, or spend 20 minutes washing their hands, so basically you still have to monitor what they are doing when they go to the bathroom, so you save money, the yuckiness of changing diapers, and diaper rash but don’t really save time, plus when you are in public sometimes you wish they had a diaper on when you have to find the public restroom in a crowded store with a jumping and screaming kid who doesn’t want to have an accident.
Now back to the conspiracy to make me late, my big boy has taken to lying about having gone poop because he doesn’t want to take the time to wipe up afterwards. So we’re already about 20 minutes behind schedule and he has to go to the bathroom again, I’m shoveling food into his little brother, he goes, washes up and comes out, I ask what did you do, poop, pee-pee, both? He doesn’t answer, did you poop, he runs back to the bathroom, so he didn’t lie, but he didn’t wipe. A few minutes later he says he’s done wiping, we go up stairs to get dressed, I say let me check to see if you need to wipe anymore and he’s like, “NOOOO! You’re going to find more poop!” which I do, so basically we’ve got a serious not wiping his ass problem going on here which means I have to give us an extra half an hour in the morning to make sure I can monitor him in the bathroom, but since we’re always late already I’m not sure how I’m going to do that, actually I am, I need to go to bed at 10 PM rather than 1 AM and have even less of a life than I already do.
The toddler has added unzipping his jacket to his repertoire of stalling tactics, which may not seem like a big deal, but when you’re already loosing your mind, 10 minutes late, one second you have your two wards already to leave standing next to you having just put on their jackets and shoes and setting the house alarm and the next the one’s running away from you with his jacket off the alarm is beeping and you didn’t know he knew how to use a zipper, and you don’t know where the jacket is and it’s raining outside, trust me it’s annoying.
At least it’s not like the yesterday right before we were ready to leave when the toddler flipped himself off of my bed backwards hitting the back of his head on a night stand, or the day before when we were leaving to pick up his brother from school and I noticed the toddler laying on the living room rug face down, I tie my shoe and look again he coming towards me covered in vomit, and has somehow in 30 seconds managed to cover a 1 by 4 foot area of the rug in white curd like puke which I didn’t have time to clean up right away because we were of course already running late to pick up his brother and the school fines you for picking up your kids late. Mmm extra time for the rug to absorb the pleasant sour milk scent, just wonderful …

From my other blog

I've hinted about some skin issues so here's what happened, about 16 days ago I thought I had some bug bites on the back of my leg that itched like hell, no big deal, spray some shit on it, wipe them with alcohol and call it a day. Then I got this big assed cigar shaped hot itchy welt behind my left knee, irritation behind my right knee, and things that looked like zits on both of my arms and neck. I'm like one more day and if it doesn't start to get better I'll go to the doctor, forgetting that my doctor is out of his office on Fridays, so I have to find a "Immedicenter."
They check me out and are about to prescribe some medicine then check me out under the fungus light, a black light contraption that illuminates fungus, and as I mentioned at the time I had fungus on the back of one knee, so they so all you need a steroid cream to rub on the one spot, don't worry about the other "bites or what ever they are."

Five or Six days of aches and pains, lesions spreading all over my body that start off looking like zits, then like herpes, made me question the Immedicenters prognosis, so like every other sucker with an internet connection I decided it was time to diagnose myself.
Shingles, that's it, it's in the chicken pox/herpes family, and my shit looks like the examples pictured. Sometime well past midnight on the lou I notice that all of the sores on my arm are weeping clear liquid at the exact same time, it was really trippy, that and now my mother in law is worried that she can't go to California to see her daughter who is trying to get pregnant because she can't be exposed to Shingles, aagh fuck I've got to get to my real doctor.

I'm like I've got Shingles, they're like no you don't, doc comes in, have you been outside of the country, no I've barely been outside of Montclair, well looks like SCABIES to me, though many of you knew me in my grunge years you may not have know that they were a reaction to my being anal about personal hygiene and I realized that I needed to get over it or be a germ weirdo, but the idea of scabies, what am I fucking homeless, or a stowaway on boat full of imported rat hair? The doctor gives the number of a dermatologist to get further diagnosed and writes me some scripts. Dude I don't have fucking scabies, I tell Julie who is not known for keeping a lid on information that under no circumstance are you to pass along information that I have scabies.

Thank god I married someone proactive, Julie got me an appointment later that day, the dermatologist explains the I had an allergies reaction to something that is responding like Posion Ivy, so he's going to aggressively treat it as if I have poison ivy, a steroid shot to the ass, 22 days of steroid pills, steroid lotion, I'm fucking huge now by the way, and fancy non itching cream which I can use as much as I want, anti itch pills to take so I can sleep, so I've been drugged up for the past few weeks, I'm still itching, but no more weeping wounds and no more spreading nastiness ...

Have you been peed on today?

I was changing my 20 month-old's diaper, and once I got through all of the dirty work he stood up and was grabbing toys off the top shelf of the changing table, so I'm holding him against my chest putting things back where they belong, trying to get a diaper on him, all the while my mind is wandering to comments I heard on sports radio the other day by a host that I don't always listen too, his show "the herd" (how appropriate) comes on in the morning between two shows I do listen to, the morning show on Newark's Jazz station WBGO and Steven A. Smith on ESPN radio, anyway this guy is dissing people who have a counter culture view of the world, people in grad school / east coast university grads / intellectuals, and stay at home dad's, (so basically he's hitting me where I live) why I don't really know, I didn't catch why he was on this diatribe, but stupidly it really pissed me off, partially because judging by other times I've heard this guy, he seemed intelligent enough to know better. So basically the past few days I've been going over this my mind, hoping to run into him some where so I could bash his fucking head open, or some other aggro fantasy, I guess it's because I hate how it's easy for these radio personalities to diss people who aren't in front of them, and how they appeal to the tyranny of the majority, "there aren't many stay at home dads, or many counter culture people listening to sports radio so I can diss them and it won't effect my ratings, or get me in trouble with my superiors."
So as I'm playing this over in my head for about the third time my son starts to urinate on me. And you know what, it just pointed out to me to focus on my own life, don't worry about the haters, closed minded people and other ignorant assholes, and lastly don't pollute my time listening or watching crap on the radio or tv. Still sucks getting peed on though.

My Four year-old started full-time preschool yesterday, I understand kids being in daycare all day if no one can be home with them during the day, but a 6 hour school day is too long for pre-school I think, but that’s how they do it now-a-days.

Junk food, TV and the internet 'are poisoning childhood'
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23366610-details/Junk+food%2C+TV+and+the+internet+%27are+poisoning+childhood%27/article.do
"A child's mental and physical growth cannot be accelerated," "It changes in biological time, not electrical speed. Childhood is not a race." "In a fast-moving, hyper-competitive culture, today's children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum."

I think these statements hit things right on the head, and touch on what I was alluding to when commenting on six hour school days for preschoolers.

Unfortunately the more busy I am, the less I blog, which means when the shit hits the fan, I’m usually too engrossed to retell the tales on this page, I’ve jotted down a number of notes in my palm pilot that will hopefully soon make there way on to this blog.

Temper Temper

http://www.wikihow.com/Handle-Your-Child%27s-Temper-Tantrum