But we know that many of you are the more conventional types, for whom the end of summer means the end of vacation, the beginning of the school year, and a long but ineluctable march toward Seasonal Affective Disorder.

So this week we took an end-of-season approach to things.

Nathan took one last monster trip of the summer with his kids (solo!) to the surprisingly pleasant Midwest, and came home just in time to get his boy crunked and cut at Columbia Presbyterian’s pediatric surgery unit

Christopher (or at least his wife) got puked on and regretted not getting puked on harder. Then again, if his boy keeps turning into a jock, there may be lots of frat parties and plenty of puking still ahead. Perhaps that’s why Christopher seemed engaged by the bizarre anti-children enviro-violence at Discovery Channel HQ.

Speaking of death, in case you missed all the fun and frivolity of Kill Your Child Day on DadWagon, you can still read Nathan and Matt’s vengeful thoughts here and here. [spoiler alert!] Both decided that their children were, at the end of the day, too cute to kill.

We were also impressed with the output of some DadWagon friends this week: Big Preg wrote a lovely summation of the bareknuckle schedule of childrearers on her blog Accidents Will Happen, and occasional DadWagon commenter Nathan Hegedus got the Slate-heads in a tizzy with his piece about Swedish paternity leave (check out his very good blog Dispatches from Daddyland).

Theodore turned his own dark blogmind to issues of JP’s boy-violence and maturation, with a side dish of constipation and infanticide.

Matt wrote about how he loves his daughter’s eyesight and, while gingerly crossing over a preschool picket line, he made one eagle-eyed observation himself: Sasha has started playing house with various stuffed animals. This sent Matt scrambling to our readers asking what kind of doll he should get for her. I think the readers pretty much shrugged off that question, but one commenter from Matt’s past seemed to reveal a dark detail about his childhood. My Buddy, Matt? Really?

That’s all from us; happy labors, and happy Labor Day. We’ll be back Tuesday.

Regardless of what illness, deadlines or domestic spats we’re in the midst of, Father’s Day joy will prevail.

This is because fatherhood is the Most Important Thing Ever – next to the mortgage, career, football, television and Facebook. Given the chance to commemorate the sacred bonds between fathers and children, we’ll stop our bickering or distracted web surfing, and concentrate on the unalloyed happiness of family. For one day. Maybe. Perhaps just for lunch, while the footy replay’s on.

It’s bunkum. I say this as a committed, stay-at-home dad. Not even copywriters selling remote-controlled wine coolers really believe Father’s Day can overcome the ambivalent reality of family life. The moods that blight or boost everyday domesticity also prevail on the first Sunday of September.

I don’t really have much to add to this, except that it’s nice to know that for every parental paradise like Sweden, there’s another wretched hellhole of commercialism and banal moral lessons. Now go enjoy your extended weekend.

Lovely story, even if they did have to import parents from Australia to find them. What I might suggest though, is instead of the “medical miracle” that the Today correspondent called it, this might just be a case of a doctor who made a supremely bad call on whether or not this baby was actually alive.

The mother recounted how the doctor kept saying, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it, as the baby squirmed back to life. That’s the same muttering doctors probably make when they misdose a patient, for example, and kill them.

I’d go further and venture that all of these so-called Medical Miracles, whether a stillborn that pops back to life or Uncle Walt, who has a massive heart attack and lies dead on the hospital bed for ten minutes before coming back for more turkey dinners, are actually something much more mundane (and, sadly, more common): doctor error.

Just remember. If it comes back to life, it was probably dead to begin with.

But I’ll let you decide:

Going nuts in his hospital pjs

After having consulted our wise (if not board-certified) readers about young Nico’s surgery, we decided to do the tubes in the ears and skip the adenoidectomy.

It all went down this morning, with the improbably early arrival time of 6am at the hospital (why are surgeons such morning people?). The wife and I put on our white paper clean suits and went into the ER with Nico, who fell asleep under the cherry-scented mask with no problems. He was actually giggling a bit.

We left before they actually put the tubes in, but it was all a little unsettling for us. He was a pitiful sight on the operating table, his skin pale under the klieg lights, with electrodes on his chest and a mask on his face, surrounded by OR techs. It reminded me of ET, trapped in the clean tent with all those thuggish government scientists in hazmat suits.

So why was Nico giggling? Because of the miracles of Midazolam. They weren’t going to offer it, but fortunately my wife thought to ask for it: 3.5 ccs of Happy Juice in an oral syringe for the boy 15 minutes before going into the OR. It’s enough of a hassle in the routine, she says, that most OR’s won’t give it unprompted, and sometimes refuse to give it even if you do ask.

But if you can get your kid some of this stuff before surgery, do it. Just that little bit of that Purple Drank got Nico higher than a Juggalo. Head lolling, giggle-snorting, staring momentously at his fingertips: he was so stoned he started to make us feel high. The waiting room turned into a psychedelic lovebus. And when it came time to enter freaky-land of the OR, he was totally unfazed.

Now we’re back home and he has woken up well, if angrily. The stony times are over, and, as I’m told, we have a day or so of crankiness and whining to look forward to until he gets completely comfortable. Also, no swimming for the next 18 months or so. But in all, a good result, and most likely an upcoming winter without ear infections.

If he does get more ear infections, though, I’m skipping the antibiotics and going straight back to the Midazolam.

Why is it most liked? Because, at root, it’s about the superiority of the European safety net, a cherished trope among Slate-reading progressives (like us). It’s particularly needed these days because progressives seem to be getting their asses handed to them in each new vote and poll and failed cable HQ hijacking.

But seriously, it’s a good read, and shows just a bit of the forced insanity of trying to raise a kid in peace in the U.S. Plus, Nathan put up a picture of his kid, something most of us here at DadWagon haven’t done yet. Mainly, I guess, because we fear you, the People of the Internet.

Slate readers, on the other hand, wouldn’t hurt a fly. And besides, Sweden’s a little far away for convenient childstalking.

Well done, Mr. Hegedus.

“This is no place to raise a kid, that’s for sure,” said 32-year-old Brandon Rushing, a lifelong New Yorker. “I grew up here and I turned into a giant asshole. Why would I want that for my son?”

Via Strollerderby today I learned that 41 American children died this summer because their parents forgot them in the car on a hot day. That’s a lot of absent-minded parents!

It reminded me of a story an older woman I used to work with told me about her first child. During her pregnancy, she and her husband used to enjoy taking walks together in the early evening. A turn or two around the block in Manhattan in late summer, what could be better, right? Eventually, the baby came, and in those first few blissful weeks of parenthood, the couple decided to take one of their walks. They got on their shoes, readied the infant’s pram (this was a while ago), took a few extra bibs, a bottle, whatever they thought they might need. Then they headed out.

Without the baby.

So I can see how this sort of thing might happen, I guess. The solution at Strollerderby was to require parents to install “forgotten children alarms” in cars, which could work, although it seems a bit draconian. It won’t completely solve the problem, of course, as the article noted that a full 18 percent of those 41 children were intentionally left in the car.

God bless America.

creepy AND commercial

On Tuesday, Sasha tried to feed macaroni and cheese to a toy elephant. Then she took a plastic figurine into the bath. Clearly, this 21-month-old is learning how to treat inanimate objects as play partners, which means I have to face facts: She needs a doll of some kind, something she can identify with, name, and have accompany her through her daily life.

But what do we get? As an effete asshole, I don’t want her to get anything too commercial—no Barbie, no Bratz, no American Girl. Why not? Um, do I even need to explain? We’ve got enough Elmo problems without adding to them.

So, here are the requirements:

• Not overly corporate.
• Waterproof: It’s gotta be able to go in the bath without getting trashed.
• Not expensive: I expect us to lose this thing pretty quickly.
• Options: Clothes we can add/change.
• Not too goddamn annoying.

What do you think?

So where did my kid learn to high-five everyone?

He does it everywhere. To other kids, to André the doorman who we pass on Fifth Avenue every morning, to cash-register clerks. It’s adorable, and I imagine it’s easier for small hands, not yet fully coordinated, than a handshake or some other friendly gesture. But it’s a sign of independence. He’s never seen me do it (except in response to him), that’s for sure.

Next up for him: Bellowing WOO! when something exciting happens. (I don’t do that either.) And then father-son trips to the sports bar. And then, probably, he’ll arrange for a bunch of teenagers to give me a noogie somewhere, just to close the loop.

What you’ll be hearing a lot about, in the next couple of days, is his manifesto, available here. It is a screed worth reading, both for its loopy, goofy language but also for its underlying thought process. “The demands and sayings of Lee,” as he puts it, call for Discovery and its affiliated networks to stop broadcasting shows about weaponry, and replace them with programming that reveals that the earth is under assault, especially by overpopulation. So far, okay. I’m with you, Lee. And then he demands that we stop overpopulation by declaring a moratorium on human birth. Altogether. A sample:

All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.

You can see pretty easily how this kind of zealotry gets built. A tottering but not completely illogical mind gets hold of some good information, runs it out to its logical end, and then just keeps going. It happens every day now, encouraged by partisan media. Rand Paul spins a laissez-faire attitude to its logical conclusion, and suggests that the Civil Rights Act be dismantled, because it proceeds from the assumption that we do not have a level playing field. On the left, old radicals still say that it was worth blowing up a few buildings to stop a war that was killing thousands. And all over the world, God speaks to all sorts of groups, telling them that they’re personally selected to destroy other groups in order to save everyone else. Educated people with solidly planted psyches can filter this stuff, taking what they know to be true and discarding the rest. But not everyone is so equipped, and that’s where the trouble begins.

I’m curious to see how fast the anti-population, pro-environment, anti-Christian, anti-baby crusade this guy is on gets picked up by right-wing media. “See, this is what happens on the loony left,” those O’Reilly types are likely to say. They will conveniently leave out his vicious anti-immigration stance, I am sure. And we’re back on the same road that feeds the crazies. Too many people may not be the problem; too much airtime to fill, there’s the real culprit.