She did not get up and take a shower.

I mean this not as a portrait of two people in their late 30s who have a boring life. That post will go up next week, and it will be about Theodore. No, my point is this: At that very moment, I realized I’d married a Twitter feed, and that Jean had married one too.

When you’re married, you say pretty much whatever’s on your mind, whenever you feel like it. What you want for breakfast, what you had for breakfast after your partner left for work, what you found stuck in the pocket of that jacket that was at the back of the closet for two years, what the kid did or didn’t do on the way to school—all the inconsequential bullshit that we hide from the people with whom we didn’t enter into a legal (and possibly religious) pact to love and cherish until, inevitably, we die. Except, of course, when we reveal that inane crap to our Twitter followers, the only people other than our spouses who could possibly care about every errant thought that passes through our minds.

This is not a criticism—not at all! (As we say with evil glee in my family, it’s not a criticism—it’s an observation.) In fact, it’s probably good for a marriage, in two ways:

1. We feel comfortable enough around each other that we can express trivialities without fear of embarrassment or mockery, knowing that our honesty, however banal, counts for something.

2. The mere fact of these communications binds us to each other, in the same way that after following someone’s shitty Twitter feed for months and years makes you feel like you know them, even if it’s just because you remember that time they got dried blackberries on their oatmeal or Twitpic’d the back of Jerry Seinfeld’s head. These little things on their own are to be ignored, but in total they form the contours of a life.

There’s also something to be said for the brevity of the observations, both on Twitter and in marriage. These are not grand monologues of triviality, to be attended to with open ears and alert minds, but instead blips, moments of amusement or information that require no investment but which connect us, bit by bit.

Anyway, this is a lot of metaphysics to lay upon the 140-character bane of our existence, supported by one boringly simple observation, but there it is: Your spouse is a crappy Twitter feed, one you have no choice but to follow. And vice-versa. #tilldeathdoyoupart

Note: This post was sponsored by Linksys and the new Linksys E4200v2 router. For more information on sponsored posts, read the bottom of our About Page.

Over the course of the next few weeks we’re going to run a few DadWagon posts related to the idea of “connectivity,” at the behest of Linksys, which has graciously offered to sponsor said posts here at DadWagon.

What’s more, Linksys has generously allowed us to offer a free $100 BestBuy gift certificate to a DadWagon reader. Here’s how it will work: Those of you who read this post can head over to the DadWagon Facebook page (why not “like” us while you’re there–we like you!), and just comment on this post.

Say anything. Say everything. Share your deep, unabridged, uncensored, unmoderated, unhinged, hyper-critical, totally unfair, completely biased, rarely intelligible, opinions. Let us have it! Praise us to the heavens! Just write! Because there’s nothing worse than begging for comments and likes, as we have now just done, and not getting any. Or getting a few polite and neutral ones.

We’re going to be taking comments until next Tuesday, at which point, we will select one commenter at random—using this totally neat site—who will become DadWagon’s inaugural Lucky, Lucky Winner™. Who will win! Because he or she is lucky, and also was diligent enough to go to Facebook and write something about this post!

Another thing: Linksys has also done a bit of research on what they–charmingly, oddly, absurdly–call “Geek Dads.” By virtue of having this blog, we DadWagoners are in fact Geek Dads. Don’t agree? Here’s the short version of what a Geek Dad might be: “tech-savvy, intelligent, engaged, confident fathers who take great pride in sharing their passion for tech with their kids, creating new traditions and making family life fun and memorable in their own unique way.” That is so us! Totally, completely, totally, really us.

Here’s a bit more data from the survey: “Nearly 70 percent of geek dads consider themselves to be cooler than other dads with 75 percent of them attributing it to creating a home where their kids’ friends enjoy hanging out.” We at DadWagon don’t just think we’re cooler than other dads…we know we are, and we have have the low-paying jobs, failed marriages (in Theodore’s case), poor physiques, and receding hairlines to prove it. And we all have iPhones. Geek!

Or how about this: “One in five geek dads admit to using technology in secret to avoid being discovered by their wives.” Yep–we don’t tell our wives anything. Ever. On any subject.

[Ed. note: Portions of this post were amended at the request of our sponsor.]

I resemble this remark

Shortly after writing my last post about not wanting JP to call me Dad I got an email from my own father. He reminded me that at the very same age as JP–five and a half–I had gone to him one day after school and said that from now on no one would be allowed to refer to me by my name at the time, Teddy.

A couple of kids at school had apparently been teasing me, calling me “Teddy Bear,” a grievous insult in my estimation at that time. I think that my father, as with me and JP, enjoyed calling me by the diminutive, and at first, also as with me and JP, he resisted. Eventually, though, he gave in and he never called me Teddy again, although there are, to this day, members of my family who continue do so.

Now my father was considerate enough not to tell me what I should do with JP. He just reminded me, which, I should point out, is a pure and exquisite form of Jewish guilt. Regardless, I determined to do something to right this cosmic parenting wrong.

Earlier tonight I told JP that before he went to bed he could expect a “special story.” This is the sort of thing that he is still young enough to find inordinately exciting. When he was finally in bed, after the teeth brushing, the discussions about pooping, the final chores, and the reading of a book, I settled in to tell him the tale of how Teddy became Ted.

Once there was a little boy just about your age whose name was Teddy. And he liked his name, because it was his, until he went to school one day and a bunch of kids starting teasing him about it. They called him Teddy Bear, which he thought wasn’t very nice, mostly because stuffed animals were for kids, and he was five and a half and no sort of kid at all. So when he got home that day he told his father that henceforth and in perpetuity (Teddy wanted to be a lawyer at that age) he would be known as Ted instead of Teddy.

Teddy’s daddy, however, didn’t immediately accept this request. He liked the name Teddy, which he called to mind certain things about being a father that he wasn’t sure he was ready to let go of, at least not just yet. But Teddy was serious, and eventually he gave in and Teddy became Ted from then on.

Do you understand what I’m talking about, JP? I asked, and the answer was a rather frank and to the point, no. So I explained and I told him that I was that boy and that I had forgotten this story and that he could call me anything he liked, Daddy, or Dad, or father, or whatever he preferred.

How poignant is THAT? Surely some Daddy prize should be coming my way, right? JP would have to admit, now and in his dotage, that Daddy listened, he cared, he did the right thing…right?

Wrong. JP’s response: “That’s the story?! That’s not funny! Tell me another one.”

He can still call me what he likes.

His newest thing is to start calling me Dad instead of Daddy. A minor point you say? Well, who asked you! I like being called Daddy; I’ve given up most of my life, time, money, hair, and sex appeal (such as it is) in order to reserve the right to choose how my son will refer to me–and I’m not ready to downshift to Dad.

JP sense this, he understands it, he gets it with innate ease, and he’s been exploiting it, mostly by dropping the shortened-d-bomb from time to time, daring me to correct him, which I do, because I’m an idiot. I did, however, come up with a better system at dinner last night. To wit:

JP: Pass the pot roast, DAD.

Me. Don’t call me Dad. I’m Daddy. [passes pot roast, directs child to neglected green vegetable on said child's plate]

JP: Daddy, when can I call you Dad?

Me: When you turn 17. [ignores eye roll from wife]

JP: 17?

Me: 17.

JP: What can I call you when I’m 18?

Me: King. You can call me King at that age. [JP puzzled, not really sure what a king is, and with little concept of the age of 18.]

Silly but effective.

There’s a whole passive-aggressive competition thing that goes on behind the scenes at DadWagon that most people (okay, no people) know about, but frankly it’s reached a boiling point. The result: while I can’t actually replace Nathan—he has the only key to the executive washroom—I can reduce his importance to the overall project.

In short: DadWagon is hiring! Well, not so much hiring—we don’t really make any money—but we are looking for a fourth guy (or a huskily voiced woman) to join the team at what very few people other than ourselves consider the best Dad blog on the Internet.

Readers, dear, dear, readers: Who should it be? You? Steven King? The guy hogging the couch at your local cafe? We’d like to hear your thoughts. And remember: blame Nathan.

UPDATE: Hey folks. Tell us in the comments why you are the man (or woman, seriously) for the job.

I think. I mean, I don’t know where I’m going to get a baptismal record for my son, who was never baptized. Nor am I confident that a boy who is really not that excited about the sight of blood will be able to concentrate in a classroom that has a gigantic statue of suffering, blood-soaked Christ in it.

And what will I tell him about the other three-quarters of his heritage, the Jews and Dutch Reformed Church-goers in my family, the Buddhists on my wife’s side? Her mother is the only Catholic anywhere in the family tree, and yet here we are: very close to putting the boy in Church of Bleeding Jesus of the Ascendant Virgin (or whatever it’s called at the church down the street) preschool.

We are doing this because, as much as I might make fun of the Doloroso names that Catholics love to give their institutions, they seem to offer the only halfway affordable preschool education in Manhattan. So after a quick surgical reattachment of his foreskin, we will be shipping the boy off to be beaten by nuns for the next school year.

We thought we would be able to scrape by with what qualifies as a moderately priced private preschool in the Upper West Side: my son’s current $19,000 a year school. But we could not. Every penny of that has ended up on credit cards, taking from the kids’ college fund and, thanks to the compounding wonders of interest, taking from their college funds of the future. We went in to tell the Director of Admissions, a smooth-voiced southerner who had always been kind to us, and said that we were taking him out of school next year because we couldn’t afford it. She smiled faintly, shook her head and said, “I honestly don’t know how young families do it anymore.”

That answer did not help us much. We are not a young family. My wife is a doctor, and I am a high-rolling dadblogger. OK, even without much income from me, we still should be able to afford to put our kid in preschool. Not that I can single my son’s school out. There are dozens of schools, Montessoris or Progressive Preschools or little boutique-y schools like my daughter went to last year that talk about building a thriving, loving, whole community, and then charge tuitions that ensure that they will only ever educate the children of stockbrokers with the occasional scholarship child thrown awkwardly into the mix. The rest of us are just left to be parboiled by the price.

There is Universal Pre-K: for two years now, in different forms, DadWagon has been pointing out the somewhat obvious (but important!) point that Universal Does not Mean Universal. The only thing I have to add to that conversation is that all the private schools—including the ones that come with rosary beads—cunningly require ALL YOUR MONEY and a commitment well before the Universal Pre-K application process with NYC public schools even begins.

Anyhow, dear readers, I would admit that this is just a Manhattan folly, and that we deserve these strange collection of choices because we have chosen to live in a very expensive city. But the bad news about pre-kindergarten is not just here.

From a new AP report on the importance—and scarcity—of pre-kindergarten around America:

Kids from low-income families who start kindergarten without first attending a quality education program enter school an estimated 18 months behind their peers. Many never catch up, and research shows they are more likely to need special education services and to drop out. Kids in families with higher incomes also can benefit from early education, research shows.

Yet, roughly a quarter of the nation’s 4-year-olds and more than half of 3-year-olds attend no preschool, either public or private. Families who earn about $40,000 to $50,000 annually face the greatest difficulties because they make too much to quality for many publicly funded programs, but can’t afford private ones, said Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

Put a one in front of those annual earnings, and you still are stuck, unable to pay, ineligible for free.

So tell me again, GOP candidates in the debates, what is so wrong with Europe?

On Friday, when I went to pick up Sasha, David came running up to me, as usual, wearing a construction worker’s costume: hardhat and reflective orange vest. Then he punched me in the balls—hard. Well, hard for a toddler, hard enough that I instinctively yelled “Oof!” and covered my grapes with my hands. Hard enough that Sasha’s teacher noticed something had happened. “He punched me in the balls” is what I wanted to say, but somehow that seemed unacceptable. Also, Sasha’s teacher doesn’t speak English 100 percent perfectly, so I wasn’t sure she’d understand me.

But then David kept trying to do it again, and I had to fend him off. This wasn’t difficult. He’s only 3. Eventually, he left me alone.

As I bundled Sasha into her winter gear and left, I had only one thought: Poor David’s father!

***

Sunday it was 16 degrees out, and I was carrying Sasha over to our friend’s house for some Burmese food. At the corner of Third Avenue and Bergen Street, she said, suddenly, apropos of nothing, for the first time I’d ever heard, “That’s dis-gus-ting!”

Then, silently, unrelatedly, I burped. And it was as if Sasha had predicted this very future.

“It smells like doggie food!” she said.

Thing is, it did, kind of.

Case in point: In the last month or so, Sasha has suddenly become much more capable of understanding narrative. She watches entire movies—My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service are on endless repeat these days—and when you ask her questions about them (“Why is Kiki sad?”), she can attempt reasonable answers. It’s sort of incredible that she can hold all these things within her head and attempt to figure them out.

While in Italy, I put this new understanding to the test: Instead of reading her bedtime stories, I began to make them up. There was one story about a princess who would only wear pink, and another about Pinocchio, but most of them were about Daddy’s valiant attempts to find and warm up milk for his daughter Sasha. Mountains were climbed, moons lasso’d, rocket ships built and launched, all so that the fictional Sasha will have something comforting to drink. Each “milky” story, as the real Sasha calls them, ends the same way: Daddy returns, exhausted, and presents the milk to the fictional Sasha, who, after considering this hard-won gift, turns to her father and says, “Daddy—I want juice!”

This ending always occasions much mirth, and it’s rewarding to me to see that she gets the humor—that it’s a joke about her behavior but that, not being real, it’s seen as funny and not a harsh criticism. She laughs, I laugh, this is great.

But then something even more amazing happened. While we were all waiting for a bus on the streets of Rome, Jean and I started bouncing Sasha in our arms and tickling her. This is pretty normal, as was her crazy laughter. But then, in the middle of one fit of insane laughter, she turned to me and said, “Daddy—I want juice!” Then we all laughed, harder than ever, as she said my punchline again and again. Wow. She gets it—she really does. It’s not just that she sees some things as funny, there’s some underlying understanding of humor there—how it works, etc. She can connect things, she can play with context, she can make us laugh. This is great!

But do you know what’s even better than having a smart kid who understand both narrative and humor? Having a kid who’s dumb enough to laugh at my jokes. I’m enjoying that while it lasts.

"He's sad because he wants to wash his hair."

“屁股! 屁股!” shouted Sasha as we wandered through the corridors of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Translation: “Butt! Butt!” Which was kind of also my reaction to the incredible collection of sculptures and busts: what a lot of glorious nudity!

But Sasha’s understanding and interpretation of the classics wasn’t just limited to recognizing bare bottoms. “He’s sad,” Sasha said in front of a statue of Hercules and a centaur, the hero pulling on the beast’s head. She meant the centaur, but why? “Because he [Hercules] wants to wash his hair.” Ah, of course. That makes sense. If it would make Sasha sad, it stands to reason it would sadden a centaur as well.

Elsewhere, Sasha continued looking at classical art from a different point of view. At a statue representing the rape of the Sabine women, Sasha gave the rapist a time out for fighting. Very appropriate, although a T.O. at such a critical juncture might have prevented, or limited, the rise of Rome. As we looked at yet another painting of the Madonna and child, Sasha gave her interpretation: “The baby likes the princess.” Well, yes!

And then we were back to nudity. “He has no clothes on,” she said of Michelangelo’s David. “He needs to peepee.” Perhaps, I thought, although when I have to pee, the expression on my face is usually not so reflective.

The effect that the David, often considered the ultimate expression of Western art, had on Sasha was not just titillating. No, by the time we left, its power and majesty and eloquence had reduced her to tears. At least, I think that’s why she was crying.

“I heard that two little birdies told their mother that I didn’t feed them any dinner last night.”

“Two little birdies?”

“You. You two. You told your mom that I sent you to bed without any food.”

For the record, the kids had been given dinner, though it consisted entirely of Mexican pastries. But the no-snitches message (remember Baltimore’s byword: “snitches get stitches and end up in ditches”) was clear enough.

Now, whether “stop snitching” is a lesson my mother-in-law should be teaching my children is a question best left to someone else to answer. But even if she’s enforcing omerta, I don’t have big gripes about my wife’s mother. Not since we realized how much child care with strangers costs. And especially not since she learned how to connect to the Internet a while ago and could theoretically be reading this on an actual web browser now.

IF I had an issue with my in-laws, however, I sure as hell know what I would do to solve the problem: take part in a reality show about those problems. Yes, the same salve–cable TV–that saved Jon and Kate’s marriage and rescued Sarah Palin’s political career could be yours as well. DadWagon was contacted last week (not paid!) about just such an opportunity for you to trot out all your dirt in front of the cameras for the second season of Monster-in-Laws. From their producers:

“MONSTER IN-LAWS” on A&E Is Now Casting Nationwide

Are you struggling to maintain a relationship with an out-of-control in-law?

Is a cultural or background divide challenging your relationship?

Does the statement, “When mom/dad says no, ask grandma/grandpa” ring true in your family?

Does your mother or father-in-law still baby your husband/wife, challenge your parenting style or openly disrespect you?

If you’re desperate to repair your relationship with an in-law before it’s too late, we want to hear from you! Families who appear on the show will have the opportunity to work with a professional relationship expert who will help them to identify their issues and repair their relationships. Families who appear on the show will receive a financial honorarium as a “thank you” for their time and commitment to the show. In addition, we offer a finder’s fee for anyone who nominates a family that appears on the show.

To apply, please fill out a brief casting questionnaire:
http://www.leftfieldpictures.com/in-laws-casting/

So, there you have it: the nexus of money, psychotherapy, and reality television. Yours for the taking.