Side-note: The great thing about that is that she knows very well what ‘shit’ means. Her question was just a way of gently busting the chops of the adult who had said it, while pretending that she wasn’t busting anybody. At the precocious young age of six, my daughter is mastering passive-aggressive behavior. She’s almost ready to go work in a corporate office where cubicle-dwellers stab each other in the back all day!

I’m obviously not too worried about the language, probably because through dumb luck and nothing else I’ve been given an older child who prefers not to work blue even though she could.

HOWEVER.

Our daily walk to school through Manhattan—not a long walk, just six blocks or so—is starting to remind me more and more of a stroll through Deadwood, except with puffy jackets and snow instead of trenchcoats and dust. I don’t know if it’s just our little slice of the island, but we have some very foul-mouthed individuals living around here. And they get after it EARLY. I mean, I try to resist that first mutherfucker of the day until at least 10am. The day is long. There’s plenty of time to mutter fuck fuck fuck under your breath around lunch, or type listen, asshole as the header of an afternoon email that you decide wisely against sending.

But we walk to school at 8am and already the Germanic cognates are flying. Often the person is on a cell phone, doing that New Yorker half-shout into it. Not in direct anger—they’re usually talking to a commiserator, as in, “So you know I told him to mind his own fucking business, right?”

Dutiful controlling parent that I am, it’s actually tempting sometimes to say something: “seeing as we are all waiting together for this light to change, could you at least not shout motherfucker?”

Saying something would be a terrible idea, I’m pretty sure, in that it would most likely add ten minutes and three fistfights to our little morning commute.

But still, I wonder, how could these good people of Manhattan, my neighbors—often women, no less—curse like Carlin, with such vigor, right next to my preschoolers? And then often I look at their other hand—the one not attached to the cellphone into which they are currently announcing plans to fucking kill that bitch—and find that they are holding something altogether unexpected: the hand of their own preschooler, young and smooth-cheeked and headed for school.

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.

Sasha and Matt enjoy the iPad in Rome, each with their drink of choice.

We saw them everywhere we went in Rome last month—at restaurants, on the bus and metro, in cafes. They looked like tourists, American most likely, youngish, with a toddler in tow. Totally normal. But, we’d notice, in the middle of meals, or squeezed into a crowded, slow mode of public transportation, they’d do the unforgivable. The kid would start to act up, and out would come—wait for it, wait for it—the iPhone. Sometimes the child would play simple games, Tozzle and the like, but often a video would come on, and the child would then sit entranced, immobile, ignoring the plate of specially prepared pasta al pomodoro while her parents would, in turn, ignore the child—and while all the sophisticated Italians in the area tried not to notice the little glass slate’s bleeps and burbles. And we, we resented them all—fatuous digital addicts in the birthplace of Western Civilization. How could they?

They were, of course, us, the Gross Family, simply trying to muddle through a two-week vacation in Italy with the least amount of distress. Our daughter, Sasha, is 3, with all the impulses and uncontrollability that go with that age. For the most part, she’s pretty good, pretty quiet, pretty well-behaved, but at a certain point in every meal or museum trip, she’s run out of steam, and though we’d do everything we could to calm her and engage her in the food or activity, there were limits. And so I’d bring out my iPhone and fire up “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (in Mandarin, for what it’s worth) or Monkey Preschool Lunchbox (keeping the volume way down, for what that’s worth), and then Jean and I would enjoy the rest of whatever in relative peace.

But the guilt! The incredible, unbearable guilt! We’d succumbed to the worst of all temptations, and had proved ourselves to be the lazy, irresponsible, uncreative American parents everyone stereotypically expects us to be. No verbal games for Sasha, no in-depth toddler-level conversations, no new flavors discovered. Instead, pulsing pixels and slackjawed amusement for Sasha, an extra glass of wine for Mommy and Daddy.

Actually, that’s not true at all. Actually, I felt no guilt whatsoever. Sure, I would’ve preferred Sasha to eat all her food or attempt to engage with us, her parents. But just because the iPhone (and its ilk) is the easily ridiculed emblem of our digital age doesn’t mean it’s essentially bad.

The thing is, we love to make fun of our addiction to new technology—almost as much, in fact, as we love to play with new gadgets. But their ease of use and startling breadth of features always somehow provoke a level of guilt. Our parents and grandparents didn’t have these things—they had books and banjos and candlelight and each other, and they did fine. We shouldn’t have to placate our kids with retina displays—we should make do with yesterday’s (or last century’s) tech, right?

It’s a romantic idea, and a stupid one. I mean, I’ve been using computers in a serious way for the last 28 years, and now, what, I should deny my kid the opportunity to get the same experience? There is no fighting the fact that devices like the iPhone, iPad and i-everything-else are going to be a fundamental part of our children’s lives (barring a zombie invasion or SkyNet takeover, of course), and those who would argue that there’s something inherently better about pre-digital entertainment are wasting your time, and their own.

I don’t mean to say you shouldn’t also try to promote things like actual books, wooden toys, or whatever. I’ll certainly squeal out loud with joy (if internally) the first time I see Sasha amuse herself with a tome of quality material at a restaurant meal. That’s what I used to do when bored, and my total immersion in novels does not strike me as all that different from Sasha’s immersion in Pocket God.

So, today I would like to call for a small but subtle change: From now on, let no one express surprise over the facility with which small children manipulate Apple products. From now on, let no one use “iPhone” or “iPad” as snide shorthand to dismiss children and their parents as tone-deaf solipsists or cultural philistines. From now on, let’s accept the place of gadgets in our lives and our children’s lives alongside the books and Matchbox cars and dolls and Legos and all the other crap we amuse ourselves with in order to forget for a too-brief moment the crushing boringness of life and the inevitability of our deaths—and theirs, and their children’s, too.

From now on, let us chill out about technology, and guiltlessly use it whenever the hell we want. And let us not use it, too. These things are all equivalent now.

Let me leave you with one final anecdotal observation on kids and technology. Late last year, as Sasha’s third birthday approached, Jean and I discussed what to get her. She’s always been interested in the photos we take of her with our iPhones, so we thought: How about a kid’s camera? We got her the Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Something-Something, and when she opened it that December morning, Sasha was excited, running around the house and taking as many pictures as possible. Pretty neat.

But after that, she just didn’t use it much. If it happened to be lying around, she might pick it up and fire off a few shots, but it wasn’t the center of her life. And when we went off to Rome, it stayed home.

Which is not to say she didn’t bring a camera. No, she brought one—a tiny plastic toy camera, whose button cycles through images of various wild animals: a lion, an elephant, etc. It fits in her pocket, and it always seems to be nearby, and she’ll bring it up to her eye and squeal, “Say cheese!” as if she’s really taking a picture. She loves it, more than the digital one, I think. And that’s fine. When she’s ready to get serious about digital photography, the Fisher-Price one will still be around, and she can learn on that. Unless, by that time, she’s ready for her own iPhone.

Or rather, I’m thinking about the way life unfolds dimly and predictably on the path to death. I was reminded of this just a minute ago: In line for coffee uptown, I overheard two men, better dressed than I and even a little grayer, talking about their weekends. Specifically, that there had been a birthday in the family of one of them, and that the birthday was a sixth birthday, and that the boy chose a superhero-themed party.

Which is, of course, exactly what Dalia’s party was yesterday (hence the caped crusader flying on the chalkboard here). It was a superhero party. She had all her friends come to a place near Union Square called Karma Kids, which based on the name could have been annoying but turned out to be fantastic, and they ran and played and planked and had a ridiculously good time.

I didn’t butt into the conversation this morning—I like to pretend I never eavesdrop and also I like to not talk to people before I get my AM coffee—but it all reminded me of the sameness of six-year-olds. It’s akin to the sameness of 3-year-olds and of 16-year-olds and 36-year-olds. Dalia is many wonderful things, but right now she is, more than anything, a six-year-old, with the skills of a six-year-old, the interests of a six-year-old, the emotional tics of a six-year-old. She likes to draw, and dance, and play games on the iPhone when I let her. She is a big fan of Star Wars. They all are.

And I am a 36-year-old, with 36-year-old skills, interests and emotions. I did not shave this morning, because there is little point of rigorous hygiene when you’re married and 36. I rode a bike like an idiot up the length of Amsterdam this morning, squeezing between delivery trucks and cabs, because I am a 36-year-old and a slightly irresponsible bike-ride is the perfect amount of risk/rush for 36-year-olds. I am in the middle of everything, neither hot nor cold, not young not old, not wildeyed nor asleep. I may think I’m an individual, but actually I’m just a 36-year-old.

I find all of that a bit depressing (of course! I’m 36!). In the same way that when all of us started moving in with our girlfriends, and then we all started getting married and then we all started having kids, I grew increasingly suspicious that what I had seen as joyous new developments on the path of life were in fact just predetermined Stations of the Cross, and that we are all just dullard pilgrims kissing the ground at each then picking ourselves up and moving to the next station. Even those of us who defied neater timelines, delayed by drug use or stubbornness or bad luck, also seemed to be predictable. Rather, their unpredictability existed in predictable ratio to the rest of us.

This post? Also totally typical for a 36-year-old. I have the capacity, quite standard for my cohort, to squeeze the joy out of anything. And there, as expected, is where my daughter, and all her little friends, are so much cooler than me and mine.

Part of what makes a 6-year-old a 6-year-old is the fact that every new station is greeted with absolute enthusiasm and joy. It’s as if Dalia was the first person in the world to turn six and enter this magical world of sixness. As she put it yesterday, “My brain is telling me: BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY.” So it is with all the other changes. Loose tooth? Awesome! Starting kindergarten? Hell yes! Big enough to hold a dustpan and a broom? Fantastic!

Her emotional life, just like that of all six-year-olds, is getting more complex by the day. But still, there is an underlying response to life, whether she rages or swoons, that is so direct and so luminant that I can hardly bear to look at it. In other words, if I was forced to think too much about how happy she was yesterday, it might break my heart. Why? Fuck if I know. Probably because I’m 36.

A finely tuned machine

So Tomoko was out of town for a couple of nights this week on a business trip, and it happened to fall on the nights I had JP. This meant two kids at home to take care of, along with work, dog, cat, and various other responsibilities. I mention this not as an exercise in cyber-bitching (which I very much enjoy), but instead as a way to demonstrate how incredibly good a father I have become: I’m pretty fantastic.

Back a few years now, when it was just me and JP for long stretches, the thought of taking care of two little people on my own would have been highly intimidating. How do you feed, clean, and not totally ruin two dependents at the same time? Doesn’t one get in the way of the other, like Cain and Abel, Romeo and Juliet, peas and carrots? One was tough enough–but two? Perish the thought.

Yet there was a moment last night when I had completed dinner for both kids–a dinner, I might add, that JP even ate–when I had managed to navigate JP through his bath while changing Ellie’s diapers and getting her into her pajamas; when I had answered every one of JP’s nightly 5 million questions while making sure he brushed his teeth and Ellie ran around the room holding my shoes and brandishing a copy of the New Yorker; when both were in the bedroom at the same time, in the dark–JP drifting to sleep, Ellie on my lap sipping a bottle–there was this moment, it happened, when I knew they would both go down easily for the night, and that I could handle both at the same time and it would be no big deal; that I could tell JP a quick story and give Ellie a last pat on the cheek before dropping her gently into the crib; and it would all be just Jim Dandy.

What was particularly nice about this, you see, was that while, in my estimation, life with children generally offers a great many long-term rewards–loving relationships, pride, someone to keep you out of a hospice–but in the short term? It’s not always so easy, frankly, and mostly feels more like struggle and strife and poop (and calling things poop) and tears and the fact that I haven’t been to a movie in over a year.

But last night was pretty good, mostly because for the first time in a long time, I felt like I owned the whole damn thing.

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?