He's sick.

A three-year-old doesn't have the physical strength or mental discipline to have any kind of control over where and when they throw up. Here's a verbatim transcript of one of my conversations with my son tonight:

Usually-insane-3-year-old: Daddy, I think I- BLAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!

Me: (holding a now-full bucket) Are you okay, buddy?

Usually-insane-3-year-old: (points into bucket) That's a kind of juice. From my body.

You'll notice I was prepared. I knew something was wrong the moment he started talking to me, because he had spoken two words without mentioning or touching his dick.

The trouble started earlier today. My wife called me at work to tell me that our three-year-old was writhing on the floor of a gymnasium bathroom, howling that his tummy hurt. We'd seen this before, so we knew that it was only a matter of time before he felt better. But there would be a price; someone or something we loved would be sprayed with vomit. The gods demand sacrifice.

My wife raced him home, periodically whipping her (newish) car to the side of the road when a new bout of stomach pain hit our son. But the pain would pass, and nothing would happen. And they made it home without incident.

And by "home," I mean "one block from home." And by "without incident" I mean, "he re-enacted the alleyway scene from Team America."

I was still trapped in traffic, trying to get home, when I learned that, post-vomiting, my son was now playing happily. But my wife's car had been compromised. And because I had a grosser childhood, it is my job to deal with things like this.

I pulled my car into the garage and stepped out with all the intensity and focus of a Hollywood action hero. I strode, unhesitating, to my wife's car, with the same mixture of melancholy and total resolve you see on Jason Bourne's face before he takes out an entire Italian police station.

I surveyed the scene. It was bad... but not too bad, actually. The mess was entirely contained to the car seat. Well... wait. Except for that one corner. Near where the car seat clips in. There seemed to be some overflow.

That car seat had to come out, right then, and the clip had obviously been contaminated. But hands can be washed. With icy resolve, I reached down into the seat cushion... and into destiny.

The LATCH clip slot was completely filled with an apparently bottomless pool of my poor son's erstwhile lunch. Completely filled. Brimming even. And it was cold.

Have you ever had to unclip one of those fucking latch clips? Not the good kind, where it's basically like a seatbelt clip. The shitty kind, where you have to simultaneously push the clip forward while twisting it sideways WHILE squeezing down on a sharp metal tab WHILE YOUR HAND IS SOAKED IN MOTHERFUCKING ICE COLD CHILD VOMIT.

I could not get it unlatched. Could not. It took me 5 attempts. On the final, successful attempt, I realized the problem was that I was not pushing my hand deep enough into the slot to get the clip unhooked.

I did what I had to do. Then, carrying the thousand-pound seat at arm's length while running and gagging at the maximum possible rate, I flung the seat into our yard.

I went inside, washed my hands, put on latex gloves, and returned to the garage, wherein I staged an elaborate one-man recreation of the car-cleaning scene from Pulp Fiction. "This is some repugnant shit!" I screamed more than once into the stinky darkness within the crevices of the backseat.

I spent over an hour exploring the maddening, Lovecraftian horror of that seat. Its unexpected, non-Euclidian geometries. Its ever unfolding, fractal crenulations, each revealing a new abominable combination of cheese and apple juice.

Cleaning that car was the purest act of love I have ever performed for my wife. If it had been my car, I would have given up after 20 minutes. "Well, I guess my car smells like college now!" I would have cheerfully exclaimed.

I did everything anyone could have done, short of disassembling the entire backseat. Her car is almost as good as new.

Almost.

I finished just as the sun set, just in time to put my kids to bed. Our little guy threw up again a few hours after going to sleep. So now I'm stationed on the floor in here, unable to sleep, listening for changes in his breathing, waiting with the bucket.

And the thing I want most of all, more than sleep, more than an end to vomit cleanup, more than a break from the neck and shoulder cramps caused by this shitty mattress...

is for this little guy's tummy to feel better.

Get better, buddy. I'll be here until you get better. 

Oh. Five years.

Not ideal.

So here's the terrible truth about why I stopped writing about the whole kid thing:

It got... easy. And kind of fun. Our kid went from being a nightmare to the nicest, easiest kid in the world in a matter of months. That little shit that once barfed in my mouth is now a kid who loves Star Wars and builds Lego robots with me (we made one that makes a random Three Stooges sound effect when you bash it on the head). And since there's nothing worse than hearing about how great someone else's kids are, there was nothing left to write. Happy ending, roll credits.

Then we had another kid, and it all went to total shit again. And it was too exhausting to write.

But here's the thing... finally, three and a half years after that, it's starting to get easier again. Our younger kid is a fucking lunatic (he once screamed at me that I had a vagina in my feet). It's clear that between knocking down other kids' block buildings and his inevitable teenaged DUI/public lewdness arrest, he's going to provide plenty of blogging material for a long time.

Also, all of our friends have finally decided to throw in the towel on their doomed attempts to be interesting, unique individuals. Instead, they've decided to join us and crap out a couple of kids. As a result, people have been asking me a lot questions. And I stand ever prepared to respond to genuine, desperate cries for help with glib deflections. I'm like Jesus that way.

So, patient readers, this blog is back, answering questions and sharing my 3-year-old's trenchant observations about scrotums (examples: they exist; they are great; they need a lot more social media exposure via being shouted about in public at every available opportunity).

And if you like this blog, I know you'd love The Breeder's Book Club Podcast even more.

I'm so happy to be back, gentle readers. We'll talk again soon.

1. I started a new job at a major technology firm. I will not mention the name of our firm, because my opinions certainly don't represent the opinions of the company at large. Plus, more importantly, the company founders now own supersonic killing machines.
2. The crushing time burden of child rearing and a two and a half hour daily commute have forced me to make some careful decisions about how to spend my time. The point is, if I had time to write a blog, I would use that time to have sex.

It seemed that I would never blog again. But then a blessing from heaven was visited upon us! In the form of shit water!

It seems that one of the previous tenants of our lovely historic home was an amateur plumber, in the same sense that wandering around with one's zipper down makes you an amateur stripper. When a real plumber finally tore out our kitchen ceiling to figure out why it was raining poo in our kitchen, we found that the sewage lines had been connected together not with epoxy and pvc joints, but with moxy and dreams.

FYI: Shit squishes right through moxy and dreams.

Anyway, the shit water is gone, but our house is now a cratered wasteland while contractors tear holes in our walls, identify yet more problems, and never return again. Because of this, Heather and I have adjusted to living in squalor, freeing up lots of extra time. And the stress of living in a nightmarish pooscape has rendered me impotent, so back to the blog!

Anyway, a lot has happened since we last checked in. Let me fill you in -

1. Logan is now mostly potty trained (see a future posting for details).
2. I got new glasses.
3. The world almost ended, but at the last minute everyone decided to vote for Barack instead.

I'll be covering these and other topics in great detail in the coming weeks, but for this blog posting, I thought I'd cover some (real) questions from you, the readers, that I've callously ignored for months.

Amy writes:

Love your blog! Just found it as I try to sleep train my second child, now 13 months, for the 10th time.

Quick question- did your wife ever nurse during the night or did it all stop cold turkey?

Last night was the second night. Alec screamed for over 2 hours again when he woke up a midnight to be fed and was denied. One determined bugger.

Dear Amy,

The 10th time, huh? That's the spirit! Remember my parenting creed: Never give up! No matter how demoralizing and self-defeating your endlessly exhausting uphill battle is! After all, it's not like there's any way out of the next 18 years! (Unless... criss-cross?)

Now, I can give Amy a whole lot of advice about what to do, but I have faith that by midnight tonight all these issues will be resolved. How do I know? Because Amy's post is from over 5 months ago. By now, Amy's son is now 18 months old, and either Alec has grown out of his sleep problems or Amy has taken her own life. Either way, she is in a better place now.

Which illustrates my other parenting creed: You can spell "I got much needed rest" without "ignore". Do not listen to the woes of other parents! No matter what problem you are having with your child, the moment you explain it to another parent, you will find out that they have it far, far worse:

You: Little Billy has been such a picky eater lately.
Other parent: I know what you mean! Sarah won't eat anything but boiled unicorn meat and my liver.
You: But at least she's sleeping through the night.
Other parent: I said she sleeps through a night, not the night. She has slept a total of 8 hours in the last 4 years.
You: Billy's eczema -
Other parent: Is nowhere near as bad as Sarah's leprosy.

Et cetera. This obviously sucks, because you are losing the parental whine-off that is the primary mode of social interaction amongst our nation's thirty-somethings. But much worse is the inevitable moment where the other parent tells you that Sarah was such an angel for the first two years - the real trouble started right after she started acting exactly the way your child acts now.

It is for this reason that my wife and I have cut off all contact with the outside world.

Anyway, on the off chance that Amy is still alive, I'll try to answer her question. First, Heather and I had it a lot easier, because we sleep trained Logan when he was only 5 months old. It becomes a lot more difficult when your kid is old enough to climb out of the crib, scream that you never loved him, get a tattoo, and all the other more sophisticated emotional manipulations available to an older child. I think with a much older kid you start getting into territory where talking about it with your kid starts to have some value (unless you're a Southern Baptist - then just keep beating the kid with the Bible until he's old enough to have children of his own).

Conclusion: don't have children. If you must have children, sleep train them early - at conception, if possible.

Rachel writes:

As a pediatrician, can I request that your next post be about the urgent need to vaccinate your kids? the morons on the discussion boards are working hard to make the world a more dangerous place for the rest of us.

Dear Rachel,

OOOOH BOY! Here we go! Here's another liberal elite vaccinazi who wants to take away my right to foolishly endanger my child. I've been scanning the popular centers of anti-vaccination debate, and there are several compelling anti-vaccination arguments out there:

Argument 1: I just don't want to put my child through that.

I absolutely agree. As I've said before, babies and small children know exactly what's best for them, and you should never, ever question their judgment. That's why when we go down to the grocery store to pick up more breakfast ice cream and adult diapers for our severely burned 8 year old, we always let him sit right up front behind the wheel.

Argument 2: Vaccines are full of toxins - I don't want that in my child's body.

Fact: Vaccines are full of things like aluminum and other metals. Sure, there's no evidence at all that these particular metals in these concentrations are dangerous, but come on - THEY'RE FUCKING METALS, PEOPLE!

We don't let our son put any metals in his body. Please donate liberally to defray the costs of his hospitalization for the sudden onset of life-threatening Postassium, Sodium, Calcium, Iron and Zinc deficiencies. We believe that he developed this disorder as a result of standing near a vaccinated child.

Argument 3: Vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent.

Except for the fact that it isn't, this is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. Consider the leading causes of death amongst children cited by the Global Health Council:

1. severe infection (sepsis or pneumonia, tetanus and diarrhea)
2. birth asphyxia
3. complications of prematurity and low birth weight
4. congenital conditions
5. (Honorable mentions: malaria and measles. Keep it up, guys, you'll make the top 4 soon!)

SEE?! Right at the top of the list - Death By Vaccination. And if you actually read the list above and point out that pneumonia, tetanus and measles are all preventable with vaccinations, that means you don't love your baby.

Of course, these are the causes of death worldwide. In the United States, disease is not a leading cause of death amongst small children (and not because of vaccinations - Jesus loves us more, that's all). In the U.S., your 0-5 year-old child is most likely to be killed in a car accident. Which is why anti-vaccination parents never allow their children near cars or streets. These hyper-rational statisticians are unwilling to tolerate the vanishingly small danger of vaccination-related complications - there's no way they'd let their children near vastly more dangerous things like cars, stairs, bathtubs, toys, or water.

Besides, even if you did take the risks of life-threatening diseases seriously, most of the time there's no need to worry. If you're concerned, consult the many highly trained medical experts that are available 24/7 on our nations message boards. Consider the following real exchange from the mothering.com "I'm Not Vaccinating" board (edited for space - follow the link for the amazing full text):

momtoafireteam:

Today my 2 year old (totally unvaxed) fell at the park and cut her chin open. It was a very clean, neat, flat laceration about ----- that long. I took her to the ER because I could see white fat in the bottom of the wound and I know that means a Doc visit!! lol.

Editorial comment from John: "lol"? What the fuck is that?
"That's when I noticed that Timmy wasn't breathing!! ROTFL."
Anyway, continuing...

Dr askes if she is vaxxed and when I say no he gets very upset. I realize I REALLY don't feel comfortable doing that and I deny it. Upon discharge, instead of discussing with me the care of the flipping wound we are there for, he seriously spends 10 minutes telling me what to look for for tetanus. And how she can die (again) and how serious tetanus is (again) and how the US is relatively tetanus free because of vaccinations. Again.

Should I go on Monday and do the tetanus? Can anyone give me any input here?

peainthepod:

The wound bled copiously, right? And you could see the bottom, meaning it was entirely exposed to air? And your baby doesn't have any circulatory problems that you know of?

Not a tetanus risk IMO. I wouldn't worry one bit.

See? peainthepod, who has obviously attended Harvard Medical School, was able to dispense expert medical advice instantly! In fact, peainthepod must be even smarter than a real doctor, because a real doctor would insist on actually seeing the patient before making any kind of diagnosis, which is just plain lazy.

Argument 4: Vaccines cause autism

This is my favorite one, because there's undeniable proof!

See what I did there? I provided a link to a journal article, from The Lancet. And in pdf format no less, so you know that it's legitimate. I provided it with no context, so now you have to choose - do you slog through this unreadably dry medical journal article, or do you just take my word that it proves what I claim it proves? You're a busy person with a child - every second you spend reading this is a second that little Jana is unattended, wondering if the stapler works as well on your glasses as it does on paper.

Even if you do attempt to plow through it, you're probably unused to reading medical journal articles, so you're unlikely to notice that it refers to a ridiculously small sample size (12), and that if it establishes anything, it's that there may be a link between autism and the disease the vaccine is meant to prevent, not the vaccine itself. You certainly wouldn't have time to notice that the controversial claim of a link between the vaccine and autism comes in a purely speculative section that's unrelated to the actual research they did.

Uh oh! Hear that piercing scream? Jana must have decided to make staple earrings. Run in there and save her! You've used up your few minutes of computer time for the day, and you'll be busy the rest of the afternoon trying to staunch the flow of blood! LOL! Now you'll never have time to do the internet research that proves that this article has been wide-ly dis-cred-it-ed. You might never learn that there's evidence that Dr. Wakefield accepted payments from an anti-vaccination advocacy group to reach these particular conclusions, and that he had filed patent applications for his own measles vaccine that would only be marketable once the standard vaccine had been discredited. Too bad you'll never have time to learn that!

(Tip for anyone who is reading this that hates my guts for belittling their viewpoint: Is it becoming clear that you shouldn't trust someone's opinions just because they have some lousy journal publications?)

Argument 5: Vaccinations don't work.

<ring> <ring> Hey, boss? Look, I know I said I'd be in early this morning to prepare for that board presentation, but it looks like I've caught that diptheria that's going around. <fake cough> I'm not sure what it is - my wife thinks it could be the smallpox. <fake sound of pustules forming> But it could be polio too - it's primary transmission route is fecal to oral, and you know how I loves me some rusty trombone. <fake sound of withering limb>

Can You Solve The Case? How did Encyclopedia Brown know that Bugs Meany was lying to middle management? (Hint: Encyclopedia is a regular on the glory hole circuit, so he knows that Bugs really does love rusty trombone - he's not lying about that).

Well, non-baby-havers, I too was once as stupid as you. When I got into this whole mess, I was convinced that the sleep issue wasn't going to have that big an impact on my life. Before having a baby, I regularly got only 5-6 hours of sleep anyway, so I figured I was already used to the amount of sleep that all our baby books predicted we would get. This belief was, of course, fucking retarded.

The retardidity of the belief comes from my failure to recognize that, pre-baby, I got to choose which 6 hours were spent sleeping, and those 6 hours tended to be more or less contiguous. I had not realized that our little miracle would have powerful psychic abilities and a deeply ingrained terror of adult REM sleep, leading to a piercing scream the moment Heather and I actually entered the phase of sleep that stops you from going crazy. For the first 3 months, Heather and I were getting the kind of sleep that a Guantanamo Bay detainee under heavy interrogation could expect to receive. If Logan had decided to switch tactics and put sacks on our heads, stack us in a human pyramid and point at our privates, we would have wept with joy and relief.

The well-studied effects of sleep deprivation include irritability, loss of memory and reasoning skills, a high degree of suggestibility, and eventual homicidal madness. Heather and I fully succumbed to each and every one of these effects. The irritability was probably the most immediately alarming aspect. Heather and I were a couple who almost never fought, and yet would find ourselves shouting the most vile things we could possibly imagine at each other at 3 a.m. during our frequent arguments about who had to get up with the baby:

Heather: Can't you hear him crying?

John: Yes I can. Which begs the question, why haven't you gotten up?

Heather: Because, asshole, I got up with him last.

John: It's pointless for me to get up! He needs to nurse.

Heather: So why do I have to be the one to do it?

John: Because I don't have any breasts!

Heather: Big fucking deal. Any man who cries during Moulin Rouge is capable of lactating.

John: Satine's untimely death was a tragedy, you heartless bitch!

But, in retrospect, the most shocking manifestation of sleep-deprivation was the ritualistic superstitions that we came to embrace. During our months of baby-enforced sleep-interruptions, I entertained beliefs that would make a Scientologist blush.

For example, we began to believe that Logan couldn't sleep unless he was swaddled so tightly that he could not move. In our defense, this belief was based on the observation that when he could move, he regularly jabbed himself in the eyeballs and made himself scream. But the swaddling theory had a number of problems that we, in our deranged state, were unable to detect, namely:

1. Logan screamed regardless of whether he was jabbing himself in the eyeballs.
2. He obviously hated being swaddled.

Point (2) was evidenced by Logan's hysterical shrieking whenever we would swaddle him, and his obvious attempts to escape as soon as the swaddling was done. Our solution to this problem was to buy specially made escape-proof baby straight-jackets with smiling bears on the fasteners (I'm not kidding). But this failed to solve the nighttime waking problem, so I decided that the real problem was that Logan wanted his arms to be swaddled, but not his legs, so I cut the bottom out of one of his swaddling blankets so his feet stuck out (again, not kidding). When this strategy also failed to elicit the desired results, Heather and I decided that Logan was asking to be held in our arms while we bounced vigorously on a yoga ball while we (often angrily) sang “You Are My Sunshine”. If you find this behavior odd, perhaps even pathetic, then you have never seen it performed by a naked person who is literally sobbing with frustration. That's pathetic.

By month 3, I had become convinced that Logan was trying to tell us that what he really needed was a custom-made spring-loaded baby hammock that I had found online for the low, low price of $300. This seems ridiculous now, but if I had been convinced that Logan would sleep through the night if I gave Ving Rhames a rimjob, I would have been on the first flight to Los Angeles with a handful of mints.

Luckily, just as I was typing our credit card number into the baby hammock website, Heather suddenly realized we had gone insane, and it was time to take a new approach. It was time to pull on to the information superhighway.

The internet has ushered in an exciting new era in child rearing. Now, if you have any question about any parenting difficulty, you can log in to a parenting message board and have instant access to the collected experience and wisdom of the dumbest motherfuckers in the entire world. There is a good reason for this: the only people who have the time and energy to post on these sites regularly have

1. a desperate need to be listened to
2. not a god damned thing going on in their lives

To be fair, not everyone who posts on these sites is an idiot. I know intelligent, well-educated women who post on these sites 2 or 3 times a day. The trouble is, the long-winded, semi-educated halfwits who regularly hijack these boards often post 30-50 times a day. So there is good advice to be had - buried on page 73 of a 200 page discussion. But you won't get this far, because you will quickly be exhausted by acronym-laden discussions like this:

everylifeispreciousrythmmethodeer: Hi, gals! My DH [Darling Husband] is constantly nagging me to strap OPLA [Our Precious Little Angel] into his CS [Car Seat], but sometimes it makes OPLA cry, and I'm TMOAFPTHTFTSBDKWBFT [Too Much Of A Fucking Pussy To Handle The Fact That Sometimes Babies Don't Know What's Best For Them], so I won't do it! I think that our baby is allergic to environmental toxins in the car seat straps, and that's why he's crying! Any suggestions? I will be WSFMHUIRFI [Withholding Sex From My Husband Until I Receive Further Instructions]!

vaccinationisabusive: Did you vaccinate him? Because vaccinations have been known to cause death and disfigurement in over 90% of babies that receive them, and are a known cause of SICSAS [Spontaneous Inconsistent Car Seat Allergy Syndrome].

lactivist: I agree! We vaccinated my son at the insistence of my SPJHD [Smarty Pants Jesus  Hating Doctor], and ever since his seventh birthday he's been allergic to my BM [Breast Milk]! He refuses to nurse, no matter how forcefully I hold him down.

vaccinationisabusive: OMG! [Oh My God!] ICWYBFA! [I Commiserate With Your Breast Feeding Angst!]

smartassdaddy: Wait a minute... BM means Breast Milk? No wonder Logan wouldn't take that bottle I made...

manysmurfcollectibles: My baby developed SICSAS from car seat straps too, everylifeisprecious, and if you weren't such a lazy, abusive skank you wouldn't be having this problem. How many times do I have to say it: Don't trust store-bought car seats! Get out your scrap-booking supplies and MAKE YOUR OWN. Our child gets by just fine in the car seat I made for her. All you need is some miniature American flags, some uncooked macaroni and some pinking shears, ladies! Aren't your kids worth it?

Even in our sleep-deprived madness, Heather and I knew that these people were idiots. But Heather was certain that she was bound to find something useful if she carefully sifted through the posts. So she began the Sisyphean task of combing the attachment parenting message boards.

Some background: Up until this point, we'd been pursuing a parenting philosophy known as “Attachment Parenting”, popularized by child-rearing luminary Dr. Sears. This parenting philosophy is based on the idea that you will be a more effective parent and raise a happier child if your child has a “secure attachment” to you. A “secure attachment” basically means that the child sees you as a source of emotional security, but is independent enough to explore new situations and environments on his own, and won't spend hours and hours on the phone in the common room clutching his sides, rocking back and forth, and whimpering “I love you mommy, I miss you mommy” like some freshman-year college roommates I could mention.

Anyway, Dr. Sears' parenting philosophy categorically rejects the idea that sometimes babies want things that they don't need.  This leads him to recommend a lot of hard-to-implement practices, like co-sleeping, unlimited breastfeeding, letting babies wean themselves, and always, always getting up when a baby cries in the night, because if a baby is crying, it means that there is some desperate biological imperative going unmet.

Sub-digression: Dr. Sears' books have been widely criticized for focusing too little on actual child-development research, and too much on smug little anecdotes. For example, when Logan was a newborn, he was nursing about every 45 minutes. This was making Heather's life miserable, and by the transitive property of spousal misery, it was also making me miserable. In desperation, I looked up “frequent nursing” in one of Dr. Sears's books, and the only information I found was this helpful quote from one of his minions:

I would no sooner count breast feedings than I would count kisses.

Which caused me to pen the following companion epigram:

I would no sooner count kicks to Dr. Sears' nuts as I would count the number of times my sobbing wife tells me that her nipples are bleeding.

I'm considering having it embroidered on a darling throw pillow.

Anyway, we started searching the message boards for help. We learned that there did seem to be an alternative to Dr. Sears' method called “Sleep Training”, outlined by a Dr. Ferber in a book called “Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems”.

Unfortunately, we were searching message boards teeming with attachment parenting zealots, so we found it difficult to find any objective information on Dr. Ferber's method. In fact, Dr. Ferber's book was mentioned in much the same tone that the Necronomicon is mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft stories. The only posts we could find looked like this:

concerned_mommy: My baby is waking up every 2 hours! Someone at work suggested we try something called the “Ferber Method”. Does anyone know anything about it?

manysmurfcollectibles: The so-called Ferber Method is what we call Cry It Out. Here's what I've been told by the millions of published international child care experts with whom I correspond on a daily basis: you should just shoot your baby in the head with a shotgun. At least that will be quick. Allow me to reprint an essay written by an actual baby who had been subjected to the Ferber method:

“Mommy! Where's mommy?!” I scream with the last of my breath. The darkness closes in around me. I beg for death. In my terror, I am plagued by hallucinations where I am sodomized by winged demons in clown suits. As the my strength finally leaves and I sink into blessed unconsciousness, I bid farewell to the last of my innocence. I turn gay. As coma engulfs me, my last thought echoes in my empty heart: “I hate you, mommy.”

Heather and I were shocked that there were parents out there so heartless and cruel that they would allow a baby to go through anything like that. We kept bouncing Logan on the ball...

Another month passed.

By the end of a month, we realized that the eternal hatred of our gay son was a small price to pay for a decent night's sleep, so we decided to read Dr. Ferber's book.

It turns out that most of what we had been told about the book was inaccurate. For example:

1. It was not bound in the skin of aborted fetuses
2. Very little of the book was dedicated to the summoning of Cthulu and his shambling Shoggoth minions from a terrible dimension of chaos beyond the stars
3. It did not recommend locking the door and letting a baby scream until he passes out

In fact, Dr. Ferber's book had the distinct advantage of actually being based on empirical research. He points out that when babies wake up in the middle of the night, it's often in very different circumstances than when they fell asleep (for example: there's no nude weepy bouncing lunatics); some babies need to be given the chance to develop the ability to fall asleep on their own. To this end, he recommends putting babies to bed while still awake, and letting babies cry for a few minutes at a time before you go in to check on them.

Heather and I were terrified that Logan would not be able to handle this system at all. We were convinced that he would scream and scream all night long. But we had to try something.

On the night we started Ferber-izing (as it's called), our friends abducted Heather and placed her in a secure, beer-filled environment while I put Logan to bed. He shrieked and shrieked, and I went in to check on him at the suggested intervals. I was sick with worry and hated myself the whole time. "The whole time" turned out to be about 35 minutes, and then he fell asleep. He woke up twice that night, and both times fell asleep within 20 minutes.

The next night he cried for 20 minutes, and woke up once to nurse.

By the third night, his sleep was entirely fixed.

So here's the brilliant parenting revelation I took away from all this: Don't trust biased morons to give you reliable information about opposing viewpoints.

And that after only 4 months of research.

Epilogue:

After this experience, Heather was shocked at how poorly informed her online community was about sleep training. She decided she had to make an effort to correct their misperceptions. This experience taught us that her fellow posters were not only morons, but also weren't even using the same rules of reasoning and evidence that are generally accepted by us college-educated, faggoty types:

smartassmommy: I can't speak for anyone else's experience, but in our case, sleep training really helped our baby. He used to wake up screaming and crying every 45 minutes, and now he sleeps through the night.

manysmurfcollectibles: Well, I feel sorry for you. I don't have it in me to be that cruel.

smartassmommy: How were we cruel? He was obviously unhappy before; he woke up crying many times a night. But he spent less time crying even on the first night of training than he did before the training started.

manysmurfcollectibles: He may be acting happier, but that's because he knows he can't trust you enough to show you his real feelings. You sicken me.

smartassmommy: Not that I expect any kind of useful answer, but how can you possibly claim to know that?

manysmurfcollectibles: A mother knows.

smartassmommy: How did you find someone who was willing to fuck you in the first place?

Hole 1: The Mouth

A small baby's mouth is designed to reject most substances. Only one substance - breast milk - is allowed to enter, and even that substance is nearly always immediately released back into the outside world to soak into clothing, blankets, and furniture. Once this milk curdles, which in a cool dry environment can take as long as 8 seconds, it gives baby and her environment a distinctive odor unique to babies (and unwashed gangrenous third-world goatherds). But undigested breast milk is one of the better things you can hope for from a baby's mouth, because if you act fast it's possible to clean it up.

By far and away the best thing that comes out of baby's mouth is drool. I like drool. First of all, it's the only baby substance where the baby word is grosser sounding than the actual word. What sounds grosser to you: "saliva" or "drool"? It sounds like something a shambling zombie would moan.

Anyway, when you see something erupting out of baby's mouth, hope for drool, because it's colorless, (mostly) odorless, and if it lands on the carpet you can probably just leave it there with no ill effects. Your baby will go through phases where he suddenly begins drooling much more copiously than before. When this happens, you will confidently reassure your wife that this just means he's starting to teethe, while secretly fearing in your heart of hearts that your baby is a retard.

But a baby's mouth (especially a little baby) is most likely to emit "spit-up", or, as the medical community more accurately calls it, "putrid rancid semi-digested tit-whey". No one knows for sure why babies spit up so much, but most experts agree that it has something to do with the babies being total fucking assholes.

Spit up differs from adult cheese-vomit in one crucial respect - it appears totally without warning. If an adult were about to yawn up a liter of rancid curds onto your carpet, you'd expect a certain amount of gagging and lurching, or at least a distinctive facial expression to indicate that disaster was imminent. A little baby will giggle and smile at you, and then right through that smile, like those Starburst ads from the 80's, a little tsunami of stinky white destruction will come crashing through those adorable little gums, right onto your priceless Faberge eggs (or Hummel figurines, or whatever other worthless shit you've got piling up in that apartment of yours).

(Just to back up a little - When I said "those Starburst ads from the 80's", I meant the ones where a big tidal wave would unexpectedly hit, with giant fruits floating in it. Sadly, I couldn't find a link to one of those. But I present you with this Starburst commercial instead, because even though it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, it's too awesomely retarded to go unlinked.)

I know many of you are asking yourselves "How does spit up taste?" Unfortunately, I can tell you. It tastes like feta. Salty, salty, skunky feta.

How do I know this? Well, this brings me to my first tip for new dads:

Tip 1: When within 30 yards of baby, keep your mouth closed.

In my case, I was playing a game called "Oh, The Humanity!", where I float Logan over me while pretending he is the Hindenburg. During this particular game, just as Logan's pretend-hydrogen-contents had exploded and we began the shrieking crash to earth as dozens perished in Logan's flaming wreckage, Logan went totally off script and giggled a stream of spit-up onto the unsuspecting crowd. Because I was busy doing the voices of the doomed passengers, I got a mouthful of Logan's stomach contents.

18 hours later, I finally stopped gagging.

Hole 2: The Urethra

The urethra outlet (or pee-hole) is an opening capable of releasing gallons upon gallons of baby urine the moment it is exposed to the open air. I'm serious. The instant a baby's diaper comes off, they're getting ready to pee, and you are playing with ammonia scented fire every second that diaper is off. This phenomenon is so well documented that there are a wide array of products available to place over a little boy's penis during the few seconds it is exposed during a diaper change. The most popular is the pee-pee teepee.

The good news is that baby urine isn't anywhere near as gross or strongly scented as grown-up potty. Which is good, because you will be peed on. A lot. And not just you. Baby will pee all over himself or herself. If you've got a boy, he'll frequently pee in his own face (don't try to prevent it, this is vital preparation for fraternity life).

You will be peed on so often that I can almost guarantee that at some point early on you (exhausted and stinky, wearing the same pajamas you put on 36 hours ago) will be peed on (just a few errant drops), and you won't even bother to clean it off. Why waste the effort? You'll just be peed on again in half an hour.

Oh, one other thing. During the first four days, it's not uncommon for your baby's urine to contain little red crystals (true!). These crystals are natural and do not indicate a health problem; they're just there to freak you the fuck out.

Hole 3: The Nose

There is a widespread misconception that a baby's nose is used for breathing. In reality, a baby's nose is not connected to the respiratory system until the child is in third or fourth grade. Until then, babies breathe heavily through their mouths, huffing and puffing like little telephone perverts all day long. Many babies' first words are "What are you wearing?"

No, the baby's nose is designed for one thing: the production and storage of boogers. A prolific baby can produce up to 8 giant-sized boogers per day. Each booger is lovingly crafted in exquisite detail, which is why your baby will be overcome with rage if you ever dare to attempt to remove one.

If you do attempt booger removal, I suggest you use a q-tip lightly moistened with chloroform or morphine. Do not attempt booger removal on an unsedated baby; most babies would prefer to whip their head around and drive the q-tip into their brain rather than allow their boogers to fall into enemy hands.

In any case, there is no real need to remove your baby's boogers. They will fall out onto your baby's mattress as she sleeps, at which point they will be harmlessly ground into baby's hair.

Hole 4: The Anus

This is, of course, the exit point for baby's precious little shitballs. It's important to realize that there are many varieties of baby poop as your child ages:

1. Meconium (first 1-3 days) - Meconium refers to the first bowel movements of a newborn baby. The word itself is derived from a latin term meaning "why is slimy tar coming out of my baby's asshole?" Meconium can be difficult to remove, but a combination of wet-wipes and a little water usually do the trick. Just kidding. We recommend sandblasting.
2. 'Odorless' Mustard Poo (first 3 weeks) - Our baby is breastfed, so his first real poops were wet mustard-colored little splashes. Dr. Sears (world-renowned-baby-care-know-it-all) claims that these early bowel movements "do not have an unpleasant odor". When I read that before Logan was born, I assumed that he meant that these poops had no odor. But that's not true. Inexplicably, these poops smell like (and I swear this is true) the glutinous film that accumulates on the inside of a rice cooker.
3. 'Odorful' Mustard Poo (until baby gets solids) - Dr. Sears didn't say a damned thing about this, but after about three weeks, Logan's poop began to acquire a noticeable cheddar cheese odor. We didn't change anything about his diet, his poo just started to stink. So, you know, look forward to that.
4. Big Boy Turds (once he gets solids) - These are your grown man, fully formed baby turds. Of course, where grown up turds tend to be shaped like hot dogs, your baby's turds will be shaped like little hamburgers, because they're instantly squashed flat in baby's diaper. But the point is that they still resemble low-quality meat, so you know your baby is becoming a man. The fun part about this stage is now baby needs to work to get the poo out. Before, when it was mostly a liquid, baby sat back and let gravity do the work. But now muscular coordination is needed as baby struggles to execute the complex dance of muscle contractions and relaxations necessary to release a mature dooky. But since baby can barely control her fingers, let alone her various sphincters, this is a challenging process. Sometimes our baby will stand by his window, screaming, tears streaming down his red, sweaty face, as he desperately works to unlock the rubix cube of his bowel muscles. And I stand by his side, cradling his head, feeling his pain, and trying desperately not to laugh.

Babies also fart. I hadn't realized this, but apparently all babies are world-class near-constant farters. Logan farts so much that I have twice asked his doctor if there's something wrong with him. Even more disturbingly, his farts always smell exactly like his mother's, to the point of precisely following hour-by-hour changes ("Look honey! He has my eyes and your flatulence!"). Whatever chemical agents bring odor to farts are apparently passed directly through breastmilk.

Hole 5: The Ears

According to our pediatrician, babies' ears are prone to wax accumulation and it is critical that parents regularly check and clean any waxy build up. Needless to say - fuck that.

Next time: Coping with Baby's Sleep Habits - The Many Benefits of Suicide

But, see, it turns out that these damned little babies burn through your free time in a big way. You're awakened at 4:00 AM by a series of high pitched shrieks from down the hall, you're sucked into a whirlwind of screaming, poop, and hair pulling, and just when you've finally picked the last chunks of curdled breast milk from your chest hair, it's 1 AM, time for bed! I don't know if there's anything in the world that has such a devastating effect on your social life, free time, and finances.

Now that we've finally found a way to get our baby to sleep through the night, I've got the creativity and energy I need to share my accumulated six months of shit stories with my adoring readers.

But my last blog entry leaves some nagging loose ends. So let's tie this shit up and move on with our lives...

When I last left off, Heather was in hour 40 of labor, but only dilated to 4 centimeters. At the time, we were exhausted and dismayed that Heather had labored so long but had made so little apparent progress. Of course, now we know that Heather was almost done! Just 16 hours later Heather and I were saying hello to little Logan.

Now, when I wrote the previous two blog entries, just after Logan was born, I was full of trauma and anger. My plan was to intersperse what we were told at our birthing classes with a narrative of the birth to illustrate how our hopes and expectations were utterly, ironically disappointed from the moment we entered the hospital.

It's 6 months later now, and my outrage has lost its edge (plus, sleep-deprivation related psychosis has destroyed most of my ability to form new memories). So I'm abandoning my subtly self-pitying literary structure for an overtly self-pitying bullet point recap of the birth:

1) During our Bradley class, our instructor dedicated an entire class to the drug Cytotec. Specifically, how the drug will kill you and your baby. This was a stunning revelation; after all, why would the FDA approve a drug that was consistently fatal? But our Bradley instructor had proof, perhaps the only proof that could be offered for an accusation of this gravity: an uncomfirmable anecdote featuring no names, sources, or verifiable facts of any kind. According to this shocking story, a lady who doing just fine in labor was given Cytotec to speed up labor, and she and her baby were dead within minutes.  Perhaps even more damning, the instructor revealed that Cytotec had never been proven 100% safe!

As you probably guessed, Heather and I, liberal egghead faggots that we are, proceeded to spoil things for everyone by making a lot of stupid arguments that nobody cared about. Like how a sourceless, context-free anecdote about one person doesn't constitute proof of any kind. Like how it's impossible to prove that anything is 100% safe, and that it's not even clear what that would mean ("Dear God! Vicks brand cough drops can be fatal when hammered directly into the skull! They're not 100% safe!"). Heather and I went home very, very annoyed that our instructor would pointlessly alarm pregnant women with illogical, unscientific nonsense.

Ironic twist: Guess what drug Heather was given to control postpartum hemmorhaging? <ding!> You guessed it: Cytotec!

2) Heather's labor took so long that the doctors became concerned that maybe the baby was turned in a funny way. A parade of nurses, midwives and OBs were brought in to determine the baby's position. These experienced professionals grew increasingly worried that the baby might be in a dangerous feet-down position that would require an immediate C-section. Heather sat through an agonizing emergency ultrasound during which two nurses could not locate the baby's head or feet. Things were starting to move in inexorably towards C-section when the lady who actually knew how to operate the ultrasound machine showed up.

Heather and I watched the screen as she instantly found the baby's feet (exactly where they were supposed to be, facing up), and ran the ultrasound down the length of the baby's body, showing us cross sections of the baby's feet, shins, knees, thighs, cock-and-balls - D'oh! So much for not finding out the baby's gender ahead of time.

Ironic twist: The labor took so long because the baby was in a weird position. He was face-up instead of face down. Not one of the nearly dozen people who had checked the baby's position had noticed.

3) The pushing part of Heather's labor took 4 hours, which is just about as long as pushing can possibly go before they cut you open. Heather was screaming like a wild animal, and sweating like a professional wrestler. Every muscle in her body was shaking from the constant effort she was making to push the baby out. Our midwife, Hagatha, repeatedly told Heather that pushing was taking so long because Heather just wasn't really trying.

Ironic twist: Of course she was fucking trying!

4) Heather ultimately ended up having a vacuum assisted delivery. Now, in Bradley class, we'd talked a lot about how to push slowly when the baby begins to crown, to slowly stretch the vaginal walls and prevent tearing. When the O.B. finally got the vacuum attached and did one good tug, the baby shot out like a cannonball. Heather experienced fourth degree tearing, which means that suddenly the only separation between her vagina and rectum was the biological equivalent of a strand of hastily hung police-line tape.

Ironic twist: Before she got pregnant, Heather would often loudly remark, "Boy, I sure am glad my vagina and rectum are topologically distinct spaces!"

There's a million bullet points like this. Nothing went the way we expected. We thought we would have a drug free delivery - Heather ended up getting pitocin to increase contractions and an epidural for pain (but Hagatha helpfully turned off Heather's epidural and turned up her pitocin once pushing began, so that Heather could experience the maximum possible agony). We thought it would be sublime and magical - it was traumatic and brutal. We thought that if we read enough books, if we did the right exercises, if we ate the right foods, if we followed the rules, we'd get the birth we wanted. We'd started to believe what our lefty hippy birthing books said: that birth was a beautiful, natural process that rarely (if ever) required the intervention of the greedy, power-mad medical establishment.

We were really fucking stupid.

Childbirth is a natural human process, but that doesn't mean it's beautiful. There are plenty of perfectly natural processes that result in bleeding eyeballs; the fact that mother nature is calling the shots doesn't make it pretty. Childbirth can be terrifying, and painful, and boring, and until very recently was a leading cause of death. And we knew that.

But we didn't want to believe that. Heather and I have lived our entire lives believing that if we worked hard enough, we could control the things in our lives that felt dangerous and out of control. And what's more dangerous and out of control than having a miniature Houdini attempt a daring escape from your high-security twat.

And once Heather and I had decided what we wanted to believe, it was easy to find a buttload of books to support it. And if we'd wanted to believe that bad feelings were caused by the disembodied souls of aliens killed in nuclear volcanoes, we could have found books to support that too.

So Heather and I were cruelly reminded of a fact we'd known for a long time, but had almost forgotten: many things, maybe most things, just can't be controlled. Sometimes, you can do everything right, and things still get fucked up.

<sigh>

The good news:

Our son, Logan Isaac, was born on August 22nd. He weighed 9 and a half pounds, and was 22 inches tall. We love that little guy with all our hearts.

But man was he a pain in the ass for the first four months.

Postscript: When Heather read through this post, she pointed out that some readers may be left with the impression that her vajayjay is now permanently wrecked. I just want to set the record straight: Heather's vagina is fucking awesome. I would go so far as to give it the Congressional Medal of Honor, or at least a prominent place in the Pussy Hall of Fame. In fact, it might be even better than it was before. Back in the day, Heather's vagina was happy, but it had never really had to work for anything. Now it's more than just a pretty face.

Work through your birth plan and make all the arrangements necessary as you prepare for your labor and birth. Then write a realistic story together, of your target birth experience. Include as much detail as possible. Make it a normal, realistic progression, but be sure that it is positive and reassuring. Every day this week, read the story to the mother when she is deeply relaxed. Then have her sit up and discuss her feelings. Did any part of the story make her feel tense, upset, uncomfortable? If so, you still have some things to work out. This does not guarantee that you will have this target experience, but it will help you both feel more confident and tranquil about what you are likely to face.

Mid-July - Bradley Method Class 8

Instructor: So, I hope everyone did their homework and did the relaxation exercise from last week?

John: Nope. We didn't want to do that one. It seemed counter-productive.

Instructor: What do you mean?

Heather: Don't you think it's a little bit of a setup to write out your ideal birth experience? You're bound to be disappointed by how it really turns out.

Instructor: Come on, guys! You know how important relaxation and positivity are! Remember, it's up to you! Let me read you a great birth quote from Dr. Bradley: "If it is to be, it's up to me!"

We checked into the hospital quickly and efficiently. Our midwife had told the hospital we were coming and forwarded our medical info, so we were able to go straight to our labor room. Heather labored steadily as we settled in, and I was relieved that her labor hadn't started to backtrack. We had heard that some women get flustered in the unfamiliar hospital atmosphere, and their labor can really slow down.

July - Bradley Method Class

Instructor: Remember, guys, you have the right to refuse ANY medical procedure, okay? So don't let anyone tell you you have to get an IV buff cap, or fetal monitoring, or anything, okay? You can always tell them no, or tell them you want more information before they go ahead.

John: I appreciate the fact that we have a legal right to refuse medical care, but come on. If a doctor tells you that there's an emergency, and you or the baby are going to die if you don't follow their advice, you don't really have a choice. Anyone in that situation is going to take the doctor's advice.

Instructor: A lot of people have that attitude, class, but you always have options. You can ask the doctor what study proves that the procedure you want is medically necessary and safe.

John: But that's my point. Even if he gives you evidence, you can't evaluate it. He can just say, "Oh yeah. It's in JAMA 52:1:35" and I have to trust him. I don't read the New England Journal of Medicine.

Instructor: Bingo! That's why you ask him to show you the article!

Heather: Wait a minute. You're saying that I should ask a doctor to produce a journal article proving that the life saving emergency intervention he recommends is a good idea?

Instructor: Yes indeedy!

Heather & John: Right.

The nurses came in to give Heather her buff cap (a little semi-permanent valve they install on the back of your hand so they can pump you full of whatever drugs they want). Heather and I were annoyed by this, because we had no intention of pumping any drugs at all into her. But our midwives and doula had assured us that it was a waste of time to fight them on this point of hospital policy. If we pressed the issue, Heather would be identified as a problem patient, and then we would be fucked.

It's been my experience that, in a hospital, whenever a needle needs to be inserted into a vein, the nursing staff immediately begins a desperate search for a nurse that is visually impaired, palsied, or mentally enfeebled (if you are insured by Kaiser, they may be able to scare up a nurse that is all three). This is just a "first draft" needle insertion that no one seriously believes will work, so it all happens in a relaxed atmosphere of trial and error, where no one gets hung up on "results", dig?

So while Heather was having contractions, a nurse arrived to insert the buff cap. She had the squeamish, unfamiliar manner of a woman who was just moonlighting at this nursing thing to help pay her way through beauty school. After a few practice stabs, she announced (as tradition dictates) that Heather's veins were very difficult to find. She would have to call in Nurse Patty.

Now, I'm sure that there are some bigots out there that read the name "Nurse Patty", and immediately leaped to some stereotyped image of a huge, overweight lesbian with an unnecessarily gruff bedside manner. You would be correct.

Nurse Patty strode in, took one contemptuous glance at the first nurse, and decisively stabbed the needle home.

And missed the vein entirely.

So with great confidence, concentration, and precision, she inserted the needle again.

And missed the vein entirely.

Not wanting to make a human pin cushion out of poor Heather, she did not attempt to insert the needle again. Instead, she left the 2 inch needle in, and began working it back and forth under the skin of Heather's hand, like a windshield wiper, while Heather continued to have contractions. Luckily, the contractions probably helped put the pain of the needle torture in perspective. (Interestingly, of all the gory carnage I would witness over the next few days, the squirming outline of the needle under Heather's skin was the only thing I couldn't stand to watch). After several minutes of needle sweeping, the nurse was finally rewarded with a gusher of blood that shot up into the buff cap. Success!

Except they had to test it, so they ran some saline through the buff cap. Heather's hand began to swell up like Veruca Salt, but then, mercifully, something clicked into place and the saline began to circulate.

With the painful humiliation of the buff cap over, we were finally able to settle in, so Heather could labor in the way that made her most comfortable and confident.

Well, almost.

First Heather had to endure 20 minutes of continuous fetal monitoring. Fetal monitoring involves having two very tight belts strapped around the mother's abdomen during contractions. This causes a certain amount of discomfort (in much the same way that wearing a metal cock ring while passing a kidney stone might involve a "certain amount of discomfort"). Fetal monitoring technology is a robust and well established field, so it should come as no surprise that the slightest movement will cause these devices to self-destruct.

By this point, Heather's contractions had begun to slow down. I attributed the slowdown to the pain of the buff cap insertion and the pressure of the constant fetal monitoring. Heather suffers from medical monitoring anxiety, to the point where she does a little self-hypnosis routine before using the blood pressure monitor at Safeway. And, sure enough, when the nurses left the room, her contractions started right back up again, as strong and frequent as ever.

Unfortunately, it was hospital policy that Heather needed to be monitored for 10 minutes every hour. So for the next few hours, Heather would labor along like gangbusters (whatever that means) until about 10 minutes before the next monitoring. And then her contractions would begin to space out. A nurse would arrive and hold the fetal monitor against her belly, and say that she just needed to monitor a few contractions. And Heather's uterus, horrified that it might inconvenience this nice young lady, would panic, and not have a contraction for 10 minutes.

As soon as the nurse left, the contractions picked right back up again.

After about 3 hours of this, I called in our midwife for a conference.

John: The thing is, every time you monitor Heather, her contractions spread out. So maybe there's a way we could skip an hour of monitoring, just to let the pressure off a little-
Hagatha: No, no! Absolutely not! I don't think you appreciate the absolute seriousness of this! And, look, if Heather were really in serious labor, her contractions wouldn't be so dependent on circumstances.

Hagatha's lecture continued for several minutes, ending with a suggestion that we should go home if Heather's labor didn't start to pick up. Needless to say, hearing a medical care professional say that Heather wasn't in serious labor did wonders for her confidence, and the contractions grew even further apart. I sat, gritting my teeth in rage, unable to meet her eyes.

Luckily, our doula was an expert in hospital diplomacy, and she was able to broker a deal where Heather would be hooked to the monitors every hour, but the nurses would watch the results from another room. We knew the talks had been successful when our midwife came storming into the room, with our doula following meekly, geisha-like behind.

"Well, we're going to monitor you from the next room now, but since you aren't going to have anyone in here for a while, I think it's time for a vaginal exam."

Vaginal exams are never pleasant, but they're even worse for a woman who is having contractions. She gets the pleasure of being roughly fingered while flat on her back; just about the worst possible position for labor.

After a moment of diddling, Hagatha pulled out her hands, whipped off her gloves and announced (perhaps triumphantly?) that Heather was only dilated to two centimeters. As she left the room, she said with a chortle:

"Okay, I'm leaving. I don't want to scare off anyone's contractions."

To which I responded with an enraged display of silent cursing and flipping off that was so energetic, our doula averted her eyes. Really.

Ten minutes passed without a contraction. The doula and I tried to comfort Heather, who was feeling incredibly guilty and stupid for coming to the hospital too early. She seemed unable to remember the shivering, trance-like state she had been in when we left our house.

Near tears, she got up from the bad and began to plod towards the bathroom, saying "I'm so sorry guys. Maybe we should just go hoOOOOOOOO!"

The doula and I raced over to grab her as she doubled over from a powerful contraction.

Heathers contractions were back, but the damage had already been done. Her contractions were back to being 6 to 8 minutes apart, where they had been 10 hours before.

It took 8 hours for the contractions to build back up to where they had been when we got into the hospital.

I watched the sun rise and set through the crack in the hospital curtains.

I was introduced to 3 different nurses as hospital shifts went through their 12 hour rotations, each nurse assuring us that she would be the one to deliver our baby.

I watched the woman I love endure the terrible monotony of one long contraction after the other. Every 8 minutes. Every 6 minutes. Every 4. With each one I held her hand, or her head, or her shoulders, as she moaned and shook through the obvious pain.

Around 10:00pm  on Monday, I was holding Heather's head as she worked through another 2 minute contraction. As I held her, I realized that Heather had been doing this for more than 36 hours. In all those hours she had never complained about the pain, even when she was obviously in agony. And as I thought about how strong she was, and how proud of her I was, I realized that I was crying. And Heather was looking up at me, smiling. And she was crying too.

When we came out of the bathroom, with our arms around each other, Hagatha was there.

"Your contractions look like they're finally on track, so let's see how we're doing."

...

...

"Well, not bad... We're up to 4 centimeters."

If this were an episode of 24, this is when the clock would appear:

<boop> 39:59:57
<beep> 39:59:58
<boop> 39:59:59
<beep> 40:00:00

Hagatha the Wicked Nurse Midwife: Well Heather, it looks like you're only dilated to one and a half centimeters. But you're about 85% effaced.

John: Are you sure? She was about to start pushing when we got here...

Hagatha: (rolling her eyes) Sure she was. You have to expect this kind of disappointment when you come into the hospital too early...

Heather woke me up at 9am on Sunday, August 20th.

"Baby, wake up. I'm pretty sure I'm having contractions."

"Are you sure?"

"I think so. They started around 7, but I didn't want to wake you up until I was sure."

"Well... let's take showers and get dressed, and see if this keeps up. We want to make sure that this is real, you know?"

"Absolutely. I want to be pushing when I get to the hospital."

We'd heard a lot of horror stories about couples who got so excited when they went into labor that they went rushing right out to the hospital. These poor losers would show up, check in, and then be forced to go home, disappointed and embarrassed, when their labor fizzled out entirely.

We were smarter than that.

So we began to work through our list of labor activities. We'd started this list months ago, slowly adding new ideas as they came to us. So we packed bags, fixed snacks, walked in the park, and generally had one of the most pleasant afternoons we'd had in a long time. Once labor began, Heather finally stopped having the "stabby pains" (aka ringing shots to the cervix delivered by the cutest li'l fetus in town) that had plagued her throughout the pregnancy, and she was happy to finally be able to take a long walk around our neighborhood. I suggested that we walk to a bookstore to buy a copy of Ann Coulter's book so that Heather could squat over it when her water broke. Heather refused, since she was saving her amniotic fluid to blast our cruel, mean-spirited midwife that we nicknamed Hagatha.

On the way home from the park, we rented the movie "Airplane!" from the neighborhood video store. We knew we'd have to return it by 11pm the next day, but by this time Heather's contractions were 4 minutes apart. Even if we were still at the hospital by the time the movie was due, I'd just take a minute to call one of our friends to return the movie for us.

(Many, many days later, I would return to that video store, place a human baby on the counter, and plead with the childless, gay video clerk to cancel $25 in late fees.)

So Heather and I pursued our plan to stay away from the hospital until the last possible minute, trying to contain our excitement, and remain reasonable about the possibility that this might still turn out to be false labor. Unfortunately, although my rational mind was convinced to take this one moment at a time and not get too excited, my heart could not help but be overcome by the excitement.

And by heart, I mean bowels.

You see, I suffer from the Concern Related Anal Projection Syndrome (CRAPS). This disorder manifests itself as an intense need to take frequent, highly pressurized liquid shits whenever an exciting, high stakes performance situation presents itself. I've done some informal studies of this phenomenon during theater performances, and I'd say it affects about 35% of men, and 10% of women (women are far more likely to suffer Theater Induced Nervous Kidney Liquid Emission). This phenomenon accounts for the fact that the men's rooms in all small theaters reek of farts before any performance (check it for yourself). The male actors have been in there, pooping their little thespian hearts out right before the house opened, so that they wouldn't pollute the tiny backstage area where they will be huddled for the next 3 hours. So if you smell a poopy aroma outside the Nederlander theater in New York, don't wrinkle your nose! The fart you smell might once have been inside Taye Diggs!

Anyway, since I was running to the bathroom every 60 minutes or so, Heather's early labor was pretty hard on me too. My tortured digestive system was making weird moaning noises inside my abdomen all day, which could be clearly heard if the ambient noise levels were fairly low. Heather preferred to lean her head against my belly as she had her contractions, which led to some humiliating exchanges:

Heather: Ooooooooooo....
John's Bowels: Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee... - OH! Bladda bladda bladda, glump!
Heather: Ooooooooooo....
Bowels: Snork snork snork snork - tick! Watcha watcha. Blap. Blappa blap BLAP!
Heather: Hee hee! Hey you fucker! Stop that! It hurts to laugh!
Bowels: Myyyyyyyyy baaaaaaaad.

Even as the contractions got more painful, Heather remained in a good mood. She laughed throughout the movie, she remained properly disgusted with Nicole Ritchie when she read her Us magazine, and she generally was an unbelievably good sport as the going got tough. Heather's labor had even brought out the best in our dachshund, Remy. Remy normally spends every waking moment trying to set the land speed record for most deafening shrieks emitted within a 20 second period, but even Remy knew something special was happening. When Heather labored on the couch, Remy carefully climbed up next to her and gently rested his head on her legs. He sat there, perfectly still, for hours.

By midnight, Heather's contractions had really started to hurt, but she was riding them out with great courage and composure. I had Heather walking a circuit around the first floor of our house while she labored. I had built three piles of pillows in three different rooms that she could lean on when a contraction set in. I had named these pillow piles Station Alpha, Station Beta, and Station Zed.

Heather: I feel one coming...
John: Head for Station Zed!
Heather: Fuck Station Zed! Station Zed is a piece of shit!
John: You're doing (consulting his notes from childbirth class) ... "great".

Around one o'clock, Heather had started to become distant. Her contractions were two and a half minutes apart, lasting two minutes (which, by the way, does not mean she got a two and a half minute break between contractions. It means she got a thirty second break between contractions). She had started shivering uncontrollably.

I decided that this was getting serious. I called our doula (professional birth coach, for you cretins out there), and told her to come over. She confidently assured me that she would be over in 20 minutes. An hour later, she arrived.

After a brief assessment, she agreed that Heather was damn near ready to start pushing. We bundled her into the car with the last of our stuff, and headed to the hospital.

It was 2:00am. Heather had been in labor for 19 hours. As I navigated the 10 minute drive to the hospital, my nerves buzzing with excitement and concern, I reflected with amazement: "I'm going to be a father before the sun rises."

This was the first (but far from the last) of my predictions that would be proved bitterly wrong in the next few days.

1. Rub her back
2. Sob, give up

So, from a pure technique point of view, I'm golden. But I find myself feeling guilty about the fact that, no matter how many inane, sure-to-fail relaxation visualizations I attempt, in the end, Heather's the one who will be experiencing agonizing suffering for days on end. I'm of course referring to the upcoming finals of "America's Got Talent", but I'm sure the birth will be painful too.

In order to assuage this guilt, I find myself doing uncomfortable or painful things on purpose, thinking to myself, "If Heather can handle the pain of childbirth, I can handle this".

I never know when this tendency is going to rear its mentally-defective, hydrocephalic head. Most recently, it happened when I was ordering at Chipotle:

"What kind of salsa would you like?" asked Satan, cleverly disguised as a young, pleasantly plump, recent immigrant to these great United States.

"The flavorless, inoffensive Pico de Gallo for whitey, please!" is what I did not say.

"I'll take the hot one," I smugly announced. "I'm trying to prove that I'm stronger than my eight-months-pregnant wife!" "Oh! And I'd also like to pay extra for another cup of that salsa and some of your inedible, razor-sharp chips!"

So I got my salsa wads, and ate them with relish. I don't like hot food at all, but as I crammed it down I thought, "If Heather can push a baby out, I can eat a pint of searing hot, tomato-colored acid." And I did. And it wasn't that bad.

The next morning, my contractions started.

I was awakened with a start when I noticed a pain in my abdomen that, true to what I had been told to expect, felt like strong menstrual cramps. Of course, I have no firsthand experience of what strong menstrual cramps feel like, but if they feel like being struck in the intestines with a 500 pound wrecking ball made of shit, then yes, they felt like strong menstrual cramps.

My Bradley instructor will be disappointed to learn that I didn't have the presence of mind to time the contractions, but they were certainly getting closer together. I tried to ignore them and go about my business, because I knew that it would probably be hours before I'd need to be rushed to the hospital (although it did seem pretty clear that it would become necessary at some point). But then, quite suddenly, the contractions changed their character. They were suddenly accompanied by an almost uncontrollable need to push.

Rather than make a tasteless and unnecessary "water breaking" joke at this point, I'll cut to the chase. I spent the morning in the privacy of our hall bathroom, going through all the stages of labor, including a difficult period of transition where I became emotionally distraught and felt I wouldn't be able to do it. But eventually, things finally leveled out, and I delivered without the use of medication.

Ladies, you know the "ring of fire" women experience as the baby's crowning? Yeah. I had that. For hours.

Holy shit! Special bulletin!

Heather has been complaining that the baby is big enough that it's started to headbutt her cervix. She normally uses the euphemism "stabby pains", but this morning she said:

The baby
hiccuped in my twat
so damn low

Which is, of course, a haiku.

All in all, it was a far more pleasant drive this time than it ever has been before, because I no longer had long hair. On every previous trip through Texas, I had long hair that I wore in a pony tail. This poses some difficulties at service stations and the like, because, to a Texan, this look signals "faggot". It turns out that the average Texan is not interested in having long-haired faggots shop in their establishment, presumably because the homo-rays I emit might irradiate the merchandise, and the next thing you know all the cheap cowboy hats would be made of leather.

Interestingly, to any educated observer, I look way more gay now. No gay man has a long, unkempt pony tail, because it looks like shit, and that's no way to get attractive men to fuck you. But now that I get my hair cut by a blue haired submissive named "Wookie" and wear enough Crew product in my hair to frost a small layer cake, I'm exactly what the Texas shopkeeper has been waiting for: a smartly dressed young man full of buy-curiosity.

I don't know if the hair product helped, but this was also the first time we made it through Texas without getting pulled over by the police.

I think we normally get pulled over because of the "Attack Iraq NO!" sticker displayed prominently in our back window. It's still there, because a) it's hilariously ungrammatical and b) I want to keep it around until it's kitschy and cool, like when you see an old VW bus with an "Abolish Apartheid" bumper sticker. This sticker is a magnet for cops in Texas because the official Texas State Bumper Sticker is "I Support Our Troops."

I'm not entirely sure what "I Support Our Troops" means, but I assume it means "Once a month the owner of this pickup truck flies a Blackhawk helicopter to Tikrit and lays down a blanket of suppression fire so that our boys can secure the WMDs." At least, I hope that's what it means. If it means "I saw this sticker on the impulse-buy rack at the Dollar Tree, and I decided to get it because everyone else has one, and now I'm in the America Club, hooray!" well, it can't be that. That would suggest we didn't have the informed citizenry necessary for a functioning democracy!

Anyway, we didn't get pulled over, and before we knew it we were approaching Houston. You know you're getting close when you get to the 20-story-high white marble statue of Sam Houston, standing on a highway embankment in the middle of nowhere. He has an arm extended and an disturbingly blank look on his face. It's like he originally was part of Mount Rushmore, but then suddenly burst out, Night of the Living Dead style, and began making his way towards Texas ("..must... eat... ribs... RIBS!!!").

We finally rolled into Katy. Baby shower time, bitches!

The shower was at a tea house in Old Town Katy. It's called "Old Town Katy", because "Crumbling, Impoverished Katy City Center" doesn't have the same tourist draw.

Heather was getting really, really excited about the presents, and as we walked up to the building Heather said -

Actually, let's back up a second. Sometimes it can be hard for people to understand why me and Heather's relationship works. She and I have very different interests. She's obsessively organized, while I've been known to jot down notes on a slice of bread rather than hunt down some actual paper. But once in a while there's a moment that proves that no matter what, my wife and I are soulmates, that she and I were meant to be together, that there could be no more perfect partners in the world than us.

As we walked up to the building, Heather said, "The baby's so excited it's going to shit its sac!"

Cue the old Taster's Choice advertisement song: "Celebrate the moments of your life..."

The baby's meconium stayed put, so we went inside. The tea house was surprisingly well appointed, in a fussy Connecticut-bed-and-breakfasty kind of way. Everything was doilies and lace, and Heather's mom had hung clothes lines with baby clothes as decorations. The charm was not diminished by the fact that every member of the staff was a 15-year-old boy in a painter's cap and soiled Nascar t-shirt (not kidding). This phenomenon was never explained.

The menu was quite nice, on paper, but slightly less amazing in execution. The "raspberry vinagrette dressing" for example, looked and tasted remarkably similar to the neon orange sauce that is typically served with "crab and cream cheese fried wonton (8 pcs)". There were also cucumber sandwiches on white bread with provolone cheese, a triumphant trifecta of perfectly white flavorlessness. But while the menu failed as food, it was a resounding success in terms of looking good on a doily. And there were baby-themed Reese's peanut butter cups, so I was happy.

I made a point of introducing myself to the actual hostess of the party, a woman neither Heather nor I had ever met. Heather's mom had actually organized and paid for the shower, but this mystery woman had agreed to be the public face of the baby shower, because apparently mothers aren't allowed to hold baby showers for their daughters. Every time I tried to get an explanation for this, I was told "It just isn't done!" in the same tone one might expect if you asked a member of the Taliban how they felt about boy-on-boy ass-to-mouth-contact on the first date.

So Heather and I put on an elaborate show of pretending that this mystery woman was actually the host of the party. Our efforts were slightly undermined by Heather's mom's frequent, top-of-her-lungs shrieks of "I'm just SO PROUD TO BE HOSTING THIS PARTY FOR MY DAUGHTER!". Still, I'm sure that there were families in neighboring counties who were totally taken in.

Heather's mom also gave herself away by organizing and emceeing all of the baby shower activities. I was surprised to learn that baby showers traditionally include various party games, all centered around the theme of being really, really boring.

If I designed the baby party games, they'd be a blast. Blindfolded cut-the-umbilical cord, anyone? How about an activity where you try to accurately determine the cervical dilation on a life-like mannequin? The best hemorrhoid balloon sculpture wins a prize!

Instead, the games were more or less worksheets from a third grade English class. As we labored in silence over our xeroxed handouts, Heather's mother shouted instructions to us, sounding like a coked-up activity director on a cruise ship full of mentally retarded children. "Make SURE to write your NAME so that we KNOW who to GIVE THE PRIZE TO!"

So everyone was relieved when the desserts showed up (I ate more peanut butter cups), and soon Heather's mom was shouting that it was TIME for the PREEESENTS!!!! Heather and I sat on a little platform at one end of the room to open the presents, and it was on this stage that Heather did some of the best acting I've ever seen in her already distinguished career. When she said, "Oh! A baby blanket! This will come in so handy if the other 23 catch fire!", not only did I believe that she was genuinely thankful, but it made me genuinely thankful too.

Heather even put in a fairly believable performance when she opened the box that contained a hideous navy blue sweatpant set, emblazoned with a print of a moose and racoon ice skating. (This was perhaps the first garment in the history of civilization where a Rocky and Bullwinkle iron-on-print would have made it more tasteful.) Heather managed to cover her audible gagging sounds with a ladylike sneeze, and no one was the wiser.

(True story: There was, of course, no receipt with this thing, so when we returned to Colorado, Heather undertook an elaborate investigation to determine the origin of this garment and return it, no matter what the cost in time and dignity. After three entire days of grueling phone and internet research, Heather finally returned the garment to a local Kohl's, where they offered to refund her the item's full sticker price:

One dollar.)

To be fair, the majority of the gifts were great, and there were only one or two really horrible offerings. Heather and I finished the gift section in high spirits, which made the final humiliation a little easier to take...

Heather's mother had asked everyone to write down a piece of advice for the parents-to-be, and at the end of the shower, she read them out loud. The interesting thing was how exactly the same most of the advice was. Here's a breakdown of the most popular suggestions:

1) Your child will only be a baby once, so fill this time with love! - It turns out Heather already knew this, but I was shocked: I had planned to constantly beat the baby with it's own shitty diapers for the first two years, and then love the baby during it's second infancy.

2) Keep your marriage healthy: have a weekly date night! - Bullshit! This baby's the one that's supposed to save this marriage, not me!

3) Thank God for the sweet shining light of the merciful baby Jesus Christ and the Heavenly angels up in Heaven will be thy chariot of Justice and the Thanksgiving of Eternal Judgment (etc)

4) Keep an extra bag hanging near the hamper for really poopy items. - Okay, only one person gave this suggestion, and it was a really good idea. Of course, I already use this system.

5) I know you're going to have one nurse support your perineum while you're pushing, but make sure to have another nurse support your clit, too. You don't want to tear in that direction, for god's sake. - Thank you! That's useful advice.

And so, after spending a few more precious days in the company of people we'd deliberately chosen to live thousands of miles away from, we returned home, our little Honda packed with gifts. Of course, to get home, we had to pass through Oklahoma one more time...

Just on the Oklahoma side of the Kansas/Oklahoma border, we stopped at a gas station. I went inside to buy a bottle of water and use the restroom. The store shelves seemed to have been stocked by flinging items from behind the counter and hoping that they landed on a shelf, which they did not. Still, it was probably better that the clerk didn't get up to try to get anything off the floor, because that would only have allowed his B.O. cloud to gain even more territory.

Given the condition of the store, I braced myself when I opened the door to the men's room, but I was shocked to discover that the bathroom was literally sparkling clean. Every surface had been scrubbed to an immaculate shine. I strode to the urinal with renewed esteem for the American people. Sure, we may be too fat to get up and actually place store items on their shelves, but at least we still have enough pride to keep our bathrooms clean.

And then I noticed the smell.

It was a bad smell. It was a smell so bad it would normally have prompted me to get in the car and drive to the next gas station, but by then I was already peeing, so I decided to tough it out. As I zipped up, it became clear that the smell was coming from the trash can. And, despite my better judgement, like so many horror-movie teenagers before me, I went to investigate.

Someone had carefully, precisely, perhaps artfully, pooped in the trash can. I'm not kidding.

High angle shot. John stares, motionless and stunned, at the turd in the garbage can. Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." begins to play as the camera slowly pulls back into the clouds.

Fuck you, Oklahoma. Fuck. You.

His name does have some advantages. For example, although Dr. Faust and all the midwives at his practice are great, they do employ a bitchy, rude, mean-spirited assistant. She says sensitive things to Heather like, "Well, most women don't gain as much weight in their rear end as you have, but at least your breasts aren't as saggy as they're going to get." Since she works for Dr. Faust, I have given her the nickname "Mephistopheles". This is good news for all concerned, since under normal circumstances I would call her "Twatty Fuckwit McCunterface".

Anyway, this morning there was another couple in the waiting room. And I couldn't help but notice that the young man was wearing a T-shirt that said "Snatch: The Best Stuff On Earth" in giant, brightly-colored letters.

Now, regular readers know that I'm not easily offended (see: "Twatty Fuckwit McCunterface"), so it wasn't the language that bothered me. I just found it a little odd that this guy felt the need to advertise his fondness for snatch. Your wife's pregnant for fuck's sake! We know that you have at least a passing interest in poontang!

And to choose that shirt - out of all the possible items in his wardrobe - on a day when he knew he'd be sitting in a waiting room full of pregnant women seems a little crass, even by my standards. I have to assume that he agonized over the choice for hours, discarding shirts that said "Beaver Patrol", "Free Moustache Rides", and "Donkey Punch!" in favor of the more tasteful and aesthetically pleasing snatchware.

Anyway, everything that I've said so far is off-topic. Today's topic is: "Heather's Texas Baby Shower". (Note: although "texas baby shower" would be an excellent euphemism for sexual pee-play, this is not the sense in which the phrase is currently being used.)

As I mentioned earlier, Heather's mother arranged a baby shower for Heather in her home town of Katy, Texas, where every little girl hopes that when she grows up, she can work at the good Wal-Mart. Since we bought our charming and historic Denver home, Heather and I have no money, so we chose to drive down to Texas rather than fly.

It's an 18 hour drive, so we decided to get out the door as early as possible, thus naturally we didn't leave the house until noon. This is because when your final destination is Texas, suddenly there seem to be a lot of urgent household tasks that have to be addressed (ie "When was the last time we checked the ice cube maker for ghosts?").

But eventually we were on the road, and before we knew it we had hit Kansas. You can tell that you've crossed into Kansas, because all the businesses suddenly start cleverly spelling C-words with a K, as in: "Kansas Kountry Kitchen", "Karter's Krunchy Kandies" and "Ku Klux Kleaners".

I was remarking on this phenomenon to Heather as we pulled into a Stuckey's/gas station and noticed a semi with "Khristian Kountry Karriage" or something like that written on the side. As we walked into the little gas station shop, we both had a good laugh about these yokels' unintentional quasi-racist acronyms.

And then we saw what was for sale.

Did you know that they still sell black mammy figurines? Well they do in Kansas!

They also had a sign that said: "Wanted: Kitchen Slave". I'm not sure if they meant "Wanted" in the sense of "we're hiring" or "Wanted" in the sense that the sheriff was on the lookout for a negro attempting a daring escape to the north.

In any case, we sped on our way. One of the things that I love about the drive through Kansas is the endless array of entertaining signs. Most of them are your standard anti-abortion fare ("Abortion Stops a Beating Heart :(" / "Ma's Diner: Free Coffee if You've Shot an Abortionist" / "I Was Aborted, but I'm Still Saving Money on My Car Insurance, Thanks to Geico") but there are also occassional signs for other pet causes, like Intelligent Design ("Kraftily Kamouflaged Kreationism").

Since the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, Kansas has been a hotbed of evolution controversy and, if awkwardly verbose bumper stickers are any guide, the debate rages on. For those of you who haven't been following along, I'll present both sides of the debate briefly:

Evolutionist Perspective - At one time, Kirk Cameron (Kirk Kameron, Khristian) was ideally suited to the primetime television environment. But over time, new environmental pressures emerged, and Kirk Cameron found himself out-competed by more highly adapted creatures, such as Malcolm Jamal Warner, Urkel, and - to a lesser extent - Ashton Kutcher. Today, Kirk Kameron's Kareer is all but extinct.

Creationist Perspective - Kirk Cameron was personally called by Jesus Christ to make religious propaganda films that no one will see.

So the jury's still out!

But the thing I really love about central Kansas is the awesome roadside attractions. About an hour from the border, you start seeing signs for what seems to be a petting zoo ("Pet the baby pigs!"). At least at first...

After about an hour of signs, the claims begin to get a little weirder: "See the world's largest prairie dog!" "Two headed steer!" "Live 5-legged calf!"

(The "live" in the last one bothers me. It implies that the other animals, including the two headed steer and the baby pigs are not, in fact, alive. ["Pet the dead baby pigs!"] I hope that's not true, because I've driven by these signs about once a year for the last five years. If the world's largest prairie dog has been dead all that time, it's bound to be mighty ripe by now.)

The last sign, just a mile from the actual attraction, says "3000 lb prairie dog!" For years, I've rocketed by this mysterious claim at over 90 miles per hour. But soon I'll have a child. And that child will read the signs. And unless I stop, that child will shriek at the top of his or her lungs for the next 18 years. So I will stop. That's one way that parenthood changes you, I guess. You have to pet 3000 pound rotting prairie dogs.

As night fell, we crossed into Oklahoma (state song: "Ooooooo-my-god I need to get the fuck out of this state!"). And thus began the search for a motel.

I had hoped to stay in Oklahoma City, but apparently since they've had a major bombing they think they're a real city, and we couldn't find anything that cost less than a hundred bucks per night. So we drove on.

You know that part in the Blair Witch Project where the camera forbodingly lingers on their car for a moment as they walk off into the woods? That's what it was like as I watched the Oklahoma City Days Inn disappear in the rearview mirror.

After about an hour and half of driving, we arrived in a town with three major chain motels, all of them booked up (I assume there was some sort of clutching-your-genitals-while-watching-Blue-Kollar-Komedy convention in town). So I began to check out the other, off-brand motels. This was not an easy task, since I had been driving for 13 hours at this point, and my eyes had that "just-been-sand-papered" feel. After speeding away from two establishments that obviously wouldn't do (sign in window: "Your rapist tonight is Ted "), we ended up outside the Sands Motel.

It looked a lot better than everywhere we had visited so far. The outside was done in a pleasant black and white stucco pattern, and the lobby looked clean enough. We got a room. And for only $19! What a steal!

When we opened the door to the room, the whoosh of stagnant air revealed that "non-smoking room" actually means "to the best of our knowledge, there is no one smoking in there at this exact moment". Once our eyes adjusted, we couldn't help but notice that although the carpet was maroon in most places, there was a large patch right around the door that was gray. We also couldn't help but notice that this patch of carpet was shaped an awful lot like a human body.

But we were tired enough that we just wanted to get to bed, so we settled in. While I was brushing my teeth, I admired the workmanship on the bathtub. It seemed that someone had accidentally purchased a tub that was about a foot too short for the space in which it was installed. Undaunted, the intrepid plumber had filled in the entire empty space with caulk. This would be no mean feat under any circumstances, but it also seemed that the caulk had been delivered out of a high-pressure firehose, judging by the sharp points that had formed in the caulk and the grapefruit-sized caulk splatters that had hardened on every surface of the bathroom.

Needless to say, I was impressed.

Now - I don't like to get into the whole gender differences thing, but I think anyone would agree that women tend to be a little tidier than men. Am I right, guys?

So it's no wonder that my wife was the one who noticed the dozens of droplet-shaped bloodstains on the sheets.

Women! I mean, the bloodstains had totally dried!

And I wish I was joking, but I was so tired that I said "Don't worry, baby. I'll sleep on the bloodstained side." And I did.

In the morning, a number of heretofore unnoticed problems in the motel became clear. As I walked to the ice machine, I discovered that the charming black and white stucco I had seen the night before was actually white brick, encrusted with gobs of black filth so thick that they actually stood apart from the wall.

As I blearily walked back to the room, ice in hand, I noticed a cowboy entering all the rooms with some piece of equipment. I was alarmed at first, but then I noticed that he was also pushing a housekeeping cart, and calmed down. Then I noticed (I swear this is true) that the piece of equipment he was using to clean the rooms was a leaf blower. I became alarmed again.

Back in the room, Heather had made an interesting discovery. She had dropped something behind a piece of furniture, and had moved the furniture to retrieve it. My little junior detective noticed that although the carpet in the room was maroon, it was gray underneath every piece of furniture. After a little more investigation, it became clear why: The carpet was originally gray, and it had been painted maroon.

Again, I wish I was joking.

I really, really wanted to ask the manager some questions about the carpet painting, but I couldn't think of a polite way to do it. I considered saying something like "You know, I loved the carpet in our room, and I'm planning painting our carpets back home, and I was wondering what brand of paint you used," but I was afraid that they'd see through my little ruse, and the next thing I'd know I'm on my knees out back, leaf-blowing the cowboy as punishment for my insolence.

So I rejoiced a little when we arrived in Texas. Just a little.

Next Time: The baby shower

Well, maybe it'll be easier if I describe it in song...

(to the tune of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer)

You've heard 'bout rashes and flashes and hard-to-make-shitties

Varicose blueness and real tender titties...

But do you recall...?

The most heinous symptom of all?

Sometimes inside your rectum

Arteries can get enlarged

And if an abcess ruptures

Some mucous may be discharged.

'Cause when your veins get swollen

There's more blood flow than you need.

And then the slightest pressure

Can make your swollen rectum bleed!

So if you sit down to poo

Check after you wipe.

Get protrusions diagnosed

Your hemorrhoids may have thrombosed.

Some women don't feel sexy

When their rectum struggles free.

Don't fear, they can be treated

Suppositorily!

Flash back to about 5 days ago. Heather was moping around the house, looking furtive and ashamed. I didn't think much of this behavior, because we hadn't gone grocery shopping for over a day, so I assumed she was feeling guilty about some desperate pregnancy snacking behavior, like eating an ice cream cone filled with mustard.

But when I sat down for lunch, she cornered me at the table with a wild look in her eyes. I knew that this was about more than sneaking a few spoonfuls of mayonnaise right out of the container. This was big.

Here is a transcript of our conversation, as I remember it.

Heather: I have something terrible to tell you. You can't tell anyone!

John: Okay. What's wrong, baby?

Heather: I think I might have hemor.....

John: What?

Heather: You know!

John: (nodding) Ohh... (thoughtful pause) What?

Heather: (leans over and whispers)

John: (taking Heather's hand gently) Okay. Let's stay calm. What makes you think you have hem-

Heather: Don't say it out loud! (her eyes narrow suspiciously as she looks downward) They may be listening.

John: Okay, what should we call... "them"? How about... "fancy hole"!

Heather: I hate you.

John: (quietly) How do you know that you have this... fanciness?

Heather: There was... evidence. When I was... um... wiping.

John: When was the last time you ate beets?

Now, perhaps you think that last thing was a rather odd thing to say. Perhaps you don't understand a fucking thing about how my marriage works.

I do not like beets. In my opinion, they taste disgusting, they have a texture remniscent of overcooked caterpillar, and they have a terrible habit of making your morning bowel movement look like a deleted scene from The Exorcist. Heather, on the other hand, loves beets, and eats them all the time.

Now, purely in the interest of statistical analysis, let's look at the cases of "something somebody thought might be life threatening backdoor bleeding, but turned out to be nothing" over the course of my marriage to this point:

So I had some reason to ask this question. Which is why Heather responded:

Heather: Of course I ate motherfucking beets and they don't have a goddamned cocksucking rubber-sheathed shit to do with this! Now stop dicking around and help me!!!

Even though it may not seem totally rational at first blush, this too was justified. Let's go to the stats:

If you think that I might be estimating high to get into Heather's good graces, you weren't there when I was driving cross-country with Heather while eating carrots, and saw a pig, and decided to make a hilarious pig noise, causing the partially chewed carrot bits to become lodged in my sinuses, causing me to sneeze and blow snot-covered carrot bits all over the inside of the windshield, causing us to suddenly have no visibility while flying down a busy highway at 75 miles per hour.

This really happened. Ask Heather.

Anyway, Heather's insistence that this was a real problem convinced me that we needed to take this problem seriously and take definitive action. But I had never faced a crisis of this magnitude before. That's when I turned to my crisis-management role-model: Tom Ridge.

I immediately devised a convenient system wherein Heather could signal to me the severity of her hemorrhoids fancy hole at any given moment. Different levels of severity would be described by different savory spices, going from Saffron (mild, painless bleeding) through Cumin (itching) all the way to Cinnamon (fully thrombosed).

This spice-based system (code-named Poopourri), has already been adopted by DARPA.

But Heather, always the Democrat, felt like a meaningless rating system wasn't enough. She wanted to know if we should call our midwives.

My response was that we should maybe wait for a day, and see if it clears up. Of course, this is my response to all medical issues, so it's hard to take that response seriously. If my abdomen suddenly swelled, burst, and millions of football-sized spiders came streaming out, I would tell Heather, "Let's wait a day and see if it clears up."

But at this point, Heather was panicked and deranged enough to actually take my advice, so we moved on to the question of how to guarantee that no one, ever, would discover her terrible secret. She said that nobody could know, because if they did, every time anyone spoke to her they would, quote: "assume that I was bleeding out of my asshole at that very minute."

I make that assumption about everyone anyway, for recreational purposes, so I didn't see what the big deal was.

My suggestion was that she tell everyone about it, and kinda make a joke about it. Maybe in some big public forum, like a blog. If you make fun of yourself, I argued, you preempt anyone else's attempt to make fun of you.

Heather's argument was, if you put this in your blog, you'll wake up with significantly fewer testicles than the quantity to which you have grown accustomed.

I was duly persuaded. So I promised to never reveal her - no, OUR - secret. Because we are partners in this pregnancy, and if Heather wants to keep a part of this shared, sacred experience private, I will respect that.

Beets 3, Heather 0.

But I was resolved to take our baby's arrival seriously. When we went to baby classes, I was the first to wear the fake pregnant tits-and-tummy-filled-with-lead-shot vest. I leapt to the center of the floor when the instructor asked us to practice our pelvic thrust exercise, and I retreated with dignity when I realized, several minutes later, that only women were supposed to practice this particular activity.

"Whatev'!" I said, saving the spare letters for an emergency. "It's all good!" (I learned to talk all hip like that from American Idol interviews.)

Despite this commitment to an earnest process and utter lack of shame, I have begun to feel like our birthing class may not be totally valuable. I first got this feeling when we began doing vocabulary exercises. The teacher says "Open your workbooks to page 23", so we do, and there's a page full of vocabulary terms and their definitions. The teacher then proceeds to go down the list of words and say, "Okay, does anyone know the definition of anus?"

And nobody answers, because 1) of course we know the definition of anus (although I guess you could argue that if we had a little more hands-on familiarity, we might not have ended up in this mess), but mainly 2) because the definition is written on the page right the fuck in front of us. So nobody answers, and after a few minutes the teacher says "Come on guys, someone must know this one!" until someone reads, out loud, the definition that we've all been reading silently for the last 8 minutes.

This week, we did a "fill-in-the-blanks" exercise where the blanks were so open ended there was no way to correctly answer most of them. Almost everyone gave perfectly reasonable answers, but they didn't match the ones in the book, so we each got to play fun one-on-one mind-reading games with the instructor while 10 other pregnant women pretended to be paying attention, but were actually desperately concentrating on timing their next inevitable fart to coincide with a loud door-slam or scraping chair noise.

I grew restive. Here are some of my real answers to the real questions on the "What Birth Coaches Should Say" worksheet:

First Stage Labor

3. "The stronger the contraction, the more you __complain__".

4. "You're doing a __hand__  job!"

7. "Isn't my wife doing a __Puerto Rican behind my back__ !"

8. "Picture your cervix __gaping like a barn__."

9. "The discomfort in your back means that the baby is __moving 28 million dollars worth of smuggled hashish through your birth canal every 36 hours - that's why we need to build a wall across the Mexican border.__"

13. "I love __Nascar__".

Second Stage Labor

17. "Push to the point of __embolism__."

20. "I can see the __hypocrisy of our medical establishment__!"

22. "Completely squeeze your __head between dem nurse titties__  and recoup your energy."

25. "I __own__  you... and our baby!"

So my point is, it was edifying. We also spent an hour talking about how the use of analgesics or epidurals during a birth is morally equivalent to strapping your newborn to the hood of your car while forcing him to do a beerbong full of warm Keystone and meth. The cool thing about that is everyone in the class wants to have a drug-free, natural birth; hence our enrollment in this natural childbirth class (see how that works?). But after the scare-tactics and misinformation, I kinda feel like having a drugged delivery out of spite. We decided to compromise: Heather will smoke a joint during the birth, but it'll be one of those fake chocolate joints, so it's okay.

The worst part is that while this was dragging on, I missed the faaabuloooous television debut of the very Christian Soldier I referenced above in a homosexual context. This was a shame, because I really wanted to see his show, AND because he gave out fake dolphin nostrums at his party. I was really looking forward to pretending to forget the real name of the nostrum and mistakenly calling it a priapism all night long.

But, instead, nothing! Foiled again! Damn you Doctor Bradley!

So, if it's a boy, should we snip the tip on this little guy? Should we pop the hood? Should we, to be blunt, unravel the turtleneck?

I don't know much about the unclipped member. I haven't seen an uncircumcised penis as an adult (outside of porn, which, of course, I've only seen at book burnings). My wife did meet an uncircumcised penis in college. She says it was "hard to work with". (I assume they were assigned a class project together).

I've only seen one uncircumcised penis in real life, when I was a kid. Most of the little boys in my generation were circumcised. In fact, I didn't even know what circumcision was until I was in second grade, when I met Rommell. Rommell (pronounced Rome-EL; he was East Indian, not the devilishly clever Nazi general of the North African campaign) was in my second grade swimming class. After class, we all had to change in the same damp windowless concrete bunker, so when Rommell's uncut johnson was on display, it - like all our ice cold microwangs - had retracted to the size of a quantum singularity. His still-intact foreskin didn't retract as much as the rest, making it look like there was a short length of tube at the end of his penis. As a kid, I natually assumed he was deformed somehow, but I kept open the possibility that his weiner-tube had some sort of nectar-extraction role in the springtime.

(This kind of misunderstanding is exactly why we have to stop telling the "birds-and-the-bees" metaphor to kids. It doesn't even fucking hold together on the level of logic. Sex is like bees carrying pollen from one flower to the next? That suggests that babies are made when a man has sex with woman A, collects the semen that was already present in her vagina on the end of his penis, and then has sex with woman B to impregnate her with woman A's sperm. You call that making love? That's not making love. That's a CU football recruitment party.)

(As long as the flowers are passed-out drunk.)

I feel bad for Rommell. He probably went through life thinking that he had a weird unit, even though it was the rest of us that were mutilated.

It's hard to know why so many Americans are circumcised. It could be yet another example of Christian Jew-envy. Christians think that if they get circumcised, when they go to heaven God will open their fly, take one look at their junk, and say "Oh! You're one of the chosen people. Go to the front of the line and collect your gift basket." These poor misguided Christophiles don't realize that God will smell the bacon-cheeseburgers on their breath when he zips them up, and then they'll have to stand awkwardly before God himself as he asks "Wait, you chopped your dick off and I didn't even ask you to?"

Anyway, circumcision in the U.S. isn't about religion. When I asked my mom about it when I was a kid, she said that you had to do it to keep things clean. If you don't remove the foreskin, she said, it gets all dirty and infected under there. The problem is that this theory is, prima facie, total fucking bullshit. If the real explanation is cleanliness and concern for infection, why don't we also remove the kid's tonsils and appendix too, and since we've got him strapped down anyway, let's sew his filthy, filthy asshole shut. How dirty can a foreskin get? At the absolute worst, you've got maybe enough storage for a tablespoon worth of smunge. (For Ron Jeremy, add a quarter teaspoon to taste).

Consider this: If a man's foreskin space is equivalent to a glove-compartment, women have an entire Bed Bath & Beyond to keep tidy. But you don't see that many filthy, infected lady-parts, do you? (If you do, consider switching services.) I think a boy can be trusted to keep that relatively small area clean, especially considering the amount of time he's going to spend handling the damned thing anyway.

Which is, of course, the real reason why circumcision took hold in the U.S.: it was a Victorian era cure for masturbation.

For real. Look it up.

Victorian doctors were so worried about young men "stroking the coonskin" that they decided that baby boys should be circumcised with no anesthetic. That way, they would have lifelong negative associations with their penises and be less inclined to rub one out. In the late middle ages and the Renaissance the vital task of creating traumatic penis experiences had been left to the Catholic clergy, but apparently by the 1800s the medical establishment had to step in and take over for the waning papists.

(Life tip: "Waning papist" is an awesome euphemism for impotency. Try using it on your next date! You know, after the inevitable "I don't understand... This has never happened to me before." Yeah, right. Tell that to your 10th Pabst Blue Ribbon, Skeeter.)

Anyway, I don't know what the prevailing medical opinion is, but my own extensive lab work shows that circumcision doesn't have much of a dampening effect on masturbation. (Or if it does, thank God I was circumcised, or I would have died of exhaustion/cock-trauma during the summer between 9th and 10th grade). If you actually want an effective medical procedure to curb masturbation, try removing the kid's hands.

You know, that probably isn't enough - a lot of guys would just give themselves a stump-job. Better to take the arm off at the shoulder.

And the leg off at the knee. Just to be safe.

The thing is - who gives a fuck? Does anyone really care about masturbation anymore? Show me a person who doesn't masturbate, I'll show you a person who has made some horrifying romantic compromises.

I could give you dozens of reasons why I'm not comfortable with it. I could bore you with the story of when I took a long hike in wet swimtrunks and flayed the tip of my circumcised jimmy so raw that I had to prop a twig in my wasteband to hold the material away from my battered but proud pantswarrior ("Your name is Toby!" my bathing suit shouted at the little guy, but he raised his head high and gasped "Kunta... Kunta Kente"). But that anecdote might be awkward, so I'll keep it to myself.

So never fear, little Logan. I pledge allegiance to your foreskin, and the united state of your genitals!