Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. — Lewis Carroll

No. I’m not going to list them. I just love that quote. Plus, I love the contradictions that sort of thinking can lead to in most people. Most especially little dudes.

A couple of months ago, Speed Racer announced to the [...]]]> by Richard

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. — Lewis Carroll

No. I’m not going to list them. I just love that quote. Plus, I love the contradictions that sort of thinking can lead to in most people. Most especially little dudes.

A couple of months ago, Speed Racer announced to the family that he no longer believed in Santa Claus. At the tender age of 10 years. It just about broke my heart. I thought all that kind of stuff, belief in the friendly phantoms of childhood, was behind us.

Turns out  I was wrong.

In the last week, Speed Racer’s lost two molars, both on his right side, one upper and one lower. They make for a nice gap, being one on top of another. His smile still makes everyone around him giggle, but now for different reasons.

Anyway. When he lost the second tooth, we figured it was time to put them into the hands of the Tooth Fairy. Now, when we started talking about that, I figured he was just going along with the joke. But first, I wanted to say we use a tooth pillow to store the teeth for the tooth fairy. It’s shaped, of course, like a tooth.

When it was time to put the pillow to use, we couldn’t find it. Speed Racer started getting frantic. I suggested he use a small zip loc bag to hold the teeth until they could be exchanged for the moolah.

“But, Dad,” he asked, “how will the Tooth Fairy find them if they’re not in the tooth pillow?”

And he sounded completely serious. Now, maybe because he knows how hard we defended the idea and reality of Santa Claus, he was just going along to get along, but I don’t think so. He really sounded worried.

I think it’s interesting that Santa has been thrown under the bus, but the Tooth Fairy is still hanging in there.

Maybe there’s still a little childhood left in there to be eked out of him. Wouldn’t that be nice? Certainly wouldn’t be like pulling teeth. (Oh, come on. You knew that one was coming.)

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If you see a dude in the crowd at a concert jumping up and down and slapping five with people all around him and all you can think of is “Doesn’t he know about H1N1?”. . . You might be a wrinkled neck.

So, yes, we’re back to the Cage the Elephant concert, an alt-rock [...]]]> by Richard

If you see a dude in the crowd at a concert jumping up and down and slapping five with people all around him and all you can think of is “Doesn’t he know about H1N1?”. . . You might be a wrinkled neck.

So, yes, we’re back to the Cage the Elephant concert, an alt-rock group all the dudes in the family enjoy.

Oddly enough, this was George of the Jungle’s first concert. Ever. So, since it was his first and he’s more than a little shy, I rather expected him to stick with the old dude for a while. You know, let me show him the ropes a bit.

Yeah, right. About 13 microseconds after walking through the front door (where, I might add, I had to pay an extra $3 for each of them because they were under drinking age) I was abandoned in a swirl of dust and dashed dad dreams. Not for long, though. Neither George of the Jungle or Zippy the Monkey Boy had bought enough money to purchase a concert t-shirt and, you know, those are absolute essentials for any teen going to a concert. I mean, how else would you prove to your peers that you were there?

So I bought them each a t-shirt and heard them say thanks. By the time I turned around from the cashier, all I could see if them were two rapidly dwindling crewcuts bobbing above the crowd. And then I lost them in the concert gloom. I figured I should let them have a little fun and faded into the background.

Only to step on the toes of all the other parents already faded into the background. A wash of old-person vibe splashed over me as I realized none of them actually wanted to be at the concert. They had to be dragged there. Well, I dragged myself away and lost myself in the crowd on the second floor.

Just abou the time I found a place to lean on the railing and enjoy the concert, I realized why all the other parents had been standing around together: Protection. From all the very, very young ones. Up on the railing I was surrounded by a gaggle of giggling girls. And, for those pervs in the audience, no. No it was not fun. In the time before the concert started, they wouldn’t stop talking and giggling and bumping into my back in their thoughtless gesturing. Once the concert stopped, well, they still didn’t stop talking and giggling. Yes, I could actually hear them over the music. That’s how loud they were. Or how annoyed I was. Same diff.

Just as the lights went down for the main event, I managed to spot both Zippy the Monkey Boy and George of the Jungle. The band walked on stage and both of the little dudes threw up a double hand horn and started bobbing their heads like someone had severed a few tendons in there.

And that’s when the fun started. But not for you, oh, no. That won’t start until tomorrow.

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Ladies and gentlemen, boy and ghouls, here is that for which you’ve all been waiting with a worm on your tongue (baited breath): the last little bit of the introduction to the one, true unpublished (as of yet) book, A Dude’s Guide to Babies. And, even better, it’s the bit directly from [...]]]> by Richard and Barry

Ladies and gentlemen, boy and ghouls, here is that for which you’ve all been waiting with a worm on your tongue (baited breath): the last little bit of the introduction to the one, true unpublished (as of yet) book, A Dude’s Guide to Babies. And, even better, it’s the bit directly from me.

Unlike Barry, I had plenty of time to sweat the small stuff. And the big stuff. And all the medium stuff and all the stuff in between. My wife, Alyse, and I had been intending to get pregnant and, believe me, it was a joint pregnancy. More on that later.

We found out we were pregnant about two weeks into the pregnancy, which left us, as it turned out, forty more weeks to worry and fret about what was bearing down on us with all the subtlety of a runaway freight train driven by a caffeine-crazed chimpanzee. And, Lordy, I did worry.

My wife, known to me as then as She Who Must Be Catered To, seemed to go through the pregnancy with a sublime (look it up) worldliness that defied description. Me, I started breaking down by bits and pieces once I heard the little dude’s heartbeat and realized that there really, truly was something growing inside my wife’s belly and it wasn’t all just a figment of our imagination.

When I was growing up, I never wanted to get married and if, by some wild coincidence I did get married, I was never going to have kids. I never liked them, never wanted them. But something changed when I finally did get married. I actually wanted to have kids, which was a bit of a shock to me and the rest of my family. It was a good idea. In theory. But when the reality of it hit me, well that blew the theory away.

I needed help and I needed it fast. Both my mother and my sister just laughed at me, as did all my aunts. My dad and my uncles all told me that everything would work out fine, but really no specifics. Losing it? Dude, I’d already lost it and then forgotten that I ever even knew where it was.

What I fixated on was giving a bath. I was worried. What if we had a girl? I mean, how was I supposed to wash it? A dude’s tackle, sure, I’ve been cleaning that sort of thing every day since I was five. But a girl? Dude, I just didn’t know.

Eventually, of course, I figured it all out (and had a boy so that helped) and my entire family got a good laugh out of the whole experience. Even though I didn’t have a girl, I found out how to wash a girl by looking at one of those books written by the well-educated professionals. Of course, I had to search through some 500 pages of stuff before I finally found what I needed. And even then, well, let’s just say that the cutesy cover didn’t exactly inspire me to extended reading.

A lot of the stuff I picked up, I had to have slapped into me by Alyse. Over the pregnancy and the first couple of months after our first boy was born, my wife perfected the dad/dope slap up the backside of the head. Remember: dope slap — a powerful learning tool for most dudes.

A lot of stuff I did learn on my own, but those learning experiences were normally a bit dirtier and involved a lot more clean-up supplies. There’s a lot that I wish someone had told me. For instance, gravity. Gravity is not your friend, dude. Things can fall down on you like you wouldn’t believe and sometimes it’s not all that funny.

Like Barry said, though, if someone had just provided me with some of the building blocks of fatherhood, the experience would have been a whole lot easier. That’s what we’re hoping to do here.

We don’t want to leave you with the impression that being a dad is all work and fear and fright. It’s not. There’s also the purest feeling of love and joy you’ve ever experienced. Holding your son or daughter in your hands for the first time will change you forever and we’re not exaggerating. Hopefully, this little book here will give you the head start you need to get the basics of fatherhood.

After that, it’s up to you, dude.

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