Big Daddy Paul

Today, Malcolm and I had a marathon session of baseball at the park (yay!). During our two and a half hours of batting practice and catch, we discovered that we each needed to pee.  I thought about this and realized that we stay at home dads have some altogether different choices that we need to make when we are out in the world.  Here are a couple of them:

Where Do We Pee?

As a veteran stay at home parent, I should always ask my child before we leave whether he needs to go to the bathroom.  However, we are usually late to wherever we are going and I am usually yelling at him, so I am not as composed as perhaps I should be.  I often find that he has to go to the bathroom, and after a bit of checking, I realize that I do too.  Today, when it became apparent that we needed to pee, i realized that the bathrooms are located about a half mile away.  So, it was either gather up all our stuff, walk across the park, and interrupt what was a stellar hitting session, or drop trou and hide behind the tree.  Malcolm  once peed on the grass at Pier 39, so this wasn’t the most public place that Malcolm has gone.

Should I Have a Second Beer?

I go to a playgroup every monday.  It is chock full of stay at home dads, and after we make small talk for around half an hour, we wander over to the picnic area, start up the grill and open the cooler.  Our coolers are quite extraordinary, filled with half juice boxes and half beer, and that is on a good day.  Usually, we forget the juiceboxes and make the kids drink out of the fountain.  Lately it has been pretty hot during the day, and the cooler beckons often.  I try to resist its siren-like calls, but when it is 97 degrees (like it was on Monday) sometimes I give in.  I feel guilty, not because drinking 2 beers in 4 hours while at the park is dangerous, but because when I reach into the cooler to grab a cold one, the kids are all disappointed that there is nothing in there for them.

Do I Talk to Random Guys at the Playground?

There are a lot of stay at home dads out there.  There are also many dads who have alternate schedules which allow them to chaperone their kids to the park during the day.  I never know what to do when I come into contact with these other guys at the park when I see them.  My conscience tells me to strike up a conversation with them and spread the word that there are many of us out there.  My brain tells me to shut up, because, I don’t know if you know this, stay at home dads are weird.  It takes a certain something to buck societal roles, and that something is not something that I ever want to come into contact with.  I worry that I would get stuck talking to some bizarre personality who would distract me from my real duty, playing with my IPhone.  So, most of the time, I ignore every other fella I meet.  Unless he is playing with his IPhone, then I know he’s cool.

I took Malcolm to a Baseball Game yesterday.  This wasn’t his first game, as I dutifully took him to games when he was an infant.  This was, however, his first game as a little person, able to both talk in complete sentences and use the men’s room. (I am definitely not counting our first trip to the Oakland Coliseum as a “trip to the men’s room.”) I considered the game a test run, as the tickets only cost $2 and I wanted to make sure Malcolm would be OK at a game before I shelled out serious money to take him to see a real team, the Giants. We had a pretty good time and lasted until the 7th inning.  I think we’ll go to another game this year, as long as he is able to enjoy the things that he did yesterday.

Malcolm loves hot dogs.  This week, he has loved them off the grill at dad’s group, out of the microwave at IKEA, and from out of whatever-the-hell-they-use-at-the-ballpark.  That’s three straight days of lips and assholes, (it’s almost like he’s at Burning Man!)  I would have suggested something else today (like nachos, sweet nachos) but the hot dogs only cost 1 dollar, and there was no way that the dads from my dad’s group and I were going to pay more than a few bucks on food.  Perhaps it was this general interest in a cheap date that made me boycott beer for the first time in my life, and I refused to spend $8 on a tea cup full of bud light.  A half hour later, and 8 Oakland A’s runs later, I had 10 hot dogs and I returned to the group to find that Malcolm had run off and the kids were generally uninterested in baseball. Malcolm loved his dog and a half, and after I had eaten my two and half dollars’ worth, I wish I had eaten nachos.

Malcolm loves running around with his friends.  We were there with my friends from dad’s group, so Malcolm had his full compliment of cohorts to get into trouble with.  We couldn’t really see anything since the $2 seats give you a view similar to that from the Hubble Space Telescope, so Malcolm decided the best way to enjoy the game was to run races around the handicap seating area.  This lasted until the very large, very mean security guard came and told us that the kids really shouldn’t be running around like that.  My initial thought, “Well, you really shouldn’t be wearing a mustache like that,” never made it out of my mouth, and we reluctantly corralled the kids back to our area.

Malcolm loves ice cream.  Amy’s mom was in town and had promised to make brownies with Malcolm after his nap.  He had been offered cookies at the park, which I said he could have in lieu of brownies, which he politely declined.  (Delayed gratification in a 3 year old, I love this kid!) When his friend Priya announced that she wanted cotton candy, Malcolm joined in the chorus saying, “I want cotton candy too! What is cotton candy?”  When offered the choice between this strange cotton candy phenomenon, he stuck to the know qualities of brownies.  That lasted only until the ice cream guy showed up.  More specifically, the guy pedaled ice cream sandwiches, two chocolate cookies with vanilla ice cream in the middle.  Malcolm told me that he really wanted one and that he no longer wanted to make brownies with grammy.  It was getting warmer and I thought he actually made a good decision, and isn’t that what parenting is all about? So he had a fantastic ice cream sandwich and enjoyed himself greatly.

We’ll probably be checking out the Giants later this summer, as long as the following conditions are met.  First, the tickets can cost no more than $4.  Total food expenditures cannot exceed $10.  He must have at least 5 friends to play with, and everyone needs to sit together.  Now that I think about it, maybe we won’t be going to anymore games…

So we we were at the park yesterday, as we always are on Mondays, having a good time and enjoying the afternoon.  We were in Castro Valley (a suburb) and the park was full of regular looking moms, dads, and nannies.  (Of course, there was one really hot dad there but he carries himself so well that you would never know it.)

We were preparing to leave, when a nanny with enormous breasts walked by us.  Of course, I alerted the dad’s still there to her presence by saying the following, “Man I had an enormous breakfast this morning.  And when I say enormous, I mean enormous (Nodding her way.)”  The other fellas took my cue and one by one we were able to gaze with wonder at the nanny’s exceptional “parenting skills.”  And then an extremely hot mom walked right by, followed closely by another.  We looked around and the place had become overrun by hot moms and nannies. What great luck!  Sadly, nap time was quickly approaching, and we were charged with either staying at the park or honoring nap time.

Ultimately, we respected the schedule, and walked the kids to the car, saddened to leave the party just when it was getting good.  We walked past the swings where one of the hot moms was standing, and our conversation stopped as we both had to suck in our gut so far that neither of us could breathe, much less talk.  When we got to the cars, I turned back for one final glimpse of the park, and wouldn’t you know it, the moms were checking us out!  Well, according to me they were checking us out, in reality they were probably just shaking their heads and making sure the perverts were actually leaving the park.

There were a couple of new guys there, so I thought I would give a few pointers to help new stay at home dads ogle hot women without getting busted:

1. Wear sunglasses (the mirrored lenses).  No one can see what you are looking at and if you point yourself in the right direction, you are, for all intents and purposes, looking at a tree.

2. Never point, it’s rude. Nod discreetly, use the hours of the clock to indicate direction, use children as reference points. Women know when they are getting pointed at, and generally don’t like it.  Now if you say, “I find that 12:00 is the best time of day to enjoy a chicken leg, you will generally be fine.”

3. Never, ever use the terms rack, hooters, or fun bags.  Also, never, ever say, “check out.”  It’s just too obvious.  A couple of dad’s almost got kicked out of a park in Berkeley for pointing at a sunbather and saying, “check out the rack on that one.”  “That one” was, of course aware of what was going on, and trouble ensued.

4. Do not approach women.  It is icky and weird and no one likes getting hit on at a park (even me!).  Now if your kid goes over there you are free to follow.  As the kids get older, you can train them to go over and say, “Mommy’s in heaven”  There is no better wing man on a planet than a kid.

At my stay at home dads group Monday, on old woman stumbled over and set down at one of our tables. Now, I generally fear old people, so I was not happy about this development. Then she opened her mouth, “Why are all the men taking care of the babies?” Since I was closest to her, I took the lead, “Because we are stay at home dads. We all take care of the kids while our wives work.” Her reply was less than encouraging, “Everything’s gone to hell.” She went on to offer an excuse for why none of use had paying careers, “There are no good jobs anymore, they’ve all gone away.” I thought this was kind of funny, and put aside my distaste for old person smell to engage her for a bit.

Boy was I wrong. She lashed out at everything that happened after the 1940’s, lambasted Obama for spending too much money, and then chastised us for not taking care of our wives and families. When we explained that we literally were taking care of our wives and families, she told us that we should be humiliated. Then she said the whole world had gone to hell (again) nothing good had happened in 40 years. I left when she started to get racist, and heard some of the other members of the group trying to get a word in edgewise.

Usually the comments we get from random people are quite positive, “That’s so awesome! I tried to get my husband to do that. I’ve heard about you guys.” Once, a woman came up to us at a park and said that her mom’s group was jealous that we were drinking beer, because the only good stuff they had were brownies. I offered to trade them our beer for their brownies, but she declined, and later just brought over their leftover brownies for us to eat. So this was really the first time that someone had challenged our roles to our face, but no one minded, considering she was loony as all get up.

But, it did make me think. Being a stay at home is a challenge, but usually by the time you make it out of your house, you are comfortable in your role. There are days when you question what the hell you have done with your life, but that is true when you are a lawyer, insurance salesman, or postal employee, too. I have thought about returning to the workforce, but every time I do, I come to the same conclusion, “work is for suckers.” So old lady, go on and hate us, just as you hate all evidence of progress. Where we sit, progress is just fine.