My daughter Cordelia is almost four years old. My potential daughter, [NAME TO BE DETERMINED LATER], is negative-three months old. The holiday seasons are grinding to a merciful close.
Cordelia is now old enough to fully appreciate Christmas. Not Christmas in the traditional sense, that of remembering the alleged birthday of the alleged dead person who was nailed to a tree for spiritual reasons that are still completely mysterious to me.
I mean Christmas in the sense of having lights on your house, a tree in your living room, and brightly-wrapped toys to open. She’s eating that shit up with a spoon.
Also, she observed New Year’s Eve for the first time. This means that we took her to a party and let her to stay up until midnight, observing with great interest how fatigue caused the gradual and utter disintegration of her personality.
She is rapidly making the transition from uncomprehending toddler to actual human. For example, she has figured out how fun scissors are. Then she cut one of her pacifiers in half. Then she asked her mother to fix it. Then, when she realized that this was impossible, she cried hysterically. Then she saw her parents laugh at her. She learned several precious lessons about life in just this one instant. Mainly about the irrevocability of death and the Universe’s disinterest in your suffering.
By the way, it is very convenient to me, as a parent, that my child exercises her destructive impulses on things that she loves. It’s like having a self-punishing child.
As I am still maintaining my role in the family as the strict Law-Giver, Cordelia still hates me. Recently, when I walked out of the bedroom one morning, my day began with her saying, “Daddy, you’re not going to see me ever again.”
I was, like, “DUDE! Are you breaking up with me? AWESOME! I am SO OUT OF HERE!”
Cordelia’s resistance to my withering sarcasm wastes a lot of my time.
A Cute Little Bundle Of Festering Disease
Now that Cordelia spends three days a week in Daycare (well, they call it Preschool, but who are we kidding?), she is constantly being exposed to all of the trendiest and most advanced diseases Western Civilization has to offer. Her normal state now is having a cold, which makes the times when she catches something else all the more special.
She caught a case of the amusingly-named “fifth disease.” The main effect of this was to cover her with glorious red blotches over her entire body. She looked like we’d just boiled her.
Even better, she caught a stomach bug that made her vomit over eight times in one night. I lost count.
Parenting is amazing. Things can be cruising along, and you think you’re cool and it’s all good and you can handle anything, and then something happens that totally rapes your brain. One minute, you’re relaxed and you’ve caught up on your sleep and your guard is down, and then it’s suddenly three in the morning and your arms are covered in digestive fluid up to the elbows and you’re scraping vomited oatmeal out of a blanket with your fingernails and trying not to breathe, and you’re, like, what the hell just happened?
I think there should be some sort of a statute of limitations on vomiting. The first two or three times it happens in one night, you have to clean up the sheets and change the pajamas like a civilized human being. But, after a certain point, say the sixth vomiting in one night, you should be allowed to look at the half-dollar sized spot of girl-sick on the towel you threw down when you’d run out of clean sheets and say, “Meh. I’ve seen worse.” and ignore it until morning.
Right now, she just has a terrible cough. We sort of feel for her, but the cough medicine we give her is making her sleep twenty hours a day. So, overall, it’s a win for us.
I’m a Jerk, But Not That Big a Jerk
As these journals are slowly grinding to a close, I think I should clear something up.
In the past several years, I have portrayed myself as a harsh, insensitive beast, concerned mainly for his video games and creature comforts, with no respect at all for the feelings and well-being of my spouse and child.
In fact, I have often exaggerated things for comic effect. In real life, I am only about 75% sociopath.
Also, if you actually need to be told that the way I have described things is not exactly entirely representative of real life, there are some other things you should know. In real life, Pee-Wee Herman does not always act like that. In fact, his real name isn’t Pee-Wee Herman at all! Marlon Brando is not really the head of a New York crime family. And you know those people in Star Wars? They aren’t really in space.
I often joke about how my sexual organs are minuscule, I am almost completely incapable of satisfying a woman, and, of course, that my children aren’t actually my own.
But what I am doing is bending the truth for humorous effect. Simple as that. In reality, my sexual skills are renowned, my genitalia have almost alarming proportions, and I am confident that not only are my children my own, but so are several other children around town. If you know what I’m saying.
One Way To Tell When You Are Becoming An Adult
You start to root for the Coyote instead of the Road Runner.
More About My Upcoming Offspring
My wife is currently six months pregnant. She is radiant. If she were any more radiant, I think it would kill her.
(In pregnancy-speak, “Radiant” means “Suffering from constant back pain, never getting any sleep, and being an orb.”)
She got her big, detailed ultrasound, where they check out every single little fetus part for horrifying deformities. Every once in a while, the technician would print out a picture of the child, which, like all ultrasound pictures, looked like a smashed bug.
We now know for sure that the child will be a girl-child, a Daughter of Eve. The technician made sure to be extra-convincing of this by zooming in on an ultrasound image of the fetus’s labia. It would have been nice to have a picture of that, to convince dubious relatives. But, it turns out, there’s no way to ask for that without sounding a bit creepy.
