My daughter Cordelia is now two and a half years old. Or somewhere in that area. After a certain point, you are allowed to stop keeping track.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am trying to truly savor every one of these precious toddler days. The time when your child is two is a special time. It is the only time you are allowed to really, truly dislike your child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the kid is a baby? A cuuuuuuute, helpless baybee? How could ANYONE be so cruel as to dislike a baybeeeeee, even if it\u2019s dopey and immobile and boring and screams all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the kid is a child? Like in the four to ten year range? Well, you BETTER like the kid then, because that\u2019s supposed to be the good time. If you put in the long hours to get the kid to age five and you still don\u2019t like it, well, you fucked up somewhere around the impregnation stage. Better get yourself neutered, Captain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the kid is a teenager? Well, you\u2019ll want to hate it. But you\u2019re not allowed, because everyone knows that your problems with your teenager are your fault. If you\u2019d been a better, more supportive mommy\/daddy, your sprog wouldn\u2019t have sold your stereo to buy a hundred tubes of model airplane glue. Don\u2019t hate the kid. Hate yourself. Jackass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But toddlers? Toddlers are vicious, mercurial, totally self-centered, amoral, and limitlessly demanding of your time. They will, just to pick an example from this morning alone, smash one of your shot glasses and then start to scream and punch you when you won\u2019t let them play with the broken glass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is really nothing to recommend them. Even my wife, as dedicated and loving a parent as anyone can reasonably expect, is now pretty much ready to set her ovaries on fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I were one of those dreadful parents who can\u2019t meet a childless couple without trying to brainwash them into the reproductive cult, this year would cure me. As it is, all I can say to the childfree is<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Run!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Guys, if you jerk off, only do it into a pot of boiling water. Or a fire. Those sperm must be destroyed as soon as possible, or a toddler might be created. Better yet, don\u2019t jerk off at all. That only creates sexual momentum, and then soon you\u2019re doing it with ladies, and that only leads to toddlers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our child is developing. She can sort of sing songs. She sort of knows about colors. She can sort of put clothes on and take them off. She can throw a spoon at my eyes with remarkable speed and accuracy. She can unleash a torrent of screams and punches and kicks when her will is thwarted even a little bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can\u2019t spank her. Even if she would be capable of linking the beating to her behavior and learning from it, I can\u2019t help but feel that smacking someone a third of my height and a seventh my weight is just, I don\u2019t know, mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I\u2019m not above indulging in a few happy daydreams of handing down harsh, frontier discipline, like they did on Little House on the Prairie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Long, Soulful Looks Into My Daughter\u2019s Eyes<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We are still working on toilet training. Well, my wife and I are working on it. Cordelia doesn\u2019t care. She is just enduring being plopped onto the toilet every hour on the hour so that her mother or I can stare soulfully into her eyes and beg her to void her bowels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before Cordelia was born, I was told that one of the worst parts of parenthood is cleaning up the shit, once it starts to smell like shit. This isn\u2019t even close. It is far worse to sit in a bathroom with a constipated child, whimpering, beet-faced and grunting, as she tries to use inadequately developed sphincter muscles and sheer force of will to shove out a chunk of dried-out material the approximate size, shape, and texture of a fossilized trilobyte.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All the children of the world need more roughage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But even when Cordelia urinates, a far simpler process, it is still traumatic. For me, I mean. I have to teach Cordelia proper sanitation and wiping procedure, and I really, honestly have no idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I had a son, it would be easy. I\u2019d let him watch me pee a few times, and then have him cut loose. I\u2019d teach him to shake it a few times afterwards, and he\u2019d toddle off and I\u2019d grab the mop to clean up the misses. No worries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Cordelia has girl plumbing, and girl plumbing terrifies me under pretty much any circumstances. I\u2019m supposed to teach her how to wipe herself, and I don\u2019t know how women do that. Do you wipe the whole undercarriage, or just the bits where the pee comes out? And where does the pee come out, anyway? Believe me, I\u2019m not looking closely. And how much pressure do ladies apply when they wipe? Does a delicate dabbing of the surface do, or do you grab a 5-ply wad of toilet paper and just dig in there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t know. And believe me, I don\u2019t want to. So I just hand Cordelia some toilet paper and let her do whatever she\u2019s going to do with it. I trust that Cordelia\u2019s genetic instincts will tell her what to do. Meanwhile, I smack my head against the wall, just below the towel rack, until little white speckles cover my field of vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is my point? Hmmm. After looking back on what I just wrote, I think my point is that nobody should have children under any circumstances. I\u2019m pretty sure that\u2019s what I\u2019m saying here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another Justification For Corporal Punishment<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Cordelia already has the ability to make it impossible to pick her up when she doesn\u2019t want to be picked up. She dislocates all of her joints, makes her skin frictionless, and then turns into the amazing boneless baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now she has a new trick, When I try to take her somewhere by the hand (as opposed to just letting her wander into the street on her own like hip parents do) she will suddenly fling herself to the floor and make her entire body go limp. This is especially charming behavior when we\u2019re on a crosswalk in front of a car, whose driver impatiently fantasizes about killing the two of us while I struggle to haul thirty pounds of toddler dead weight out of the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I know they think about killing us. Sadly, they never do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Going all still and limp when under stress. What sort of evolutionary adaptation is that? It\u2019s not to deal with predators, that\u2019s for sure. Believe me, if you go all limp, the wolf that\u2019s dragging you off is NOT going to be impressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other Charming Behavior<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n She opens my books, spits in them, and closes them again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And people ask me if I want to have another kid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One Thing In Cordelia\u2019s Defense<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n She loves spiders. She always wants to see my pet tarantula. She admires the countless, harmless spiders that infest our house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fear of spiders is stupid. Cars are far, far more dangerous than even the deadliest spiders, but we can walk down the street without whimpering like schoolgirls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything Made For Toddlers Is Shit<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As part of our ongoing toilet-training process, we went to Target to buy Cordelia some real, actual cloth panties. I hate going to the baby section in Target because, every time I do, I see something that\u2019s so totally fucking stupid that it completely breaks my brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we go to the panties section. I\u2019ve never bought anyone panties before, so I don\u2019t know what to do, but my wife is there and she has experience in this area which frees me to just stand off to the side and whimper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, as I cower, I notice that there are no plain, simple toddler underpants. Now, when I shop for boxer shorts for myself, my choices are generally along the lines of white, brown, black, and sensible designs like that. But everything for kids has to have some cute, licensed design on it. Anthropomorphic fish from some recent popular movie, or dancing mice, or a laser-firing skeleton from Japan. Whatever happened to, you know, WHITE!?!? I mean, is there something wrong with me? I\u2019m sure those complicated designs are useful in that they help disguise the crap stains, but at some point did someone decide that this would be the post-white millennium, and you can\u2019t buy white things any more, and fuck you and your outmoded ideas of what clothing should look like, OLD MAN!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also, one of the boy\u2019s underpants had a design of a big train on it. I suppose kids can get away with this, but if I wore a pair of boxers with a steaming locomotive on it, people would think I was totally trying to compensate for something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along These Lines<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n They also had a training toilet that would, I swear to God, play music when the kid shits in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want one of these for myself. I want a toilet that plays \u201cWon\u2019t Get Fooled Again\u201d or \u201cCome Together\u201d or \u201cWe Are the Champions\u201d when I use it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What My Wife Wants Her Toilet To Play<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s Raining Men\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Giving Her Some Non-Toxic Fun<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Cordelia loves Play-Doh now. It\u2019s marvelous stuff. We give it to her, and she plays with it in a way that must be educational somehow, and we\u2019re free to basically ignore her and watch TV for half an hour while she squishes the stuff around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes we feel guilty and try to help her or show her to do something with it, and she flies into a screaming rage the moment we touch it, and we go back to the TV. This is the toddler independence all the parenting books tell you about, and it can occasionally be a great parent labor saving device.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, she eats a little bit of the Play-Doh. I don\u2019t worry about this for two reasons. First, Play-Doh claims to be non-toxic. Second, I have learned from personal experience that the best way to learn to not eat Play-Doh is to actually eat some of it. When Cordelia puts some of the stuff in her mouth, she rolls it around in her mouth, looks terrified, and drools uncontrollably. I really need to video tape this some time to provide valuable evidence to Science of what the learning process looks like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes she licks the Play-Doh and I watch, fascinated and horrified, as her saliva slowly breaks down and digests the stuff before my eyes. The spit gradually dissolves the Play-Doh and I imagine that if I put it all back into the container and waited, the spit would slowly break the whole jar down into a thick, viscous chemical slurry. Then all I would need to do is add some echinacea and caffeine and that\u2019s the recipe for Red Bull right there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our Justification For Letting Our Daughter Be In the Room While We Watch Our Kung Fu Movies<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To a toddler, a jet of hot, arterial blood looks like a little rainbow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My daughter Cordelia is now two and a half years old. Or somewhere in that area. After a certain point, you are allowed to stop keeping track. 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