Baby, baby, baby!

Man, so two of my best friends (they’re a husband/wife combo) had a little baby last night. I went to bed around ten and the last thing I said to my wife was something along the lines of “good night. I’m really glad you didn’t just have a baby…wanna bone?” To which she replied “no I don’t wanna bone. And yeah, me too.” Having babies is exhausting. The funny thing about this is that our former baby and current three year old did something that he’s never really done before last night. Namely, he got up several times throughout the night and walked around yelling.

He wasn’t particularly upset or anything, he was just kind of rolling around the house yelling “mommy, daddy,” and essentially celebrating that he’s figured out how to escape his room. He woke up for the day at a completely unacceptable 502AM, and this is after a night of yelling. I FEEL like my old lady just had a baby, I tell you what.

But, there’s a difference between having a new crying baby and having an impudent toddler just flouting the rules in your house. The baby, one would hope, you treat with the tender concern of the terrified new parent (scrambling for diapers, food, etc) while with the toddler you just fight the urge to hog tie him and leave him on the porch.

I’m currently exhausted and it’s rainy out today. Therefore, I have nothing to do with my kids and no energy not to do it with. My baby is just waking up now (738) but I’ve been up for an ungodly amount of time, and I’m bound and determined to get this blog entry completed before I go in there and start bowing to her inevitable list of demands. Fuuuuuuuuuck.

It’s funny to think about this: the greatest minds of our future, the scientists and musicians and scholars and porn actresses, they’re all little babies and toddlers right now. Right now, someone that will grow up to completely revolutionize life as we’ve always known it is pissing in a corner somewhere with a magic marker up their nose. Your future son in law is shitting in his pants as we speak and a president of the United states, one that may be responsible for the deaths of millions of as-of-yet untargeted brown people is currently somewhere begging for someone to please give him a string cheese, turn on Go Diego Go and wipe his ass at the same time. It’s pretty wild.

Conversely, there are the perverts and the weirdos and the evil people of the earth. The next guy to (for example) cut up cheerleaders and turn their tits into hats is probably sitting beneath the coffee machine watching his mom suck off longshoremen in some motel 6 lobby somewhere. AND, because of that guy, a few other babies out there won’t reach their potential as the next Colonel Sanders/Barack Obama/George Lopez/Rick Santorum/Kal Penn/David Blaine. Life is bizarre, and there’s nothing so bizarre as checking out the way kids grow up and defy expectations.

A buddy of mine used to flush rabbits down the toilet. He once locked his cleaning lady in the basement of his house for like three days. He once uprooted a clearing of saplings with his bare hands on an ecology field trip. He was, in no uncertain terms a very bad kid. He had all sorts of learning disabilities and behavioral problems and he generally terrified most parents and teachers in our community. His parents were also nice people, married and well off. He had a brother who was pretty well behaved in comparison to him. There was no reason that I, as a parent who tends to look at things like causality can see that made him such a menace. And yet, he was a total fucking menace. The assumption, I’ve gotta imagine, was that he was gonna wind up in jail after the inevitable trail of dead animals he would leave in his wake turned into dead hookers and then finally dead cops, but actually he turned out to be one of the nicest, smartest, most well rounded dudes I know. In fact, he’s the guy I just made a feature film with. He’s not only a technical and artistic whiz, but he’s a goddamned college professor, for fucks sake.

As a parent, this completely baffles me. I was never in trouble in my life. I always got good grades, never once had detention, was only grounded twice in my life, never had any trouble with cops, nothing. I got excellent SAT scores and in general, my record is spotless (except for in second grade when I truly fucked up in math and had to stay in during recess to get tutored, but that’s a whole other salacious blog entry) and yet, look at me: I’m an abject failure. Who saw that shit coming?

There’s no way to know if you’re doing a good job or a bad job as a parent because, as I’ve often said, there’s no correlation at all between how a kid acts and how they are as an adult. There’s only the most limited correlation between what someone’s exposed to and how that effects them (ask Kna’an and Redmond O’Neal), and there’s just NO way of knowing how bad you’re fucking up your kid until you become an old, old person and they look at you and say “dad, it’s because of you that I’m a doctor for the underprivileged/middle school janitor that sneaks into the girls bathroom to set up cameras to catch them peeing” and then you know, it’s too late.

Congrats to the Halborgs!

xoxoxoxo