You may have noticed that it’s a somewhat scary time to bring children into the world at the moment. We recently had our second child after surviving an exhausting pandemic pregnancy, and while it’s been a blessing to grow our family, it’s also scary to think about the country and problems our kids will inevitably inherit one day.
Aside from the global pandemic, we’re facing another dozen or so major issues that have all escalated since COVID-19 started dominating our lives. If we can tackle the virus and eventually move on, we still have the real big boss of catastrophes, the climate crisis, to deal with next.
Today’s story reflects on this strange time, including the current relentless onslaught of political headline after headline driving our anxieties to ever-higher levels. With children, squishy faces, and giggles, comes hope. And it’s our job right now (as parents and citizens) to stand up for what’s right, to give our kids a chance at a better country and a better world.
As always, thanks for reading.
It’s raining, and our two-year-old son Jack is standing behind his cheese stoop, watching through a curious set of eyes as the storm pours down and rattles its drops against the asphalt. We named the stoop back in January before COVID entered into our lives, and Jack stopped going to that place he knew as “school,” where his friends and teachers surrounded him with love while his parents worked.
It was his routine ever since he was four-months-old, and ours as well. From the stoop, he’s made friends with mailmen and UPS drivers, neighbors and strangers, dogs, and city workers alike.
And since the lockdown began in March, he’s gone from scooting, standing, and walking to running and climbing. From a little tyke who giggled and squeaked to a big boy who can tell you that Cookie Monster is blue, who can dance with the best of them, and shovels down food and snacks at an alarming rate.
This is a story about a very strange time in our lives, as it has been for everyone across the globe. We have been lucky, fortunate, and privileged enough to wait out a pandemic as a family unit with food, shelter, and jobs, while many across the country and the world struggle. Our story is not one of hardship, but one that shares how lucky we were to spend a little more time watching our son grow while we did our best to work and maintain sanity.
All that being said, just what is a cheese stoop? There’s only one way to find out.
We’re all locked in with nowhere to go. A virus is on the loose, and everyone is scared. And as parents of a rambunctious little toddler, my wife and I are adjusting to work-from-home life as the new program managers of our son Jack’s vigorous daycare regimen.
A quick glance at the clock shows that it’s 8:37 am. My best guess is that it’s probably a Thursday. I’ve worn the same outfit for three days, and my pants are in questionable condition. Jack is in the cupboard tossing out pots and pans like he buried a treasure chest in there years ago, and now he needs some quick cash. He smells funny, but on second thought, I’m not sure if it’s him or me. It’s been approximately one hour and thirty-seven minutes since he woke up for the day, and everyone but him is already exhausted.
Read on to find out if these two exhausted parents can keep up. And on a serious note, I'd like to say a big, ginormous thank you to all those essential workers out there keeping the world afloat during this strange time. Thanks for reading!
With a practiced look, our old-school-cool pediatrician assures us that a baby can’t self-soothe their way back to sleep until at least six months of age. That, unfortunately, we’re not quite ready for the infamous and sometimes controversial phase of sleep training. Not yet.
“You’re almost there, I promise. Just keep doing what you’re doing,” he says, right before running out the door in his faded tennis sneakers to what I imagine is most likely either another Jimmy Buffet concert or an emergency racquetball match. Maybe both.
Together, my wife and I nod our heads respectfully, even though this piece of information runs counter to the emergency baby sleep book (there are thousands) that she bought at the recommendation of a recent Instagram post by one of her most trusted reality television celebrity friends.
Like many who have come before us, we’re seriously wondering how anyone gets a baby to sleep or stay asleep or sleep peacefully for many hours in a row.
And so, today's story follows two sleep-deprived newbie parents, occasionally exhausted and bleary-eyed, at other times perfectly fine and filled with surprising energy. Together they find themselves right in the thick of it, learning how to navigate the changing-by-the-minute sleep schedule of a perfectly wonderful baby boy.
But what will it take for these two newbies to maintain their sanity? What percentage of their brain cells will be lost forever? And how do you put a baby down to sleep without waking them up?
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, where have all the binkies gone?
Following the birth of Jack, our new little bundle of joy, Amanda and I were automatically enrolled in the hospital’s rigorous four-day baby boot camp in the maternity ward. It was there, under the watchful gaze and guidance of our hardheaded instructor, Nurse Linda, that we learned what it would take to become parents.
To feed, clean, wipe, dress, wash, swaddle, cuddle, and comfort a little baby at all hours of the day and night.
No stranger to being in charge, Nurse Linda packed our basic training regimen with a variety of cruel and invasive sleep deprivation experiments, parental survival training classes, and a long series of never-ending physical and mental drills that would test us at every turn.
But would we survive? And if so, how? As we would soon find out, having a baby was very serious business.
Very serious business, indeed.
Having a baby is a lot like nothing else in the entire universe. And until the very day that it actually happened, that our tiny little person, with the cute cheeks and tiny little toes, popped out into existence, I’m not so sure I had even the slightest idea what I was in for.
Like all parents completely terrified that they’re going to screw things up, we took baby classes and read books and blogs and even managed to assemble the crib and install the car seat! Surely the more we prepped, the better off we would be. So much so that by the time we officially had to turn in all our free time for a life of constant things to do, we would be a seasoned, well-oiled parenting machine ready to experience the drama free wonder of childbirth.
That’s definitely how it would happen … without a doubt. Right?
In the year 2016, newly married and yearning for that typical post-wedding trip of a lifetime, my wife and I exchanged large sums of money for what we believed would be a rousing jaunt across the European country of Spain. Once there, we would consume a boundless buffet of mouth-watering tapas, fill our botas to the brim with copious amounts of sangria and wine, and eventually, settle down in a charming little village by the sea to spend the rest of our lives happily ever after.
After seven wonderful years of parking our butts in this tiny little apartment, crammed away in this cozy garden level abode, stuffing our brains with a lifetime of warm and fuzzy memories, it is time to say goodbye. And we will miss this place, this apartment, this home we’ve had for those seven wonderful years. It has treated us well and provided us with a sneaky little headquarters, tucked closely into a main artery of the city, with big windows, an old blue carpet, and a suspiciously rusty bathtub—all at garden level prices.
The very first thing I did today upon awakening once again into this beautiful world was to make a wish, from the bottomless and deepest depths of my heart, that our bathroom toilet would begin yet another flabbergasting flooding disaster. When it comes to bathroom flooding, this is not my first rodeo. More like the seventh.
It’s that time of year again folks. The month when millions, perhaps even billions of men around the world start reforesting their upper lips again for 30-whisker-filled days of brotastical unity—all in a giant effort to raise money and awareness for men’s health.
I call it: The Bewhiskering.
I’m happy to report that here in New England, summer is finally on its way.
Don’t believe it?
Just turn the dial of your telly over to the local news station and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Look! Up ahead! Three aloof pedestrians stand around a smartphone in the middle of the sidewalk.
But why? Why did they choose to stand right there?
Don’t they know the space they selected for their powwow is typically used one-hundred percent of the time for walking? Even a fool knows not to do that. Right?
I always thought there would be way more giant robots, you know? With laser beams shooting out of their giant robot eyes and destroying everything in their path with unrelenting precision and sheer brute force.
Then there would be the little green aliens controlling them—those little bastards—terrorizing us (emotionally) with weird noises and slimy goo. They would be not only unstoppable, but most definitely, and without any doubt, totally obsessed with annihilating us.
Donald, it is us. Do not be alarmed. We are your friends.
And we want you to run for President of the United States of America.
Soon ... by following the advice of this humble waddle of penguins, you will be the supreme commander. All hail our wobbling gait and death to all leopard seals.
More than a year after I asked Amanda to marry me, as I sit here on our little green couch in our tiny little apartment, the wedding day fast approaches. The apartment is full of evidence that confirms it: brown boxes; gift bags; favors; chalkboards; plants; crates; and baskets. Letters flood the mailbox with confirmations and regrets. Supplies are called in and shipped from Amazon, FedEx has agreed to assist, and UPS has kindly extended the contracts of their seasonal workers.
Rarer items are sought, haggled, and procured carefully on eBay. Unique, customized pieces are thoughtfully handcrafted on Etsy and delivered with quirky personalized notes. This is happening. It is real.
When a man decides to grow a mustache, it is, to say the least, a serious decision. You put your reputation as a somewhat mediocre thirty-something on the line.
And, there is a very real chance that you will lose everything you’ve ever worked to achieve; a 500 square foot apartment with a drop-down ceiling, a collection of pretty cool headbands, and of course, the Pyrex collection you’ve built over several years of serious investment.
The day after I shaved my first mustache, a relentless and all consuming sickness came over me in the form of a terrible cold. My body would shiver, then sweat. My throat grew sore, and my muscles ached as if I had been lifting large weights as part of an intensive exercise regimen.
This has happened to me before — getting sick. I’m prone to these bouts, I’m a bonafide bubble boy with all the trimmings; allergies to dust mites, trees, nuts, cats; brittle and easily conquered by bacteria and viral attacks — such has been my life.
How often do you get stuck in an Uber with a grown man driving the car and who is blasting Justin Bieber at full maximum volume? I would dare say that will never happen to me ever again. Ever.
This was an experience. A bucket list check-off moment.
This month, I’m participating in a fundraising event called Movember. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? During this time, I will grow a mustache from scratch, in exchange for piles and piles of cold, hard cash donated by friends, loved ones, family members, strangers, postal workers, certified accountants, and of course, circus performers.
Life is difficult for a regular working stiff. I didn’t know it was going to be like this. Everything was a lot simpler back when my main responsibility was to hang out on my parent’s couch, drink Mountain Dew, and wolf down chocolate frosted donuts and Dairy Queen chicken baskets.
Little did I know that my parents were probably perpetually exhausted by this thing we call working.
Life is moving fast these days. And with the end of summer and the season of cool weather settling upon us, I think it’s important to take stock of what’s really important in life, like organic produce.
And so this story begins, as many of my weekends do, at the magical supermarket grocery; the offensively expensive, appropriately named, downright dangerous ... Whole Foods Market.
As a 32-year-old man, I’ve come to learn that finding good pants never gets any easier. It is by nature a process designed to produce incredible moments of frustration. I know now that it’s not simply about finding a great pair of pants, but rather, the process, or journey, in which those pants are ultimately found and enjoyed. It is a quest.
Years ago when we first moved to our apartment the most obvious part about it was the big blue carpet. Even now, years later, and several requests for removal denied, it remains, as blue as ever.
It all started with a string. Just a piece. But there it was. I couldn't recall using string for anything, ever.
Let me preface everything by saying that I lost my mind during a sequence of several major snowstorms, which are still arriving, quite comically, one after the next.
And so the story begins with me — an urban street parking New Englander. The big storm hits and news teams are giddy. Grocery stores are overrun. Milk sales are up. There are, miraculously, still people rushing to buy snow shovels.
Strange things happen at art exhibits. Shoulder to shoulder with regular old strangers. It's here that I remember about bumping, about the paranoia of being bumped. Those of us entering are led to the first painting in the first room. The mood could be described as antsy. I can see the painting ahead. I've been bumped. Or I bumped. It's hard to say.
One moment all is right in the world. I'm driving down the highway like any other day, finished with work, focused on the road ahead like a thousand times before. Responsibilities and troubles are on hold as I listen to the tunes on the radio.
And then, there it is. A disturbance. A noise. A noisy disturbance. Birthed from a whole slew of events and car part transactions with the road that I never knew a thing about.
The crunching of the curly kale cruciferous, while one of the healthiest choices you can make, is not for the faint of heart. Some claim to enjoy the experience. I have not been so lucky. But we all must try to love the kale, right? Now that America, or at least several sections of it, appears to be on a mission towards healthy eating, the kale can not be stopped.
It is, as they say, blowing up.
You've gone and done it — you've spoiled the day with a spill. Both humans and domesticated fish alike worry themselves silly over spilling. A brief moment occurs for all humans when we spill. It's performed in slow motion, and we understand what is happening, as it happens, but remain powerless nevertheless. The cup falls. The jar slides.
There is life in my parking lot. Which is to say, things are happening. The squirrels live in a tiny little park nearby and they eat in the dumpsters. These furry, grey animals are largish and bushy-tailed, maybe a bit more worn than say a suburban squirrel.
The answer is Yes. I do need a vacation home. The only trouble is I need more vacation time and a much much higher vacation home budget, which is presently sitting flat at around zero. Maybe the sender misjudged my financial status by a rung or two or hundred dozen. Maybe I CAN purchase a vacation home with nothing but a few bucks and a couple years worth of belly lint.
The true home of the cookie is, of course, the belly. The human belly. We are the only species capable of ingesting large, mostly irrational, and potentially hazardous amounts of sugar, at least intentionally. There is no willpower when it comes to cookies.
To begin, I think it's worth mentioning that there are different tiers of wrapping paper. It was only yesterday that I realized I've been using the lowest tier for my entire life.
Too many times to count have I finished up a pretty serious job, only to have the corners poke holes at the slightest movement of the box. And that's no good. That's shoddy workmanship.
I wonder what the perfume sales are like this year, how are they trending? Are sales better than last year? In a slump? Maybe this is the best year ever for perfume sales and nobody's talking about it. Who exactly is purchasing so much perfume to justify the high quantity of perfume commercials? I never ever even realized I had so many questions in the first place, regarding perfume. I
While inside my tiny apartment I become keenly aware of my stuff, which is a word I use to call my things. Clothes and couches, books, shoes, glassware. I never anticipated this much glassware. My office is a buffet table that sits in the living room across from my clothes closet. My micro space.
First thing upon waking, you want to start opening and closing drawers with a wild fervor, ensure a good slam before moving on to the next drawer. Have no concern for the integrity of the furniture, it can always be replaced and any structural damage can always be fixed. If you have enough energy, and hopefully you've been exercising regularly, try to stomp your feet up and down while slamming the drawers. This creates a subtle, but complex layering of loud noises that will thoroughly confuse and startle your downstairs neighbor. Obviously the earlier you start all this the better.
The couch, which always welcomes its guest and serves as a reliable place where the world can be watched from a comfortable perch. Couches, in my experience, almost always promote poor posture. But what good is a seasoned, well-worked, bouncy, embracing couch if you mean only to sit up with a straight back and your head well-positioned, hovering as it should be, perfectly above your spine.
It's an interesting experience, owning a car. One moment all is right in the world. I'm driving along like any other day. Maybe even minding my own business, completely oblivious to the physics and engineering that allow me to do so, and then, from an invisible seam, existence offers up a noise. It cannot be my noise, not a noise I am responsible for. Let me roll my window down and investigate, just to be sure.
The most wonderful time of the year is a bit of a lively holiday circus — proof that being human and being human in America is a very strange and weird experience. Not a bad one. Not a negative one. It's just a thing that happens.
I've always wanted a Jacuzzi Walk In Hot Tub. I mean, who wouldn't. On the other hand, placing one in my tiny apartment would mean replacing a very valuable piece of furniture, like a bed, or maybe a couch. I suppose we could eat on the couch or in the Jacuzzi if we just throw out the kitchen table. More importantly, who are these aggressive walk in Jacuzzi hot tub salesmen express emailing me messages to my spam folder? O
A nice leisurely car ride is like a breath of fresh air. I enjoy turning onto a road that I don't know, the windows are down, some nice music playing, nowhere to go. An adventure. Nothing but four wheels carrying a giant hunk of steel through the back roads.
A keyboard is for two things. The first is typing. When you connect a keyboard wire to a computer it will type out letters onto the computer screen when you press the buttons on the keyboard. Most, if not all people are aware of this.
What do I possibly have to say about pants? Well I don't know either. I know I've come a long, long way in my life when it comes to the types of pants I wear most often and where I go to get them. When I was young, my Mom took me to a place called Maurice the Pants Man.
My world is full of neat and tidy boxes. All sorts of boxes that come in all sorts of different sizes. First there was my crib, a small room. I inevitably escaped only to find that I did not in fact escape. Instead, I was just in a larger room. My life went on, room by room, collecting them, entering different ones for different reasons, always feeling best when I'm not in any at all.
I've never really had any horrible, never again, what the hell was that cab rides in Boston. For the most part my cab rides have been pretty simple. I get in cab, cab driver takes me to destination, I pay cab driver. I'm probably just lucky. I can even understand when a driver is talking, without breaks, for the entire ride, and will probably continue talking for the rest of the day. I imagine those cabbies never stop talking. They must eat, sleep, and work with that Bluetooth on every single day and become unbelievably distraught if it's ever removed by accident.
As a grown adult New Englander with no children it wasn't until I actually went apple picking that I realized that children are monsters and filling an entire apple orchard with hundreds, even thousands of them is one of the strangest and most horrible things that can happen.
Luckily for you I've prepared a list of guaranteed experiences that will occur when you go apple picking in New England.
First of all, anyone who has ever been documented successfully spelling McConaughey's last name within the first eleven attempts should be up for some sort of global, high-level, big draw, Olympic like medal. That being said, I'd like to address the Lincoln car commercials that MM is currently starring in.
In honor of the Autumn season I decided to post a nice picture of the city of Boston from the tall hill of the Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Watertown/Cambridge. From here you have a great view of the city and you can even climb the somewhat sketchy spiraling staircase of the Washington Tower to get an even better view.
Let me ask you something. How many workplace office carpets did you completely destroy today?
At 7:15 I was at my desk, in my chair, ready for action. I began rifling through messages after warming up my dual computer monitors; ready to peruse my workload, man the phones, and batten down the Google Docs.
And then … before I even had the chance to slurp it down … the smoothie uncontained itself.