Kirk blAug

I recently wrote here about how our family treats the Santa Claus character as we would treat any other fictional character. I also mentioned that there are good arguments for propagating the lie from a critical thinking standpoint. An excerpt from Parenting Beyond Belief was posted on Dale McGowan's blog that does a very good job of making that argument : Santa Claus, my secular friends, is the greatest gift a rational worldview ever had. Our culture has constructed a silly and temporary myth parallel to its silly and permanent one. They share a striking number of characteristics, yet the one is cast aside halfway through childhood. And a good thing, too: A middle-aged father looking mournfully up the chimbly along with his sobbing children on yet another giftless Christmas morning would be a sure candidate for a very soft room. This culturally pervasive myth is meant to be figured out, designed with an expiration date, after which consumption is universally frowned upon. While

Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today... Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace... You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world... You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will live as one Today is the 31st anniversary of the day that John Lennon was shot by Mark David Chapman. The song Imagine still inspires an deep felt emotional response every time I hear it. When thinking of my favorite music artists, Lennon does not cross my mind. I do not like choosing favorites when it comes to something like a song, but if

I was recently remembering strange emotions I started going through when Chris and I first found out she was pregnant with Jupiter. The realization that I was going to be responsible for a tiny human was very scary. I think it started with me being in a daze for a couple of months not knowing exactly how I should feel. I was excited, but I was constantly taking note of the fact that I was not feeling quite as excited as I maybe should be. I think I was more scared for the little guy. This human life was going to have me for a father. Me. That did not seem like a good idea at the time. It seemed like I might possibly be subjecting someone to the life long punishment of having me for a father. I did not know what kind of father I would turn out to be and I am sure I over-thought the prospect. There was more than once that I was freaking out. Balling even. I was convinced for a moment or two during those nine months that I was in no way responsible enough for this task. I am always pretty

Historically, Thanksgiving is a day which celebrates the Puritans and the Natives enjoying a meal together. This happens just before the Puritans decide to slaughter a lot of the natives and steal their land. Still, I like to take this day to think about some of the things that I am thankful for. I am most thankful for my family. They give me reason to get up in the morning. They give me reason to better myself. They give me reason to try to make the world a better place to the best of my ability. I love them more than I could possible describe. I am thankful to them for putting up with me every year.

Since getting moved, we have been doing a little bit of exploring around our new community. It has been keeping us very busy the past few days and my posting frequency has suffered a bit as a result. Sorry about that. When we found out the house that we rented was so close to an Amtrak stop, we told Jupiter that we would ride trains when we live at the new home. On Wednesday we fulfilled that promise with a short trip down to the nearest stop in Washington, Missouri. Jupiter had gotten sick over night and seemed to be tired Wednesday morning, but we decided that he would still enjoy the ride and went anyway. We could tell that he was indeed very excited, but he lacked the energy to express it. He wanted very badly to watch out the windows while the towns and other trains were going by, but had eyelids to heavy to stay open. When we arrived in Washington, we walked up the street a bit to a place which served food and pie. The owners had a sign up that stated "Pie Fixes Everything&q

Every once in awhile, I come across an article having to do with what is considered by some "higher authority" to be an abusive name. A 9-year-old girl whose name was Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii was taken into state custody in New Zealand a few years ago. The judge said, "It makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap." More recently, Heath and Deborah Campbell who named their son Adolph Hitler Campbell are in a custody battle their their kid's over the name. This, despite the judge saying that there was no evidence of abuse in the home according to Heath. In the first case, I think it is definitely a stretch to call Talula Does the Hula from Hawaii a social disability and handicap. If the girl feels embarrassed by her name she could shorten it to Talula when she introduces herself. The article even said that her friends refer to her as "K", as if a one letter name is so much more acceptable than a 6 word one.

Today my hair smells like watermelon. It is not because I got into a food fight in the produce section. No, that is still on my bucket list. It is because my shampoo is packed in a box somewhere and the only shampoo I could find belongs to my two year old. We are packed up and ready to load up the rental truck and drive it from Lincoln, Nebraska to St. Louis, Missouri. The family finally ready to make the move. It is about time. We have been talking about it for almost two years. Jupiter was surprisingly helpful when packing. He was eager to help me pack up the kitchen which was by far the biggest headache in my packing yesterday. He also packed himself in a couple of boxes, but we let him out eventually. Tsunami was also pretty helpful in that he remained mostly quite and sleeping while we were packing. We can not ask for much more than that from him. Today we load the truck. Tomorrow we hit the road and unload when we arrive. I am excited for some new scenery with some new experience

Scooby and Shaggy must be the world's worst skeptics. Time and time again they find that the supernatural illusions they come into contact is nothing more than a human with a greedy agenda, yet every time there is a new mystery to solve they suspend their past observations for the idea that these things the go bump in the night are truly the unexplainable supernatural phenomenon that they intuitively appear to be. One would think that anyone with as much experience in ghost debunking as Scooby and Shaggy have would walk right up to their fears and confront them head on so that we could spare the remaining fifteen minutes of the episode and go on doing something useful with our day. They will not, of course. They spend so much time making a mysterious smoke come out of that Mystery Machine that they seem to completely forget all their experiences from one episode to the next. Instead history will repeat itself. The two will keep running away from what they should reasonably assume i

I am out at a restaurant or a store. Baby has a full diaper. I need to go change him. I start walking toward the restroom area. I notice a Koala Care sticker on the door of the women's restroom as I walk by on my way to the men's room. I breathe a slight sigh of relief thinking that I will not have to huddle over the baby on the floor, but only for a moment. I saw no similar sticker as I passed through the door to the men's restroom. No changing station. This is a very common instance when I am out with a diaper aged kid. In most cases, I end up using the floor. In some cases, when I am feeling feisty, I enter the women's restroom to do the job. Older parents will likely say, "Well, back in my day when we had to walk up hill both ways through 500 miles of blowing snow to get anywhere, the floor was all we had!" I understand that. I agree. The floor does the job. I do not take issue with the floor versus modern baby changing technology. In many cases, the restr

Our Halloween celebrations have been heroic this year. It started with Jupiter telling us that he wanted to be Superman for Halloween. Not only did he want to be Superman, but he wanted Tsunami, Chris and I to be Superman as well. So he is going to be Superman with Tsu, and Chris and I will wear our Superman T-shirts as well. We got our pumpkin from Arbor Day Farm, and carved the 'S' from Superman's chest into it. Jupiter keep telling us that he was going to show Superman when he was done, which we thought was strange until he brought out his stuffed Superman. Over the weekend we were in St. Louis getting some things in order before we move there. We stayed with Jupiter's aunt and uncle. Uncle Tom had the terrific idea of making more super hero jack-o-lanterns. We had originally planned on doing a Superman and a Green Lantern with the two orange pumpkins that Tom had already picked up, but while roaming around a pumpkin patch Chris decided that we should get a green pum

Ragu , Pampers , and a bunch of other companies still do not get how they are hurting their sales sales by making marketing assumptions which only moms to be parents. But at least some companies are getting it right. Check out these Tide commercials: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1qW7Po-1KI?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M28l-6LUp3w?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] I do have a slight problem with the term "Dad Mom". It still implies that primary caregiver is a position inherently for moms. But it is an improvement over some of the insulting marketing we have seen. I do not use Tide, but it is always good to have the recognition. In the event that I am looking for another brand because the store is out of the selection of All that I usually get or something else happens with the brand I am using, maybe I will consider some Tide. (via The Real Matt Daddy )

According to the Guardian , there are many more at-home dads in the UK than there used to be: There are now 10 times as many stay-at-home dads in the UK than a decade ago, with one in seven fathers (14%) now the main childcare provider, according to research from Aviva. It says about 1.4 million men are now the primary carer in their households. The rise is unsurprising. It seems the more egalitarian we become, the more women are going to be making comparable and better wages than their male spouses. There are also more adoption agencies willing to adopt to gay male couples , which account for at least some of the stay at-home dad count. Related, is the increase of single father households. As culture here and in the UK gets less patriarchal, the difference between primary caregiving moms and dads will continue to even out. We are still a long way away from that, but studies showing improvement are encouraging.

When you have a newborn, you get a lot of baggage to carry around. I mean that literally. You get a diaper bag, and you put stuff in it that the baby needs when you go out. At first the bag was a hassle. We had a big black one with many handy compartments. It did not have a shoulder strap which cost the use of one of my hands while carrying it. It was also a bit of an awkward shape. I carried it around for quite awhile. I got used to it. I learned to enjoy the convenience of having so much stuff with me. Eventually, Chris got me a new diaper bag that was way better. It had a shoulder strap. It had dedicated compartments for bottles, diapers, a changing pad (also a good place to tote my iPad), and smaller items such as straws, bandages, tissues, etc. It also had a built in refillable wipe container. This was a bag I did not mind carrying. It did not take up any of my hands and I could even put my own personal items in it. Fast forward about another year, and I do not need to carry arou

Occasionally, I come across some silly parenting product or another. However, this one I actually think is useful. I also think it is impractical though. It is a solution for those times when you are out with the baby and you need to use the privy. It happened to me a lot when Jupiter was a baby. I would be out getting groceries or running some errand and nature would call. What do we do in this situation? Well, as a guy, during a stand up situation I could manage a baby in one hand and my equipment in the other. This does not really work for moms or sit down situations for dads though, so sometimes putting them on a blanket on the floor is all you can do. The Babykeeper is meant to hang from the door to keep that child off the dirty floor an on the dirty door instead. Honestly, I would prefer the door, but the keeper seems way to big to fit into my already overflowing diaper bag, and certainly will not earn that space with the limited use it provides. There are solutions that the own

I get a little peeved when someone says to my son, "do you have a girlfriend?" or, "is that your girlfriend?" or some other such sexual orientation attribution. Why do people think it is okay to lay the groundwork for orientation long before children even have any interest in sexual mates? I think it seems a bit presumptuous. Say my son does one day realize that he prefers the company of others of the same sex where intimate matters are concerned. With a lifetime of build up of this expectation that he is supposed to prefer the opposite gender, he will undoubtedly feel guilty for going against the expectations of all the people he has grown to admire. I think the expectation that people need to pair up at all is ridiculous. Just because some of us choose to make a commitment to be with someone does not mean that one should have to be looked upon as a social outcast if that is not their own desire. I was single and in no relationship for years before I started dating

Not long ago, I was having a conversation about how messed up the world is. It is pretty messed up, but that is a topic for another post. During the conversation, I was met with a phrase that far too many people actually believe. "You can't change the world." It wrong to think that one person cannot change the world, because every person does change the world. Granted, not everyone changes the world to the same degree or in a positive way, but everyone has an effect on their surroundings. They have an effect on the people they come into contact with. They have an effect in what they create, what they destroy, even what they decide not to do. Every moment is spent making choices. Whether it is choosing what to do with our lives or choosing to literally take a step forward. Choosing to wait a minute to take that next step changes the timing with which you do everything that follows. And since what you do and when you do it affects anyone and everything else's future th

The 16th Annual At-Home Dads Convention is coming up October 8 2011 in Washington, DC. I have made it to the past two which were hosted in Omaha, but I will not be at this one. Tsunami is just over a week old and I need to stay with Chris to take care of him. Hopefully next year it will not be such a hectic time for me. The past two that I have attended have been a great experience. It was at the first one that I met the LinOma Dads, Lincoln and Omaha local area dad playgroup. I go to playgroups sometimes, although lately most of the time the schedules conflict and I cannot make the drive to Omaha. I keep in touch with many other at-home dads that I meet at the convention from all over the nation through social networks as I have recently described . The community is the biggest benefit of the convention as far as I am concerned, but there is certainly much to be learned from the lectures and the breakout sessions. Particularly of interest is the age targeted group sessions as I have

Since I started staying home with Jupiter a couple years ago, my social media usage has gone way up. The thing is, being a stay at-home parent can be lonely. Social media counters that nicely. I first discovered Twitter while I was still working, but it gained new value once it was the majority of my social interaction. I made a lot of friends with it. Most of them local. I would later meet many of them in person. Many of them, I noticed, we're parents as well. I had used my Facebook account for years and there is a huge mix of people on it. During the day there are many parents on it too, however I did not really connect with new people through Facebook. Facebook has always been a tool that I use to connect with people I already know. Google+ has entered the arena recently. I have found that it is the best social network for connecting with people who fit a certain group, such as "Stay At-Home Dads" for me. The other night after a single search for that term, I have a &q

We have been back in the hospital for the past day, or actually, Chris and Tsunami have been back in the hospital. Jupiter and I have gone home to try to sleep with varying success. Tsunami was a little jaundiced when we left the hospital the other day, but his levels were not high enough to worry about. Yesterday was his first appointment at the pediatrician where the doctor took his bilirubin level again and it was going up. He recommended that we put him under a light until the level gets below 15. We had hoped that it would be down by last night, but after his most recent test this morning it was still at 16. We are not too worried about it. Jupiter was much more jaundiced than this when he was in the NICU after he was born. But here we are, waiting, not getting much rest. Hopefully we will get out sometime today. Update: We have just been told that we can go home and will have to come in for another blood draw tomorrow morning. Yay!

Tsunami Dawkins Augustine was born at 13:05 on September 26, 2011 at Bryan Hospital in Lincoln, NE. He weighed 8 lbs 5 ounces and measured 20 inches. Mother and baby are doing great!