The Roman army once used a practice known as decimation to discipline units refusing to follow orders.  Cruel and effective, the technique involved killing one randomly chosen soldier in ten.  My wife challenged me to a mass reduction duel in early February.  The challenge?   Lose 10% by June 1.  As part of my battle to save the English language from its speakers, I would like to reclaim the word “decimation” by using it to mean a reduction by 1/10th rather than as a synonym for “obliterated”.  I would like to still exist at the end of this challenge, I would just like a little less of me.  It is now the last day of February, and I am happy to report that the decimation diet is working.

We are finding that when challenged to not eat so damn much we turn to smaller quantities of higher quality foods than what we would normally eat.  Instead of a box of macaroni and cheese, I might eat cottage cheese and an apple.  Rather than eating an entire frozen pizza in one sitting, I might eat three slices and a salad.  Instead of ordering a double quarter pounder super sized value meal, I might just duct tape a two pound dumbell to my spare tire, bypassing the entire digestive process.  Speaking of spare tires, mine is no longer a cushy Michelin Man but is now more like the skinny donut hidden in the floor of a late ’80s hatchback.

A side benefit of providing a better example to our children is in effect as well.  Our boy has been a moderately picky eater and we have often commented on how he does not like many fruits and vegetables, but I have noticed him taking more interest and trying nibbles when he catches me munching on a stalk of celery or contact juggling an orange.  I have to admit it is a little creepy to see an open bag of M&M’s slowly decay on the counter over the course of a week rather than be gobbled up as an afterthought, but perhaps the lingering candy is being decimated in solidarity with our mass reduction goals rather than being obliterated.

Have you ever joked about that “new baby smell”?  Well Julia still has it, and it turns out that the new baby smell is not only real, but useful.  It has been reported that the phenomenon is caused by pheromones excreted by infants, and that men are more attuned to them than women.  This mysterious mechanism is apparently designed to overcome the agressive and potentially dangerous urges of the male and allow the young to grow old and strong enough to someday borrow the car.  Now every time I hear a story about some jerk who hurts or kills a baby that will not stop crying I will wonder if the guy had a cold.  Perhaps Breathe-Right nasal strips ought to be prescribed to fathers of colicky babies.

Baby Julia is now practicing her smiles every day and loves it when I play guitar and sing for her.  She enjoys prolonged eye contact even more than her mother, loves to kick and coo during bathtime, and stares at her ceiling fan friend going ’round and ’round much as Baby Boots (Dylan) did just a few years ago.  At nearly three months of age, Julia retains her olive complexion, slate blue eyes, surprising shock of dark hair, and still has furry hair on the backs of her cute little ears.

One of my favorite things to do with baby is to give her a bath then put her in a cute new outfit.  Baby clothes are different than regular clothes, and not only in size. Snaps are to be found on the sides and backs of shirts as well as at the crotch of onesies, but that does not fully explain the difference either.  The fundamental difference is that baby clothes are fragile in time.

We were given an enormous bag of gently used clothes from my summer friend Duane as well as many outfits from neighbors, friends, and family. There is no way that Julia will wear each item before she outgrows them, at least in part because favorites emerge.  Most of the clothes will be given to my brothers who are both expecting baby girls shortly (we are in the midst of a Brandon baby boom). Other baby stuff will find its way to local thrift stores, but a few pieces will be put away as keepsakes and saved for the far off possibility of grandchildren.

Baby Julia and I have been fighting the bottle battle lately. I can hardly blame her for preferring the breast, but the best I can do is to offer time shifted breast milk.  Today, Julia drank milk that was pumped on December 14, 2009. This mundane form of time travel has benefits for the working mother, who is able to be away from baby for more than a few hours at a time without jeopardizing comfort or sacrificing production.

My wife and I have decided to shuffle our shares of market and non-market labor once again, and we are now running a co-provider economic model rather than a primary breadwinner/caregiver duo.  We are each working around 32 hours a week at paid labor, caring for our children and taking turns picking up after toddler tornados the remaining 136 hours per week. Basically what this means is that I am working more hours than before and Janelley is doing more laundry.  One of the great things I am finding with this arrangement is that since we have similar time at home with the kids, the misleading label of stay at home father is out the window.  I haven’t been demoted, rather my time has shifted.  I still get to engage in the alchemy of transforming time into love much more than turning time into money, a bargain at any price.

Along with calculus, the Farmer’s Almanac, and the internet, family planning is one of the great changes that distinguishes us from our more willy-nilly ancestors.  We have a responsibility as the most advanced beings on earth to both propagate the species and to procreate within our means.  For our family, that means two children is enough.  Despite the wide variety of options available to women wishing to prevent pregnancy, non-invasive birth control that is controlled by men boils down to condoms or abstinence.

While filling out the paperwork during my pre-op visit to the vasectomist, I couldn’t help but notice the archaic questions on the form (I believe it was copyrighted in the early ’80s).  The literature seemed to indicate that only men over 30 with two or more children should consider a vasectomy.  I strongly believe that being a man who doesn’t want any(more) kids is the proper criteria.  My doctor walked me through the procedure, wrote me a prescription to ease operating room jitters, and encouraged me to schedule an appointment any time after the mandatory 30 day waiting period.  We also discussed the former Winnipeg Jets, Teemu Selanne, and my favorite video game of all time, NHL ’94.

Roughly two months later, the day had arrived: Janelle would take the morning off from work to be my chauffeur and her mom would watch the children.  I was showered and shaved, just about to pop my sedatives and be driven to my destiny, but the mood changed abruptly as  I descended toward the living room.  The clinic had called and the appointment was canceled.  One of the biggest decisions of my life, carefully considered and coordinated on our end, had been dashed on the rocks of bureaucratic bullshit.  According to a decidedly uninvolved medical receptionist, my health insurance (which is subsidized by the state) requires an additional form to be signed.  It was unclear whether the clinic misplaced the form I did sign, or if an additional form should have been presented during my pre-op visit.  I did not receive anything approaching an apology for a human error, but was informed several times that the problem was due to the “form not being signed”.

Once again, the system has failed me.  Dylan received a duplicate vaccination by mistake last year,  my dental insurance is not accepted by any dentists, and now the Dad-ratted doctor won’t cut my vas deferens unless I sign another piece of paper and wait 30 days.  From a business point of view, these outcomes make perfect sense.  Departures from prepared scripts lead to errors, public insurance that pays out less than the cost of a procedure will not be honored, and the haphazard requirements of various private insurers are cumbersome, unnavigable, and inhumane.

So why am I so happy?  In terms of biological success, I had been about to self-destruct and was granted a temporary reprieve.  No wonder the world seems so full of possibility today.

Wet with sweat, muscles aching, and out of breath, he leaned against his shovel and was pleased.  Shoveling is hard work, honest work, northern Minnesotan work.  It had been difficult to leave his family on Christmas Day, but there was no guarantee the weather would hold to drive in to work the morning of the 26th, and so the wife and kids stayed back at the lake while he drove home to find his house slumbering under two feet of snow.

The snowflakes continued to fall as though in slow motion, and the noise of snowblowers had ceased.  As he labored, the man thought mostly about what he was doing, and occasionally about Christmas.  Engaging in his familiar brand of self-justifying environmentalism, the man imagined that he was working out and losing a little weight while staving off the end of humanity for at least a full second simply by doing things the hard way rather than buying a snowblower like all the other guys in the neighborhood.  “You’ll buy one too, you’ll see,” they all said while slowly walking behind their two-stroke snow throwers.  Fat chance, the man thought.  Big, fat, lazy chance.

Consciously switching to a more positive line of thought, the man noticed the colored lights across the street, red and blue and green, pulsing in a soundless and peaceful pattern.  “Sure, holiday lights are an energy indulgence,” he thought, “but since we can’t be perfect we may as well spend our excesses on meaningful personal displays rather than the garish commercialization of Christmas.”  His arms and chest were tingling with the cold as he continued to shovel the sidewalk in a relentless shuffle step: scrape, lift, throw…scrape, lift, throw.

“After all, the perfect isn’t the enemy of the good,” scrape, lift, throw.  “I might not be a vegan, but that doesn’t mean I should eat fast food every night either.”  Scrape, lift, throw.  He was really sweating now, moving faster and faster, all ill feelings forgotten in the rhythms of exertion as a sense of weightlessness and detached peace arrived.  The stillness of the night grew more still yet, and the colored lights filled his field of vision.  The green colored lights had vanished, and the red and blue lights were larger, revolving, insistent.  He heard his last words as though listening to himself from a distance as he understood the absence of green.  “Ambulance,” he heard himself say, though his lips remained in contact with the sidewalk where he had fallen.  “Should have bought a snowblower.”

Our son has been watching old school Sesame Street clips on YouTube since he was a baby and has recently taken to acting out the “Baker” counting video series.  Dylan possesses an irrational but very real fear of these videos, especially the part where the baker announces how many cakes he has, falls down the stairs, then licks the frosting from his fingers.  For the last month or so, he has been practicing his act and we are now ready to share it with the world.  The first video is the Sesame Street original, the second is Dylan’s creative way of dealing with his fear.  Enjoy!

Dylan and I went out for a ride on the bicycle and trailer tonight, and it worked out pretty well.  My friends at the Fargo Moorhead Community Bicycle Workshop (FMCBW) assure me that winter riding can be done, and since the mercury was only a bit below freezing, I felt we had better get a ride in while the getting was good.

I was surprised at the small number of vehicles we met on the road, but that allowed me to concentrate on the terrain right in front of me, avoiding almost all of the obstacles in our path.  Dylan was on my side, reminding me to try not to fall many times while we rode from park to park in search of the perfect winter playtime scenario.  We crossed north Moorhead to our old neighborhood and caught our breath at the 5-9 Park, a place I remember better than he does.  This is the first park I took a one year old Dylan to when I first took on parenting as a full-time occupation, and used to be the extent of my running range at about 5 blocks from the old apartment.

Dylan was not interested in stopping, so we came to one of our favorites, Davy Park.  I chose to continue on across the pedestrian bridge to Fargo’s Oak Grove Park, knowing that Dylan would have been content to play for a bit then go home, but needing more out of our adventure now that my blood was flowing.  We stopped and discussed which park we were going to play at once again near Mickelson Park, and agreed that this would be the one.

Upon lifting his trailer’s snow cover, however, Dylan announced that we needed to go to a different park and we were off.  Across the toll bridge and into a new construction neighborhood, I contemplated the lack of mature trees and prominence of three car garage architecture.  Our house was built in 1926, and has been a long time holdout on the garage front.  It occurred to me that if the future brings less dependence on personal motorized transport, all of the houses dominated by their garages could be remodeled, turning the garage space into lavish parlor areas, or perhaps turned into living space as future owners modify the 2,500 square foot floor plans into duplexes.

At all rates, Bridgeview Park was not the panacea I had imagined, just another wild goose on our chase.  Dylan now insisted that we go back to Davy Park, so the wintry ride continued.  We were across from the razor wire of the county jail when a shape caught my eye near the river.  “Dylan, it’s a deer!”  I unbuckled my sidekick and we snowpantsed our way toward the deer, discovering that it was not one, but at least six deer ambling along the riverbank.  Dylan began to cry, saying that he was cold and hungry and wanted to go home.  We never did make it back to Davy Park, never really stopped riding except to watch the deer, and to talk about which park would be the perfect park in which to play, on a dark winter’s day.

Gender Muted Fathering- The New Fatherhood Replaced (<– click this link to view the paper)

It is done.  It is not every day that one meets a man who has attained a thirteen year degree in anything other than medicine.  My final paper on the history of fatherhood as an institution took shape over a period of almost exactly one year, and (assuming it receives a passing grade) will be the end of an important phase of my life, the college years.

I attended my own graduation as a spectator the first time around, and listened to my future brother in law’s commencement speech.  Nate spoke of the importance of avocations and the examined life, and it is a message that has stuck with me through the years.

I always was bad at goodbyes, and often thought of my failure to write my final paper and earn my four year degree as a way of keeping an open door to the past.  Now that door has finally closed.  One of my favorite fictional characters, Stephen King’s Roland of Gilead, has been my companion on the quest for my own Dark Tower.  Roland is the last gunslinger in a world that has moved on, and as he finally approaches his goal (the Dark Tower), he sounds his horn and calls the names of all those who have been instrumental in the pursuit of his quest.  In that spirit, I would like to acknowledge the people and places that have accompanied me on my thirteen year quest for a four year education.

“I come in the name of Gay 1-3, we like it on top!

“I come in the name of 707 Wyoming, and batslayers everywhere!

“I come in the name of 712 E 7th, the ka-tet of my youth!

“I come in the name of the commune, the bars, the Hut, and the drawers!

“I come in the name of Northeast Minneapolis, and of Moorhead!

“I come in the name of my parents, who have made me, and their families, who have made them!

“I come in the name of my wife, my son, and my daughter!

“I am Lukas of Morris, and I come as myself; you will open to me.”