Baby Shower

Sunday is the baby shower that the company, particularly Mary Leach and Meg McQuillan, are throwing for us. We are so lucky to have so many good friends. We're really looking forward to seeing everybody at the new place.

Hopefully bringing some more stuff over today and tomorrow, continuing to get everything in place. It's all becoming even more real.

Um...

At Babies R Us, I registered for the Yankees baby bottle and it showed up on the registry as the METS baby bottle. Little bit of a difference.

Today has barely started and I'm already done. I have had heartburn since yesterday and swollen legs for three days. I really just want to lie down. Thank God it's Friday and I have a three day weekend. Sunday is our baby shower so there will be plenty of prepping.

I'm too exhausted to write any more.

peace out

Up To Speed

So, Nicolle and I started this blog as a way to keep everyone updated on our journey into parenthood. I also maintain the popular theater weblog Mr. Excitement News and I'll occasionally be cross-posting items to that blog. But the main purpose of this one is as a journal, updating everyone on the latest pregnancy and baby-related news.

Here's where we are at so far.

*Nicolle and I are expecting our first child on April 17. We will be having the birth at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, where we just finished our birthing classes.

*Nicolle had a very rough first trimester, unusually so. She was very nauseous and unable to eat much. Since the second trimester, things have improved a bit. Now, in the third trimester, she is dealing with swollen ankles and issues of general bulk (although she is mostly carrying in front). She has been a real trooper about the whole thing. She is still working and will through the end of the 37th week.

*We are moving from our current location, which is near Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, to a new place in Flatbush (also in Brooklyn). Our new place has three bedrooms; one for us, one for L.P. (Little Person, which is what we call the fetus, since we have elected not to find out the gender) and one to be used as an office for our theater company.

*Nicolle's mum Sandra will be coming out later this month to help us out through the birth of the baby. My family will probably be coming later in the spring and summer.

*Yes, we have picked out both boy and girl names, but we are not telling you.

*We are registered at www.amazon.com/babyregistry and www.babiesrus.com. Also, we will be purchasing all diapers at www.gdiapers.com.

*We have a new cat named Dylan, who we rescued from the cold.

More updates soon.

A Positive Conception of Adulthood

Nicolle found out about Baby Loves Disco a few weeks ago and was really excited. She's a former dancer and very excited about the possibility of getting down with our upcoming arrival, once he or she hits the six month mark. I'm really excited about all the things we're going to be able to do with the kid in New York. My friend Blake is raising twins on the Upper West Side and they're having a blast. Raising kids in the city is completely underrated.

Now, I see that the Christian Science Monitor has a problem with Baby Loves Disco (Hat tip, Amanda):

"One of the major premises revealed in [Baby Loves Disco] is that we've shifted from a child-friendly to an adult-driven lifestyle," says Lynne Griffin, an author and registered nurse who teaches in the Family Studies graduate program at Boston's Wheelock College. "What we're seeing increasingly is adults sharing a lifestyle with their children that is geared towards adult needs for everything from sleep to daily activities such as entertainment and communication."

Noting that parenting styles tend to go in cycles, many clinical experts dub this a period of permissive parenting, in which adults do not set appropriate boundaries between themselves and their offspring.

"I'm seeing parents who look at their children and say, 'He's just like me, so whatever is good for me is good for him,' " says Don MacMannis, a child psychologist who is codirector of The Family Therapy Institute of Santa Barbara, Calif.

Aside from the disturbing implication that Saturday afternoon dancing is apparently bad (hello, Footloose), I just don't agree that children seeing adults act like adults is such a bad thing. For years, mainstream Hollywood has been feeding America the myth that adulthood is such a terrible, unfulfilling thing and that what we really all want to do is go back to being children again.

Growing up in the 1980s offered many examples of this trope, which Anthony Giardina discussed in this essay, which anyone who is or (as I was when I first read it) is thinking about becoming a parent should read. He describes being capitve to this anti-adult mentality after having his first child - the Kramer vs. Kramer paradigm:

Whatever he has been before, he has whittled himself down now to one pure thing: a father. For Ted Kramer, it pretty much ends there: work will never again have the same meaning for him. He will do it, but only for the money, only so that he can provide for his son. The world of hustle, of power lunches, of office flirtations, all those lubricants of his previously exciting, superficial existence has been seen through. So has ambition itself. He has ascended to a kind of saintliness, and that is where he will stay.

It ought to have settled things for me as well. The "About Men" column, "Kramer vs. Kramer," and all those sons and daughters of it that filled my Saturday afternoons at the movies in the years to come "Mr. Mom," "Mrs. Doubtfire," "Baby Boom," "Parenthood," "Hook" -- they all cohered around a central premise: we (men) were better off when we let go of hustle and allowed our inner nurturer out.

But the idea never sat well with him:

"What were the images of "Hook" and "Mrs. Doubtfire" -- those adulthood-hating stories we were now telling our children -- doing to my daughter's sense of what was to come? In those movies, whether the parental figure is Robin Williams as the hustling businessman of "Hook" or Michelle Pfeiffer as his female counterpart in "One Fine Day," the main narrative thrust has to do with getting this worker drone to face the boss, jettison work, and sacrifice the career so that he or she can make it to the place where we all truly belong -- on the sidelines of the soccer game!
[--]
[M]ovies offered helpful clues as to what might be going on: at a certain point in the movie "Multiplicity," the chronically overworked Michael Keaton comes home, late at night, to watch a video of his child's grammar school play, one that work has forced him to miss. So dreadful does the play seem that you find yourself thinking he must be secretly glad he missed it, until you look at the screen and see Michael Keaton weeping uncontrollably. It's a deeply unbelievable moment, but it says a great deal about the ways in which, between 1979, when "Kramer vs. Kramer" opened, and 1996, when "Multiplicity" made its bow, a generation of parents enshrined the notion of itself as childhood-worshipers."

Eventually, however, Giardina came to look to another movie as a model for his parent-child relations:

This time it was a movie I didn't really have to watch, but only to glimpse briefly, on the TV screen of a beach house in Ocean City, Md. We were there with friends, and my daughter, then about 6 or 7, had turned on the TV, midday. We discovered her watching, rapt, an old movie I recognized immediately. It was "40 Pounds of Trouble," a largely forgettable early '60s concoction in which Tony Curtis plays a Las Vegas casino owner, a man about town who is suddenly handed responsibility for a little girl. There is no point in glossing the plot of "40 Pounds of Trouble" except to say that Tony Curtis does not accept this responsibility as Ted Kramer does, by jettisoning everything about his life that made it exciting and fun. Instead, he takes the little girl along. There he was, on that screen, Tony Curtis in all his glory -- sharkskin suit, porkpie hat, shiny sports car -- living the vivid life of an American bachelor, circa 1963. And the little girl beside him in the red sports car -- did she look deprived because Tony hadn't cast all his selfish pursuits aside in order to settle down and read to her about Mr. Pumblechoke? Did she look as though what she wanted above all things was to be clasped to his bosom while he ran through the streets of the Upper East Side, a Saint of Fatherly Protection? Hell no. The little girl was having a ball.

There are adults who actually despise adulthood, with its myriad of choices and complicated moral universe. I won't be one of them. My kid is going to see his or her parents pursuing their dreams and enjoying adult life.

I can't wait for Saturday afternoons at Baby Loves Disco.

[Cross-posted at Mr. Excitement News.]