Cause I'm mobile...

It is one of the great mysteries of parenthood that although you go to sleep knowing who your child is, upon waking you have no idea who will greet you. You can’t imagine it until you have a child of your own. They change faster than the patterns in a kaleidoscope. They go to sleep having loved green beans for a month and the next day they’ll never eat them again. Yesterday’s favorite toy is tomorrow’s forgotten relic.

Watching a child grow and develop intellectually is a marvel to behold. As you spend time with them there are moments where you can watch the light come on in their eyes. One second they are flailing and wailing and the next they’ll reach out a tiny finger as deftly as a concert pianist and push a button on a toy again and again and again. They’ll squeal with joy and give you a look like they just completed their college thesis and are bursting with pride in the achievement. It is a magical process that occurs on a near daily basis.

As I sat on the sofa this morning nursing my first cup of coffee I knew from the moment he worked his way through a three hundred and sixty degree spin what was coming next. I saw the lights go on in his eyes. As quickly as possible I sprinted for the new video camera and prepared to catch the magic moment. No sooner had I turned on the camera and adjusted the focus he crawled for the very first time. It was simply amazing...

On the darker side of parenting, there are things beginning to appear in his diapers that simply cannot be the result of any natural biological process I’ve ever heard of in my lifetime. When I open his diaper to confirm my olfactory suspicions, as God is my witness, cockroaches come crawling out their hiding places and die in writhing agony. Neighborhood rodents have placed tiny signs on lour lawn that read: Abandon all hope ye who enter within.

I left one sitting on the front porch a while back and we haven’t been bothered by a door to door salesman in weeks. We haven’t had much mail either but hey, no news is good news. I just can’t figure it out. We’re putting only the purest of ingredients into him. Where are the hot-steaming, foul-smelling, toxic piles of horrendous byproduct in his diapers being produced? This is the apple of my eye, the very fruit of my superior loins we’re talking about here. Surely this can only be the result of something contributed by the mother.

I’m working on a technique where I undo one of the Velcro fasteners, scoop him up with a snow shovel, roll him out of the back door on to the lawn and wait for the diaper to fall off before sending one of the dogs out to fetch the boy back inside the house. (The snow we’ve had lately has proven to be a Godsend because now he’s clean when the dogs bring him inside.) If anyone has any other ideas on dealing with the situation please don’t hesitate to pass them along because at this point I’ m willing to try most anything.

This home fathering thing is definitely not turning out to be the cakewalk I envisioned it to be when Felicia first agreed to the idea. (I should have known something was up when she kept grinning and chuckling all the time.) She thinks she's so smart, but what she doesn’t know is that I’ve been saving up my allowance and I’m going to hire me a nanny. I just hope she doesn’t quit on me when I ask her to change one of his diapers.

Now do you people see why I’m so cranky about my politics?