How to Be a Dad

BEWARE: Cartoons Are Loaded with Lies

Posted by Andy on February 20th, 2012, under NOTEBOOK

Cartoons are loaded with animals. They’re also loaded with lies! It’s true. Uh… I mean it’s true about the lying part, that there are lies. Anyway! Kids’ books, animated shows, toys, breakfast cereal boxes, restaurant activity mats, you name it, they are all filled with breathtaking inaccuracies about the Wild Kingdom.

“So what,” right? We all know that they’re filled with fantasy and artistic license. But at what point exactly do we know this? When we were little grubby grenades of youth ourselves, did we really think about it? We were being kids, learning and having fun using orange crayons to color in cute crocodiles. We knew they were super friendly because their mouths were so gigantic when they smiled, right?

I’m not trashing cartoons in any way—I love them! Probably too much. Waaaaay too much. And I’m in no way suggesting some kind of reform, like an Honesty in Cartooning Act. Frankly, I don’t want to live in a world without cartoons and the thought of “accurate cartoons” makes me want to throw up in my mouth.

However, there’s an interesting side-effect that can occur in life because of these brightly-colored characters we grow up with. I’m saying “we” because I’m really hoping that it wasn’t just me. There’s a point when you start to learn, for real, about some animals. Animals that have even helped to teach you the alphabet by representing a letter.

The opossum goes “Hhhhhhhhhgh!”		The first time I saw a one of these I said something like: “Holy sh#t!!! Radiation-mutated rat from New York!!!” The person I was with laughed and told me it was an opossum. I wanted to say something about the fact that I’d thought they were cuter, like in cartoons, and not so… mutant-rat looking. I may or may not have asked some supremely dumb question about why it wasn’t hanging from its tail in a tree. Ehem. Or something.
Kiss your picnic basket and your ass goodbye.		Winnie the Pooh, Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, Fozzie, the Berenstain Bears, Care Bears, take your pick. I don’t have a clear recollection of when this reality hit me upside the head because even now I have to actually force myself, with great difficulty, to think of any of these characters being associated in any way with the beast shown here.
Hippo: “NOM!” Widlebeast: “Ohsh#t-ohsh#t-ohsh#t!”		I can chant the advertising jingle for the kids’ game Hungry Hungry Hippos, a fun board game set with goofy plastic hippos with levers to make them gobble up marbles. When I was about 20-years-old I saw a show about the hippopotamus. I was horrified. I tried to reconcile pictures in my head of the ballet-dancing hippos of Disney’s Fantasia with the documentary commentary, “one of the most aggressive and dangerous creatures in the world” and “it can easily outrun a human.”
Do NOT mess with George. Just hand over the red balloon and run!		I’ve loved Curious George since I was little. All my boys have, especially my youngest. So I recently got curious myself and hit the internet to see what George was. I read that one primatologist concluded that he’s an ape. That no tail plus knuckle-walking rules out all monkeys and narrows down the field to chimps and gorillas. At which point, all the daring episodes of Chimp Eden I’d ever seen came crashing down on me. And I had to shake off a picture of The Man in the Yellow Hat appearing on Oprah after massive reconstructive surgery to the remnants of his face. (Shudder!) I shrugged it off and popped on the TV, Lucas and I laughing as George constructed the worst tree house in the universe. Hilarious!

These were just some examples when the real Circle of Life was brought home to me. I’d like to think I’m not a moron. I tell myself that these mistakes and misconceptions are perfectly understandable when you compare the super boring detachment of school textbooks against the sparkling, sound-effected allure of Saturday morning cartoons. There’s no contest! Those books were made by people who may not have even studied animals in their actual natural habitats, and definitely didn’t color them in with orange crayons like the people who make cartoons do.

–

Our Facebook Habitat
Don’t worry. Facebook can not easily outrun a human.

Instructional Diagrams
There are some pictures here that are way more misleading than cartoons. Enjoy.
 

HowToBeADad Version 2.0

Posted by charlie on February 13th, 2012, under NOTEBOOK, VIDEOTAPE

For my notebook today, I decided to make a video. I did this for many reasons, not the least of which was time, but also because I wanted you to hear my thanks for all that you do, dear reader, directly from me.

It’s both remarkable and inspiring what you guys do, even the trolls. Writing a comment doesn’t just happen. Sharing our stuff on Facebook isn’t by accident. So, please… know that it keeps us going to hear from you when we’ve had 30 hours of sleep between the two of us for over a week.

Feeling like someone is listening is one of the most profound feelings a writer/artist/creative can have.

OUR LINKS – PICK YOUR POISON
Facebook
YouTube (Please subscribe!)
StumbleUpon
Pinterest

THEIR LINKS
Kin Community YouTube
Kin Community Facebook
HTBAD Babble Dadding Page

I don’t want this to come off like a humblebrag, but inevitably someone will accuse us of it. We’re busy. We’re more alive than we’ve ever been and probably tireder than ever before (with the exception of the birth of our respective sons).

So, all this is meant to say that we’re working hard to try new things and bring you more fun stuff to interact with…

But we want to hear what you think and where you’d like to see this train go. Write a comment below and tell us. We mean it.

Lives Flashing Before Your Eyes

Posted by Andy on February 6th, 2012, under NOTEBOOK

They say when you have a near death experience, your life flashes before your eyes. I’ve never had that. Don’t mistake my meaning though, I’ve had near death experiences aplently. Hair standing on end, mouth flooded with the metallic taste of adrenaline, testicles making an emergency evacuation up inside my body. Yes. But never the >>>> fast-forward mental recap of all my wanderings in the world.

This story isn’t about me though. And it is. Any story about your kids is always about you in some way, isn’t it? Sometimes in every way. This is about two of my sons, Max and Cody. It was eight years ago, when they were only 3 and 5 years old.

Cody and Max, 6 and 8 years old here.

Like Sherlock Holmes deducing a scene from pure observation, I saw in my mind’s eye what had happened: when I was fixing something in the apartment, they snuck out and went to the pool. Cody had undone the latch on the pool gate. He could climb like a monkey and had reached the five-foot-high latch. He had obviously watched me undoing it before. I had seen him studying me. Absorbing. Learning. I didn’t worry though. Oh, I worried all the time. Every parent does to one degree or another. But I didn’t choose to focus on that thing, that moment, that pool gate latch.

Oh my god I already knew what had happened and I didn’t want to be right! MAX WAS ONLY THREE!!! I asked what happened in the safest tone I could manage, so they wouldn’t try to lie.

Is there a way to die when you hear something and still be alive? Yes. I tell you yes, there is. I choked back the tidal wave of self-loathing and bit down on tears before they could be seen by my boys, and just hugged them as hard as I could without letting them know how dire the moment was, hoping they couldn’t feel the chill emanating from the ball of ice in my stomach.

From that moment and into the rest of that night, I was in a sort of shock at what had almost happened. As I’m writing this, I’m almost unable to see the screen with any clarity, this story is really rough to tell. I’m so glad to have my sons. My heart goes out to every parent who has suffered the most devastating blow life can deliver to a parent. Losing your child.

I bumped into an older dad who had just lost his child a few months after it had happened. He was in a living nightmare. I could see the pain in his eyes as we passed each other with token greetings. He turned to me. “Hey Andy. … …” I stood and waited, calm and silent. I wanted to hug-crush him, but his pain was his own, it belonged to him, and I respected it. “Andy, you have kids, right? Two?” I said yes. He nodded for a long moment. Then he patted my arm and seemed to lift himself a little as he walked away, reassured that the world was not a flaming ball of s##t waiting to burn and swallow each and every one of us at any second. I felt proud that having my boys, just having them, and them being okay, seemed to help this poor, devastated man.

My survivor, me and my hero.

So, Cody and Max were having it out about something in front of me yesterday. They’re always at each other’s throats, but, Cody chuckled “Shut up, I saved your life,” punching him in the arm. Max chuckled too but there was a loud silence to it all, a soberness. We were all together, here and now, looking back on a funeral that never took place.

–

I normally answer back to nearly every comment on my posts, but I won’t on this one. Please understand. But know that I read and appreciate each and every one.

When you read this, Cody, my amazing son, as you most certainly will one day, please know that I thank you for saving Max’s life with every fiber of my being. And for saving mine. From what it would have been.

The Testicle Umbilical Cord

Posted by charlie on January 30th, 2012, under NOTEBOOK

When babies first come out of the womb, they are physically attached to their mom. But could it be possible that perhaps, somehow, they are also attached to the father’s testes? Stay with me… if you can.

For my next trick, I will light this car on fire & give you a heart attack doing backflips off of it.

As a younger man, I skateboarded all over the San Francisco Bay Area. We used to stay out WAY too late and occasionally got into some great trouble. We were always trying to go for bigger air or nail a more technical trick that seemed ever elusive. I still have a sad face emoticon tattooed on my soul from not figuring out a couple of those skateboard moves.

Another major part of skateboarding culture was our obsession with watching skateboarding videos, when it was too cold or too rainy or too late to do anything productive. A notable sequence in the videos was always a section where people got hurt. I’m sure that this was the genus of “Jackass” and all those hordes of human failures on TV. The accidents were invariably pretty brutal and brought on physical sensations when you watched them. Imagine a guy trying to navigate a skateboard down the metal railing of a staircase and ending up landing it with their sack.. Ouch. Broken arms. Road rash. It was a blast, despite those momentary physical reactions we had.

Areas affected by your child’s activities. Notice the lack of genitals. This statue was probably built in response to what I’m talking about.

Fast forward to present day: You have a child and the guy/gal is a little daredevil. But every time he/she almost falls or actually DOES FALL, you get that same physical reaction. For a father, it seems to be in your balls.

A year and some ago (eat your heart out Lincoln), when Finn was learning to walk, my wife and I were watching him try to take a few steps. He lost his footing and fell headfirst. At the last moment my hand caught his wrist and stopped him from certain death. I had that aching, kicked-in-the-balls feeling. It was like a “scrotal spidey-sense.” I looked over at Avara and she was holding her stomach. “Are you okay?” I asked. She replied that whenever she sees Finn almost hurt himself or actually sustain an injury, she gets an aching, painful feeling in her “uterus”…

Now, every time Finn almost/does hurt himself, we both deal with metaphysical umbilical cords, still connected to our son. What the hell is that?? Are we the only parents who have this CRAZY phenomenon?

Please don’t tell me we’re the only ones…