Elmo vs. Red Monster Mascot

Charlotte, 17 months old, has had her first interaction with a brand. Until recently, she only had one word for “adult who takes care of me” (“dada”), and long before she’d say “Mama” on demand, she had a word for Elmo. Sure, that word is “Memo,” but she makes her demands clear enough when she stands in front of the computer monitor and shouts, “Meh-MO? Meh-MO? Meh-MO?”

Red Monster Mascot

It’s the same tactic she uses with food, which she calls nana. She starts out at a normal volume, putting a raised inflection on the last syllable like it’s a question. “Nana?” If she’s not fed within the next two thirds of a second, she repeats herself, getting louder each time. “Nana? Na-NA? NA-NA?”

It's not the Elmo brand itself that worries me. He's nonviolent and educational. Yeah, he has a different baby in his house every week, and that's a huge red flag, but he broadcasts interviews with these babies on his show, so I figure it's not a hostage situation. I mean, if you delivered a pizza to Jimmy Fallon's house and you accidentally saw Emma Watson tied to a chair, it'd be a good move to call the cops. But when you see Emma on The Tonight Show and Jimmy demands no ransom, it's probably on the level. So Elmo doesn't bother me — but the idea that companies are already cultivating brand loyalty in my 17-month-old does.

I know marketers did a number on me as a kid. My dad only drinks Coca-Cola. I think colas taste like muddy gasoline, but if I need a sugar or caffeine boost and my options are down to Coke or Pepsi, I'll always choose Coke. If my options are down to Pepsi, I'll choose water and drowsiness. At work, It took me more than a year to realize I might also buy from the Pepsi vending machine in the break room, even though I saw it every day. This despite Pepsi and Coke both tasting like muddy gasoline.

Another example: Legos. I used to play Legos with my two brothers, and we eschewed Tyco Mega Bloks (We also chewed Tyco Mega Bloks, but we chewed up everything as kids.). We got to the point where we could instantly discern the texture and color differences between Legos and Mega Bloks, and if my character Skullhead made a doomsday device incorporating even a single Mega Blok, no one would take it seriously.

Of course, my brand loyalty for Lego paid off years later when I learned that Lego was struggling to make a profit because they couldn't get patent protection against Mega Bloks’ incessant copying of their product in all its varieties. I felt like I was supporting the artistic integrity of Lego against plastic plagiarism. And then Lego licensed Star Wars sets in the late '90s, and finally they had something Mega Bloks couldn't copy. Fast forward to 2014, when the company had picked up enough licenses to make The Lego Movie into the most surreal character mashup ever to hit the big screen — one character can’t keep Gandalf and Dumbledore straight, and (spoilers) Batman steals the Millenium Falcon’s hyperdrive. The one thing they couldn’t seem to do was bring both Marvel and DC comic characters into the movie, despite selling sets from both.

My family’s criteria for brand loyalty selection was pretty weird. We stuck to brand names for Coke, Legos and outdoor gear. Outside those areas, we had Western Family corn flakes and Honey & Nut Toasted Oats and Equate ibuprofen. I suppose the rule I learned in my household is that anything that can save your life — climbing gear, tents, M&Ms — you don’t mess around with. Food’s not as important. In my grandfather’s words: “I don’t know why we spend all this money on food. We’re just going to eat it anyway.” With anything your kids want, sneak some off-brands in there and see if they kick up a fuss.

I hope Charlotte appreciates when Red Monster Mascot shows up at her birthday party.

I'm 27 and getting kicked out of my mom's basement

Charlotte tries on my shirt in my mom's basement.

I’m 27 and I live in my mother’s basement. My mom doesn't hassle me a lot about dating, though, because my wife and my 16-month-old daughter also live in her basement.

We used to live in a sixplex near campus with a lot of character and a moat when it rained. Early this spring, Sarah started hearing rumors that our building would be renovated and we might lose our apartment. Whenever she dropped off the rent check, she’d ask about the rumors, and they said they’d let us know if something happened.

They didn't let us know. On June 9, a letter from the new owners informed us we had to be out by July 1. The company was renovating the apartments, essentially changing it from family housing to rent to single students so they could make more money.

We weren't big fans of this plan. I don’t think either of us feel we’re entitled to a whole lot — maybe not even our crummy apartment — but we looked at our baby girl and reasoned that kicking a cute, helpless larva out of her home had to be illegal.

Several blustery Facebook posts and a few minutes of Internet research later, we determined Heartless Business Monsters LLC was well within its rights to kick us out. We hadn't signed a lease, so we couldn't sue for breach of contract. And in Logan, you’re required to give tenants 15 days’ notice before dumping them onto the curb. They’d generously given us 22, so we started looking for new digs.

Then lady luck must have started feeling like a jerk, because the next day, our real estate agent showed us a house in our price range. She’d done that before, but previously all the houses we could afford had meth contamination or roofs slowly ceding the point to gravity. The house she showed us this time was clean and structurally sound. By the end of the week, we were under contract to buy it.

In order to purchase a home, you have to convince the bank you can reliably produce pieces of paper, whether it’s dollar bills, tax documents, papers bearing your signature or checks for $500 they say you’ll get back at some point. In that respect, we made it rain. We buried the bank under a fluttering paperslide, hoping somehow we could move into our new home as soon as we moved out of our old one.

Three-hole-punch drunk, the bank promptly began sorting our paper mountain. They squinted at one third of our papers for a bit, then emailed us, saying these weren't the ones they were looking for. They gave another third to the government, and that’s the last we've heard of those. The last third they shredded and used as hamster bedding, I bet.

By the end of the month, we were up against plan B — my parents’ basement. We packed up our belongings — by which I mean Sarah packed up all our stuff while I told her how I was a packing pro in my bachelor days and didn't have to start yet. We put our things in storage and set up camp at the ancestral home, ready to move out at any word from the bank.

At the beginning of the month, we had word that we’d be waiting at least until Aug. 28 on our USDA loan. It's Aug. 28 now, and the USDA just asked us to produce more papers. We’re enjoying our stay and my parents are wonderful housemates, but there’s a problem. The basement we’re camping in doubles as my mom’s preschool, and we have to move out at the end of the month.

But looking at my cute, helpless baby, I bet my mom’s inclined to keep her as a tenant, at least.

Teething is a... well, you know.

Product Review: Baby teeth (1.5/5)

Do you have teeth? Me too. Remember when they grew in? Me neither, and thank the luckiest of stars above, because it is rough. Teething gets 1.5 stars. Or less.

So I have a beautiful daughter. She's smiley, happy and the light of my life. That's all fine and good, but when I ordered this child I did NOT order a lengthy and untimely ordeal like teething. Her first two teeth came screaming in around 3 1/2 or four months. Stressful. I have read in a very reliable baby book of baby-rearing knowledge that teething does not, in fact, cause any of the following: night waking, fever, extra night feedings, etc. This is an obese lie, the largest lie you can even imagine. She woke up a ton more at night and had a fever and needed more food. I'm sorry Dr. Smarts, you aren't a mother, and you don't have your own baby with teeth coming in.

Lovable and drooly bulldog.

Anyway, we had already been through this teething business once and it blessed us again around seven months. By blessed, I mostly mean scammed. She was for sure teething for about three weeks. I could see the little white buds on her top gums and she was drooling like a bulldog (a precious, lovable bulldog). Then, Houdini-like, the symptoms and the little buds disappear. They just left me wondering if I was a mother making up symptoms to explain an inability to soothe my own baby. I swear, they really were coming in!

Then, in December, she had some back-to-back colds. A nice little Christmas gift for us. At the tail end of the last one, she managed to sneak some teething in for a New Year's surprise. Not one, not two, but three pearly whites just magically appeared with no more fanfare than a bit of extra drooling (think three bull dogs), extra sleeping and a slightly more cranky Charlotte.

She is now trying to break these three new teeth all the way out of gum-jail. I'm really surprised by the quiet nature of this third teething round. It's not so bad as the first or second time (and the second time really did happen; I'm not crazy) and I am also a fan of cutting multiple teeth at a time. I'll take a week from the pits of Tartarus if it means all the teeth coming at once.

So, if you're thinking of ordering a round of baby teething, here's a review for you to ponder:
Delivery: A bit early, then a no-show, but then just right.
Satisfaction: Well, it increases the ability to chew food and smile less like a toothless grandpa, but it does increase nose-biting ability. That's from experience, people. Terrible experience.
Cost: Doesn't cost much, just a few extra pounds perhaps as you stress-eat your way through bags of chocolate or gallons of ice-cream.
Overall: 1.5 stars. It's worth it in the end, but boy-oh-boy, it's a rough ride.

I'm lucky I still have all my digits.

Today's post brought to you by a miracle

"I spilled water on the computer" is not a great text from your wife to get at work.

The imperiled Pew! Pew! Kickstarter

Sarah had been using our laptop, which I have named Freeman, when she tipped her giant water mug and the lid came off. Water spilled onto the keyboard, and she snatched the mug away. Freeman automatically logged her off and powered down as she quickly dried the keyboard, unplugged the power and removed the battery. That's my wife!

If I learned anything in my two years as a computer repair technician at PCs Unlimited, it's that computers don't do well underwater. And being a starving journalist, replacing or repairing a dead laptop could take a big chunk out of our finances. Without going into too many embarrassing budgetary details, our cost-cutting project this week is learning to make ramen from scratch.

What's more, I had launched the Pew! Pew! Kickstarter just that day. I needed Freeman, or at the very least the files on Freeman, to create the magazine I promised my Kickstarter backers. Even if the Kickstarter raked in twice my goal of $500, replacing Freeman would put us right back at square one.

When I got home from work after 11 p.m., Sarah was still up. I told her not to worry, it wasn't her fault, but I may need to get a second job. I'm a pie-in-the-sky kind of guy, meaning I have a very poor sense of what jobs are available and how to get them, so any conversations about finding work slowly spiral out of control until I'm talking about being a carney or signing up as a Mars colonist.

We tried powering Freeman up 4 or 5 hours after the spill, but during bootup he started beeping, which usually means something's gone wrong with the fiddly bits inside. Those fiddly bits are usually not cheap. On the plus side, the keyboard was much cleaner.

I went to sleep worrying about Freeman, worrying about Sarah, worrying about whether my insurance would pay for booster shots before I joined the circus. I prayed that Freeman might be OK somehow.

This morning, I tried booting Freeman up again. This time I still heard the beeping, but I didn't hear the cooling fan. That could be good news or bad news -- fans are cheap to replace, but they're not electronically complicated -- so if water somehow took out the fan, the rest of Freeman's guts couldn't be doing well.

I dug out my static clip and opened Freeman up. You know how when your walkie-talkie breaks as a kid, you get a screwdriver and open it up, even though everything you know about electricity comes from watching cartoon Ben Franklin fly kites? Despite the hundreds of computers I've opened up, I felt a lot like that.

I unplugged the fan and looked at it. Wonder of wonders! Miracle of miracles! A dried clod of dust was lodged in the fan, just big enough to keep the fan from spinning. When the water seeped into the fan, it must have dampened the dust and clumped it all together. I removed the clump and named it Dustin.

Dustin

After that, Freeman booted up fine. I'm grateful for a God who answers my prayers, and I'm grateful that he has a sense of humor. Now I'm writing a blog post with Charlotte on my lap. If I'm rambling, you'll have to forgive me. I'm restraining Charlotte, because she's trying to eat Dustin.

Update: A couple of days later, Sarah made a batch of miso ramen. It was delicious.

If you're our neighbors, please shut up

Resist the urge, Steve. Resist the urge. Photo by Fran Gambín.

We live in a college town, a couple of blocks off campus. I can genuinely say I enjoy living here, but pretty much only when school is out. When school is in -- especially at the beginning or end of a semester -- there's a party every weekend night.

Sarah and I were lying in bed at about midnight last night. We could hear the bass notes of a nearby party.
"I'm giving them half an hour, then I'm calling the police," Sarah said.

"It's OK. It's not too bad," I said.

Sarah gave me a dirty look. She had a rough day and didn't feel well.

She looked inclined to violence, so I said: "That's just what I was telling myself. I was just trying to CONVINCE myself that it's not a problem."

Then I'm assuming the partygoers got too hot and opened the windows, because a tide of OPA GANGAM STYLE crashed over us.

"Look out the window and see which house it is," she said.

I did, and every window outside looked dark. If I strained at the blinds of one house, I could see a strobe light.

"It's that house again," I said. "Let's burn it down."

"No," Sarah said. "That's not real."

House fires, not real? At my job at a great metropolitan newspaper, I listen to the police scanner for hours. Just last night fire crews responded to a house in Hyrum after someone said they saw flames. Last Monday I laid out a story for the News-Examiner in Montpelier about a fire that burned a family's house half to the ground. There was a great picture of the mother holding an oxygen mask over their pet turtle's head. Fires are real. And I really wanted to burn their house down, but my own wife kept denying the very reality of arson as a solution. I needled her, trying to find out what her specific objection to my plan was.

"I could go next door and fill a can up with gas and use that to get it going."

"Stop that. That's not real."

A few minutes later, I tried a reconciliatory approach.

"I guess I keep forgetting how close that house is to the other side of our apartment building. I bet a house fire right there would burn us up, too," I said. "But then again, our house is very wet."
Sarah laughed. We were at the tail end of a warm spell, and melted snow pooled up in our parking lot and over the sidewalk, coming right up to the foundation. The sagging rain gutters dripped more steadily right in front of our door. The lake wasn't new, but because we don't have a basement, we haven't complained to the landlord yet. But about a year ago, going to an early morning class, I opened the door to find a family of ducks.

"How many diapers do we have in the trash?" I asked. "We could set a bucket of dirty diapers on fire and leave it on their doorstep." This motion also died in committee.

"They have 14 more minutes. Then I'm calling the cops."

"You know what we should do? Here's what we should do. I'll take some speakers over there, plug them in and play Shaina Feinberg's cha-cha album. That would get them."

"I don't know what that is."

I should note that Sarah hates 95 percent of things I try to introduce, and she's never loved anything new after 11 p.m.

"It's the diametric opposite of whatever music they're playing. It's impossible to party to." I played it for her on our tablet.

"Turn that off. That's the worst thing I've ever heard."

For the record, Shaina, I like the album.

Sarah was afraid the noise would wake Charlotte. I said if it did, I'd take Charlotte, crying, over there and none of them would get lucky. Nothing kills the mood faster than a crying baby.

"No, you won't," Sarah said. "Why do you keep saying these things that aren't even real?"

"I dunno. I'm tired of calling the cops on these guys. The cops probably think I'm a whiner. I guess I want to do something that really makes them question their grip on reality. Where could we get 20 -- no, 50 cats? I want to break into the animal shelter, steal 50 cats, put them in a van and back them right up to their door. I'd let them go, and suddenly their house would just be full of cats."

No use. Sarah told me to call the cops, and when I refused, she stalked off downstairs with her phone. A couple of minutes after the call, the party stopped. Sarah made me look out the window again. I told her the cops were there, all right, with choppers and national guard tanks. She gave me another dirty look.
Sarah couldn't sleep for another half hour afterward, she was so mad. We watched Keeping Up Appearances on the tablet, and I couldn't help feeling a little like Hyacinth, the human killjoy. We broke up their party, but hey, they were asking for it at 12:30. And while by the light of day I realize arson isn't the answer, I still want to do something incredible. I want to host the loudest outdoor dance party in our parking lot. I'll do it every day for a week before finals and invite all my non-student friends. Then, at the end of the semester when they're partying again, I'll sneak over and caulk all their doors shut.

But Sarah's right -- I won't do any of that. None of it's real. What's real is the seasonal swing from party town in the spring and fall to ghost town over Christmas and summer. Even though those kids will someday turn 25 and realize that all parties are horrible and binges are killing them, they'll move out and we'll be stuck with another batch of 18-year-olds. They'll be younger every year, and every year my wife will remind me that we need to get out of here.

Maybe when I'm 45, and Charlotte is out of the house, and I'm having a real midlife crisis -- maybe then I can burn their house down.

What I know about Charlotte as of October 2013

-- Charlotte thinks humans communicate chiefly through raspberries and shrieks. Under our current schedule, I feed her at night. Most of the time, she's pretty groggy, but by the time I change her diaper, she might blow some raspberries. It's nice that she can be cheerful even right after she wakes in the middle of the night.

The tables turn in the morning. After I've slept in about half as long as I'd prefer, Sarah brings Charlotte onto the bed and points her at me. My daughter spits all over as she says good morning. I do feel a little bad that my wife needs to use our baby as a shield from my grumpiness when she wakes me.

-- Charlotte is surprisingly dexterous. I've mentioned her long fingers before, but it still amazes me how she can use them. She's now picking up little snacks and putting them in her mouth. When we feed her bottles, she often fully extends her arm in the air and looks at her fingers, tilting her hand as if admiring a diamond ring. Then she slowly rotates her hand to look at the front, then the back again. Her specialty, which she learned in the NICU, is grabbing wires and waving them around. During feedings, she'll often pull out my earbuds. I bet some old-schoolers will tell me that's a message.

-- Charlotte gets cabin fever. For those not familiar with the expression, cabin fever, or stir-craziness, is when you can't stand being stuck in your house any longer. Our kid will sit in her Super Activity Play Seat Baby Gundam Mobile Armor for about five seconds before she's sick of it. She loves her Baby Bjorn carrier, and she'll seldom complain on walks.

-- Charlotte loves new faces. She will sit and stare at a stranger quietly for minutes on end. This is very handy in church. Sometimes she's scared by glasses and sunglasses.

-- Charlotte is not easy to impress. With some kids, you throw them in the air or tickle their stomachs a bit and they laugh their heads off. Charlotte laughs for about five seconds, and then she just smiles like she's humoring you. The only times I've ever got her really laughing, she was pretty tired.

--  Charlotte's eyes are currently blue and green. By which I mean one is blue and the other is green. Of course, any predictions about her eye color I make now will end up being completely wrong, but I bet they'll be green or hazel.

UPDATE: Charlotte's trick poops were a result of the Enfamil Gentlease formula the NICU sent us home with. Once we switched to Sam's Club Brand Members' Baby Chow or whatever, her poops got a lot less interesting. She doesn't have blowouts nearly as often as before. Side note: Sarah believes the term "blowout" refers exclusively to baby poop escaping a diaper. Every time she sees an ad for a blowout sale, or hears an anecdote in which a car's tire explodes, she giggles uncontrollably.

Control is mostly (definitely) an illusion.

Silly me. I assumed once I figured life out it wouldn't change again. I could finally rest my weary head and, I don't know, smoke a pipe? But don't worry, it never came to that because I have learned one thing over and over again in life: control is mostly an illusion.

It's a real nice illusion though. Real nice. It's a bit like a low-hanging cloud scuttling around the middle of a mountain range. When I was younger I always had a dream of taking a jar up to those clouds and bringing some of it back with me. It was a tangible goal; I could get a jar, maybe wear a jacket and hike up to the unsuspecting cloud and snaggle some to take home. Then I think I realized that you couldn't catch a cloud in a jar. Well, technically, sure you can, but it just condenses to water droplets. This reminds me of control. You work to get to it, plan for it, but you can never quite have it, just the illusion of it in a wet jar.

I'm not sure why this is a lesson I've had to re-learn so many painful times in life. I thought I'd figured it out on so many different occasions, it's actually quite funny looking back. Silly me. Nothing has brought this lesson home further than marriage and motherhood. I know, I know, these are pretty much the only topics I write about but you have to admit, they're pretty major ones.

She's the best baby. Worth every moment of crying, spit-up and blow-outs.

Six pounds 11 ounces. Small, snoozy and dark-haired. My precious baby girl helped remind me of my jar full of water droplets. She was beautiful, of course, from day one. She had a crazy entry into life and then she demanded I give it all up for her. And I did. Steve did too. I didn't try to control all that much for the first six or eight weeks, but then as I started feeling more myself I started looking for my cloud-catching jar. Boy, oh boy, did that ever backfire. I had to relearn how to feel in control of the simplest aspects of adult life (ie: brushing my teeth or getting to take a shower). I felt completely out of control. Very luckily, I had a superstar husband and family to help remind me that this is how every new mother feels.

Hottest husband? Check.

But I've learned. I've adapted. Not always gracefully or with any tact, but I'm slowly getting there. I felt so confused for the longest time because I couldn't seem to get back that elusive control I'd so lovingly cultivated before all of this. I was doing all of the same things that brought it before -- why the flip wasn't it working? I'm going to wax quite poetic no,w but I think when I'd climbed the mountain with my jar, I looked out and saw that the mountain had changed, as well as the cloud and the jar I would need. I'm pretty sure that's happened every single time I've felt like "Aha! I've got the secret control formula now!" 

It's never going to be the same as before. That's just a fact of life. Doesn't mean it's a nasty, gross fact, like taxes or death. It can be a really cool, interesting and liberating fact, like you can eat dessert before dinner if you want. Control is an illusion, I'm pretty sure I've never been in control in my life. My jar always comes back with water droplets, not a cloud. But I learn and grow every time I try and find control, and there are things I can control in my ever-changing life. Whom I love (like my hot husband and beautiful baby),  my attitude toward all this change, which at best is grudgingly and at worst is full of tears, and if I want to eat lots of chocolate at 7 a.m. instead of a waffle.

So I'm going to try and remember that even though I can mostly control nothing and life will keep slapping me in the face with the red herring of change, I can control what I learn from it and a few small but really important aspects like love, perspective and chocolate consumption.