June 21st, 2015 At 30,000 feet, on a flight somewhere over Ontario, I visit the restroom and fold down the baby-changing station. So much room! Way to go, Air Canada.
I used to spend exactly 0% of my time thinking about baby-changing stations. Now that Dubsie is in my life, I kick the tires on them even if I am (as in the case of today) not in actual possession of a child.
I survey the cramped and well-used water closet and experience a wave of wistfulness. Dubsie’s toilet training is coming right along, and the days are numbered where I will have the duty — or shall I say pleasure — of changing her diaper at altitude.
To which a parent should say say hoorah and hallelujah. If I think back, though, to the memorable moments in air travel over the last two years, many occurred in tiny bathrooms like this. I lay Dubsie gently down on the tray, prop her feet against the wall, and move oh so gingerly, trying not to send wipes or the clean diaper or the baby herself tumbling to that dubious floor. Her eyes look trustingly into mine as the aircraft bounces in turbulence.
Back on land, I persist in calling her a baby though the evidence mounts day by day that she no longer is one. The lengthening legs, the hardening abdominals, the constant stream of an ever widening vocabulary.
I call her baby because I can get away with it. “She’ll always be my baby,” parents of grown children are known to say, but the days are shortening when I can say it to Dubsie’s face. Some day soon, emboldened by the little punks at daycare, she’ll come home and declare I’m no baby! On that tragic day this daddy will go underground.
June 14th, 2015  Before Dubsie was born my cousin Alison warned us about what she called the Radius of Doom. Anything within baby’s reach at the table is in imminent danger of spillage, breakage, slobberage, or some other form of annihilation.
We learned to conduct safety sweeps and clear the Radius. But of course that isn’t enough. You get complacent and one day Dubsie stretches out her arm, longer with every passing month, and swipes at your wine glass. The Radius is a vigil that never ends.
Until the days come when the child learns to crawl and then to stand and walk, and the Radius of Doom transitions into something far more dangerous and unpredictable: the Zone of Doom.
The Zone of Doom spreads out in concentric circles, like the blast area from a thermonuclear device. Anything left on the floor is eligible to be eaten. Low-lying electrical outlets are trips to the burn unit, and previously innocent objects like candlesticks and picture frames must be evaluated for their shatter tolerance and throw weight.
But the child keeps getting stronger and more mobile. She learns to climb stairs, to wrap the cord for the blinds around her neck as an invitation to strangulation, to mount pieces of furniture only to fall off them headfirst. Shortly after Dubsie was born, a friend confided to me, “Really, until the kid is three or four, you’re basically on suicide watch.”
What took me most by surprise was that the Zone of Doom expands on not only the X axis, but aggressively on the Y axis.
In our living room we have a wonderful old bookshelf, built by my great-grandfather, with stepped shelves, long at the bottom, short at the top. When Dubsie learned to stand, we realized that everything that wasn’t a toy or a baby book had to be vacated from the bottom two shelves. And then she got a bit taller, and the adult items — the ones that reminded us of our simple carefree pre-child life, like the Italian vase — needed to surrender the third shelf and retreat upward.
Now, if she stands on her tiptoes, she can just reach things on the fourth shelf.
All that remains is the fifth shelf, which is only about two feet wide, and it is now crowded with nail clippers, my guitar pick, wine bottles, Dubsie’s crayons and a potted plant. I look at it and think of that moment in the disaster movie where the floodwaters reach the attic.
The same story has been unfolding in our bathroom, on Mummy’s vanity, where Dubsie will eagerly grab and hide earrings, or stab herself in the ear with a mascara brush. Luckily, we can clear the vanity table and stash things on shelves that stand five feet tall. No way Dubsie can reach that, I say to myself with satisfaction, when I step into the shower.
When step out I see that Dubsie is standing on the stool. She has discovered a force multiplier and is delighted at the fact. Unsteady on her fat legs, she rifles through the blush cases and jewelry boxes.
Dammit, the stool!, I say, and clench my fist like a hapless villain. The stool! Outwitted by that little girl once again! Will she leave no zone undoomed?
June 7th, 2015
Somewhere between dawn and 6:30 a.m., Dubsie bounds out of her bed. She rattles her cage — that’s what we call her baby gate — and stirs me from slumber. I stumble to her room, change her diaper, and carry her back to our room, where I deposit her in our bed. I then put my head back on the pillow, with the fervent but absurd idea that she will go back to sleep.
Dubsie thinks that is amusing. She immediately climbs out of bed and wanders the room, while we lie like corpses, not yet ready to be parents. She enjoys unplugging and using my phone, which she can manage to disable while also taking screenshots:
We try to keep Dubsie away from electronics. She will probably (like us) spend too much of her adult life staring at glowing rectangles, so for now, we enmesh her as much as possible in the analog world of dolls and crayons. We don’t own a television and try to resist her constant campaign to swipe through our photo feeds. We snatch the device away when we see her getting too transfixed.
Now the two-year-old is turning the tables on me.
 Dubsie enjoys a victorious moment with the iPad. 8 p.m. is when Dubsie starts down the road down to sleep. In her room, after helping her go to the toilet, after squeezing her into jammies and brushing her teeth, after singing her her easy-listening songs (Away in a Manger, All the Pretty Little Horses, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, the money chant from The Wolf of Wall Street), after I’ve finally lulled her into lying corpselike in bed, I pull out my phone. It’s the only time I give myself the treat of checking Facebook.
She somehow detects the ghostly glow from under her eyelids. “Stop checking your phone, Daddy,” she says.
Tonight I elected to ignore her. Deal with It, Little One. It’s been a long day and I am supposed to be in charge here. Dubsie fell back to sleep. I had become engrossed in a skateboarding video when I noticed that she had gotten out of bed and was standing by my knee. “Stop checking your phone, Daddy.”
Oh, all RIGHT. Fine. I stick the phone in my pocket and she climbed up into my lap. A creature not three feet tall, making me walk the walk.
May 31st, 2015  We are a household governed by the rhythms of yogurt. I fed Dubsie the first spoonful when she was six months old (her first taste of sour, you should have seen how her face puckered). The fermented flow has only grown since then. After all, Dubsie’s maternal lineage is from India, the motherland of yogurt, and everyone is excited these days about probiotics and diversifying your gut colonies.
In January, we expanded from consumption into production. Making yogurt is a point of pride for all the older women in Mummy’s family, some of whom claim that the curd they serve today was seeded decades ago and has been perpetuated ever since in unbroken line of batches. Yogurt, I have learned, can be endlessly replicated as long as a little of the prior batch is left around. Milk is boiled and then cooled to the temperature of baby bathwater, and mixed with the parent culture with bare clean hands. Bacteria ferments the milk’s lactose, which produces lactic acid that reacts with the milk’s protein to make the stiff and creamy product. Timing and temperature are key.
I didn’t know any of this until January, just after Mummy’s grandmother died. Culture would need to be preserved. Mummy acquired some starter from Gomathi, her aunt in New Jersey, and that kept us going for a few months. Then Lilia, our Ukrainian au pair, polished off our supply one day and that lineage was snuffed out.
Next, unbeknownst to TSA, we smuggled a new starter from Mummy’s mother in Seattle. But that strain was a little sour. So now we’ve moved on to a culture that we acquired from Atlanta, from her aunt Gijiperima, who originally brought it from India. We can’t imagine how.
We may keep that strain going for decades, who knows, but this morning we had a scare. Mummy sat bolt upright in bed and realized that she had kept her new batch out overnight at room temperature and hadn’t calculated in the effect of our May heat wave. “Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh…shit!” she yelled as she leaped down the stairs.
I was left in the bedroom with Dubsie, who jumped out of bed and stomped around the room yelling “Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh….shit!” while I stifled my laughter in the pillow.
Yogurt is a hot enough commodity for Dubsie, who will eat it as fast as we shovel it in her mouth. To manage her excitement we use that time-honored parenting trick: spelling it out. “Is it time for Y-O-G-U-R-T?” we murmur to each other knowingly.
But yogurt, it seems, is not the only thing in our house that is adulterating. “Y-O-G-U-R-T!” Dubsie says. “I want Y-O-G-U-R-T!”
May 24th, 2015  Create a childcare schedule for Dubsie for the next two weeks, with the following conditions:
Ferris is in Cuba for a conference from May 25 to the morning of May 29. Mummy is in Boston for her most important conference of the year from noon on June 29 until the mid-afternoon of June 4. Mummy’s father flies into Washington D.C. the evening of May 26 and leaves the morning of June 2.
Ferris and Mummy’ father, plus Dubsie and Lilia (the au pair) drive from Washington D.C. on the morning of May 30 to suburban New Jersey for the wedding of Mummy’s cousin. At 8 pm that night, Mummy flies from Boston to Newark, and Lilia picks her up. On the evening of May 31, all members of the party drive back to Newark airport, where Ferris and Mummy board a flight to Boston, so Mummy can get back to her conference, and Ferris can do a short but necessary reporting trip.
The evening of May 31, Lilia, Mummy’s father and Dubsie drive back to Washington D.C. On the midmorning of June 2, Ferris flies from Boston to Washington D.C. On the mid-afternoon of June 4, Mummy returns from Boston to Washington D.C.
Ferris and Mummy attempt to work normal business hours when they are at home. Lilia takes care of Dubsie during those hours. However, according to State Department rules, Lilia can work no more than 45 hours a week. She can work no more than 10 hours a day and must have a contiguous 36 hours off per week.
Mummy is a member of the YMCA, which has childcare. Lilia joined the gym on Mummy’s family plan (official documents claim she is Mummy’s spouse). Either Mummy or Lilia can put Dubsie in childcare at the YMCA while they work out. Childcare is available from 9 am to noon and from 5 pm to 8 pm, and can last no longer than two hours.
Submit your full two-week schedule below in the comments.
A sample solution from our kitchen whiteboard is below. Note that the “Flexible Time” label on May 31 does not constitute cheating, since it is cultural immersion for Lilia (at an Indian wedding, wearing a sari). Please don’t say we fudged it, or worse, call us bad parents.
May 17th, 2015 First, say “cough” in Spanish. Tos.
Then understand that we’ve had an illness going around, at least among us adults, that involves a lingering and persistent cough. After a bout of hacking, I tell Dubsie “tengo tos.”
Her brown eyes are full of concern. “You are sick?”
“Yes, I am sick.”
“You need tea?” she asks.
“No Dubsie. But thank you.”
“It’s OK, Daddy,” she says. She nods and caresses my arm.
I stifle a cough.
“You have toast?”
May 10th, 2015  The truth of the matter, the truth we will tell Dubsie one day, is that Mummy never wanted to be a Mummy. She told me a revealing story once. She was on a hike in New Zealand and met this happy, gray-haired woman in her 70s who had never had a child. “No children, no regrets,” the woman said briskly, and that agreed with how Mummy saw her life unfolding. Mummy is a doctor, a woman who intended to devote her passionate heart toward toward patients and students and research projects, toward her husband, toward her friends and their children and her nieces and nephews. She felt no urge to add to that roster her own flesh-and-blood child.
I had different ideas. I’d always wanted children. Not for any other reason that I had always imagined I would enjoy them. I saw the stages of my life pegged to those of a younger one, from diaper changes, to first days of school, to giving a shove as he/she wobbles away on a bicycle, to attending horrible piano recitals and snapping pictures at high school graduation. It was for me the natural order of things in the exact way that to Mummy it was not.
This would seem a dangerous gulf of opinion for a couple planning to spend their lives together. And a lot of our friends and family were concerned that when it came to something as important as children, we had simply agreed to disagree. Those worries made all kinds of sense. But I had a gut feeling that the question would work itself out.
Then, in the spring of 2012, on my birthday, Mummy informed me that for my gift, we would try.
Now that is the greatest present ever, or what?!? After some trying (not much trying at all, really), the signals of pregnancy made themselves known. There was Dubsie, on the ultrasound machine, waving her arms and doing deep knee bends in the warm lagoon of Mummy’s amniotic fluid.
Pregnancy proceeded in textbook fashion, anatomically speaking. In every other way Mummy deviated from the American pregnancy textbook. Some mothers, you know, proudly show off their bellies, celebrate their flushed cheeks, complain on Facebook about their aching backs, sign up in advance for Mommy & Me classes at the gym, participate in passionate debates on the pros and cons of various binkies.
Mummy, on the other hand, could write a handbook on How to Have a Pregnancy With No One Knowing.
After forbidding anyone from throwing her a baby shower, Mummy went to Marshall’s and did not shop for maternity clothes, but rather picked out blousy tops that would conceal from her co-workers and patients that she was anything other than a hardworking doctor. Then she vanished, starting her maternity leave four months before Dubsie was born, leaving her with only six weeks afterward to spend with the newborn. Many moms want to spend every moment with the new arrival, but Mummy wanted to hustle back to work. She had no qualms about delegating duties like diaper changes and burping. Pregnancy, she reasoned, “is the only part that I can’t outsource.” (Though she did have earnest conversations with a lawyer who specializes in surrogates.)
Now it’s two-plus years later and Dubsie is a toddler. At this point, it is almost like there are two Mummies. One is the fiercely fancy-free and independent one, the one who still imagines herself arriving solo at seventy, the one who can blow out the door for the hospital in the morning with barely a wave to her daughter. It isn’t that she doesn’t take care of Dubsie’s needs — she does and very well. It’s just that Dubsie is an accessory rather than the whole outfit. Earlier, when Dubsie was smaller, Mummy would wrap Dubsie so tightly to herself that we could hit the bars until 1 a.m. without her ever waking up.
 Then there is the other Mummy.
This one complains that Dubsie is ruining her life, then spends fifteen minutes gathering her stubby little curls into pigtails. Hospital departures are delayed as Dubsie is deliberately piled into Mummy’s lap, to pantomime her mother’s application of lipstick and mascara. In the midst a task-filled weekend day, Mummy’s pulse of urgency will unexpectedly stop. She will hoist Dubsie face to face and they will have long discourses on what happened yesterday. They will sing “Skiddy-Mer-Rink-A-Doo” and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.” When we go on a hike, no one other than Mummy can carry her; when we go to a restaurant, no one other than Mummy can feed her.
“She is so cute, Ferris,” Mummy will say to me. “She is such a liiiiittle bun-bun. She is sooooooo sweet. And she has such a tiiiiiiiiny face.” Mummy squeezes her fingertips together, hard, as if the presence of such tiny cuteness were almost too much for her to bear. Her voice takes on a tone of revelation. “I didn’t expect to love her so much.”
May 3rd, 2015
Once, in the dead of night, nestled between us sleeping, Dubsie sat bolt upright. She began to chant in a deep voice we didn’t know she possessed.
Mother, Father, Uncle John
Went to market, one by one
The words rolled slow and solemn from her mouth, like a dirge.
Mother fall off … whee!
Father fall off … whee!
Uncle John went on and on.
She repeated the verse, to our confusion and alarm. We had never heard this rhyme before. We looked at each other and wondered if Poltergeist were perhaps more than just a movie.
She promptly fell back to sleep.
Inquiries the following morning revealed that this Uncle John was a ditty she had learned at library music class. Why she muttered it in our chamber, once upon a midnight dreary, is a dark and curious mystery.
That was a few months ago, but Uncle John remains one of her favorites. Each time she recites it I am amused yet disquieted. Who was this Uncle John? And what of Mother and Father? When they fell off, how did he so callously go on and on? Did he not hear their whees?
Uncle John, careening down a muddy country road, in his rags and matted hair, cackling as he drives a whip across the horses’ backs, and Dubsie shuddering behind him on the buckboard. These are the rhymes that try a father’s soul.
April 26th, 2015  Dubsie has turned two! This post will end with photos of the most salient development, which is that my daughter no longer has hair. Her curls occupy a dustbin in the Georgia suburb of Dunwoody. But our story begins elsewhere, on a fine morning on the southern outskirts of Atlanta, at a Hindu temple.
 The Hindu Temple of Atlanta is a complex of gleaming white buildings near the airport. We came to town to celebrate the big day with an branch of Mummy’s family in Georgia, and had arranged an appointment for Dubsie to meet with a priest for her mottai. In gratitude for the child’s existence, an offering is made — of the child’s hair, a symbolic surrendering of the vanity that it represents.
We brought along the $51 fee and all the items that were listed as obligatory on the website, including turmeric and kumkum powders, three coconuts, a packet of incense sticks, 10 betel leaves, a bunch of flowers, five mangoes and five bananas, and of course a pair of scissors.
 I have attended enough Hindu ceremonies to know that most of the rituals will drift right over my head. It will be beautiful and bursting with color, yes indeed, as the priest tends to his silver plate with its tiny hillock of turmeric powder, and a pile of magenta mums that Mummy had snipped the heads off of, and the three of us sitting cross-legged on the floor and casting handfuls of rice when the priest instructed. What luck to marry into a tradition that engages in such flagrant pageantry. The colors and the burning incense envelop my senses and evoke otherworldliness and awe.
But to this white guy raised nominally Christian, it makes no sense at all.
The priest, a fellow in his 30s wearing a white veshti, chants not in Hindi, the most common language in India, nor in Tamil, the native tongue of Mummy’s people, but in Sanskrit, which is a language rarely spoken by anyone other than priests. Contemporary Hindu ceremonies are like the Latin liturgies that the Catholic church abandoned long ago. Visit almost any church in America and you’ll get your prayers in English, but go into a Hindu temple in the deep South, and one overhears a nonsensical conversation between monks and gods.
At times the priest leans forward and prompts me, the man of the house yet the least Hindu person in the building, to chant after him. I repeat the Sanskrit sounds best I could. Some I get my tongue around and some I mangle so thoroughly that he makes me repeat them in smaller bites, in order that the gods not miss our humble memo.
Then Mummy’s father and I ‘shave’ Dubsie’s head. We snip off a few locks that the priests guides us to wrap in yellow cloths. With that we are pretty much done. Even the gods would have noticed, however, that our toddler still had a towering and vanity-inducing mop of hair.
When Mummy was a child, her mottai was conducted at Tirupati, a temple on a hill in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh famous across the Hindu world. This hair tonsuring, as it’s formally known, produces from Tirupati’s pilgrims a ton of hair a day. All that the ritual in Atlanta requires is that a few locks be cut. But in Tirupati at the age of two, Mummy was seated in her father’s lap while a barber shaved her bald with a straight razor. If Mummy went all the way, we determined, so would Dubsie.
So we drive across town to a Great Clips.
 There, we are received by Fallon, a woman with thick glasses, plunging décolletage and some creative arm tattoos. I lift Dubsie into the chair, and Fallon surrounds her with a smock and sets to work without delay. I expect to have my staff-photographer duties interrupted by a bawling Dubsie, but no. She is as calm as could be. (Or as oblivious as could be, like her Daddy at the temple.).
We bring her home to family with a buzzcut and a bindi on her forehead. Dubsie is now even more adorable than before — no poofy hair to distract me from her big bright eyes and those comical eyebrows. I rub her sandpapery head with affection. If a goal of the mottai is to vanquish pride in Dubsie’s appearance, then I am unvanquished. Maybe I’m the one who deserves the razor.
April 19th, 2015  Washington, D.C. is tough on lawns. Ours would seem easy enough to care for — it’s only twelve by sixteen feet — but the winter taxes the grass with a few good freezings. In the spring, the ground explodes with life, and any clumps of grass thas survived the winter are swallowed by creepers or die in the shadow of towering, ambitious weeds.
And they wonder why there’s so few grassroots movements in the nation’s capital.
Last year, with Dubsie in the picture, we took a drastic step. We had some guys install a fake lawn. “Install” is the right word; it was actually nailed into place, on top of thick layers of sand and gravel that are supposed to defeat even the crabgrass.
Now, after weathering the coldest and most brutal winter of our six years here, we go out there every evening we can. (“Outside??” Dubsie reminds us again and again. “¿Afuera?“) Two lawn chairs are perched on our new, narrow flagstone patio. Dubsie tools around with a blue medicine ball and her Kettler tricycle. Whenever a stroller or dog appears she she rushes to the cast-iron fence, which also forms a psychological barrier against the neighborhood drunks.
Let’s call this lawn what it is. It’s astroturf. But I do appreciate stepping outside at the end of a workday and not extricating Dubsie from puddles and nettles.
When Dubsie is feeling brave she ventures into the neighbors’ yard. By mid-April it is crisscrossed by menacing gangs of clover. She makes her way slowly, picking the heads off a couple of dandelions and wending her way over to a little boulder that sits right at the edge of the lot, by the fence, just at the corner of the street, where she commands a view of all the taxis and bicycles and homeboys and gay couples that come from any of four directions.
She sits there quietly, almost contemplatively, on her rock island amid the roughage. It is her first solo wilderness experience.
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