I Can’t Just Say “It’s Seven O’Clock Somewhere”

Today I woke up–the last time I woke up, I mean–at about 12:20 p.m. I guess you could say my leadership in the area of getting the household on a workable schedule is not what it could be.

The heir apparent is resisting sleeping in the bassinet again. Pretty sure this is his mother’s fault. She let him sleep in the bed for several days without telling me, and he got spoiled immediately. He would yell like crazy when she put him in the bassinet. I fixed this problem. I told her to let him cry, and it changed his disposition for the better in one day. I think he is reverting because she is getting around the no-sleeping-in-bed rule by letting him fall asleep with her in bed during the day.

There are two layers of resistance I have to deal with. His and hers.

He will sleep if she fills him up with milk and lets him pass out. She takes his unconscious form and moves it to the bassinet, and he keeps sleeping. But it just so happens we run out of milk between 10 p.m. and midnight, so guess when he finally fills up? The wee, wee hours.

Now it sounds like I’m talking about a different subject.

I have realized that I, a male, have to take over the feeding plan. I started buying protein shakes and bars, and we have a big can of pure protein powder on the way. If the web is giving me the straight poop, we need to try to get something like 100 grams of protein into the wife every day in order to keep the baby fed, and to put that in perspective, a large egg has 6 grams, so 100 grams would run, what, seventy-five dollars?

I am also pushing her to drink water. She forgets.

We have to build up a reserve so we can knock him out–I mean feed him responsibly–regardless of the hour.

It’s not that easy getting food and drink into my wife. If you told me I needed to drink half a gallon of water, I’d drink one half-liter bottle in 15 seconds, a second within the next minute, and the rest would be drunk within no more than 45 minutes. Wouldn’t mean a thing to me. For some reason, my wife is different. It takes her several minutes to drink one bottle.

The baby appears to take after me, to put it mildly. She says he drank 7 ounces of milk in one feeding yesterday.

She has a hard time with pills, too. I have no problem swallowing a half-dozen huge supplements at once, but she has trouble getting one large capsule down.

I don’t know if my wife has an accurate picture of the lifestyle she signed on for. The web says women should pump milk 8-12 times per day. In other words, normal sleep isn’t even something they should consider. The goal shouldn’t be to have a pleasant life during the first three months of a baby’s life. It should be to get the job done and accept a schedule most Chinese factory slaves wouldn’t trade for.

Sometimes she expresses shock or dismay when she finds out what she has to do. My response? “You decided to have a baby.” I tell her I know she is suffering, but it serves no purpose to discuss it as though there were a way around it. There isn’t, so discussion just promotes an escapist mindset and delays getting down to necessary tasks. The only productive thing is to do what you have to do.

I take jobs off of her. I tell her I understand this is a tough time for her. I try to make sure I’m not pushing too hard. But I am not going to stop, because if I do, there will be chaos.

After another month, things will get much easier. We just have to get there.

I have learned that when I know I absolutely have to do something unpleasant, I will get up and do it. If I think there is a way around it, however, I will waste a lot of time pitying myself and trying to craft an escape. This is why I tell my wife there is no way to avoid her tasks. It’s why I remind her she chose this challenge. In the end, it makes things easier on her. When she resigns herself to what she has to do, the peace it brings her is obvious, and it ends contention between us.

She needs me to reinforce her. She almost always knows what has to be done, but temptation creeps in, and she dithers. If I reinforce her, she stops dithering and bucks up.

I plan to take this approach with the boy, too. Unless he’s an exceptional kid, he will try to find ways to weasel out of things. My mother used to enable me when I shirked, and it did my character a lot of harm. It made me mushy and lazy. My son will pick up his toys and put them in a box. He will sit down and do his homework. He will take whatever shots I tell him to take. If he tries to get his mother on his side and divide us, he will wish he hadn’t.

This is what husbands and fathers are supposed to do. When my dad was stern with me, often it was for selfish reasons. He wasn’t a completely worthless father, but a lot of his parenting–perhaps most–was based on a desire to get out of parenting and get back to the TV. Often, he was also motivated by anger. He was often tough about the wrong things. When I’m tough, it’s not because I’m angry or I want to be excused from doing my job. I take stands because I know how things will deteriorate if I don’t. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t do it for myself.

A long time ago, my dad and I anchored his boat in Honeymoon Harbor south of Bimini. We had guests. In the evening, I checked some bearings, and it looked like our anchor was dragging. We seemed to be headed toward the shoals to our south.

I told my dad, and he didn’t want to deal with it. Getting a big boat off of sand would have been very difficult, and it would probably have cost a lot of money, but he wanted to sleep. I said I couldn’t go to bed until we knew things were okay. He said there was no point in both of us staying awake, so he turned in for the night.

A father can’t act like that. He has to be the person who takes the most responsibility, stands up, and does the hard, thankless jobs.

A while back, a tropical storm came close to us, and we got a lot of rain. I realized one of our roof gutters was overflowing. I had cleaned it out recently, but I had underestimated the amount of leaves that had fallen since. They had clogged things up.

I climbed out a window in the rain and sat on the roof scooping leaves into a bucket so I could dump them on the grass below. I fired up a leaf blower and shot air up the downspouts to blow leaves out. I got a ladder out and used it to scoop up leaves I couldn’t reach from the roof.

I told my wife to call the EMT’s if I fell.

It was no fun at all, but it absolutely had to be done in order to avoid a huge water intrusion that could have cost thousands in the end. Nobody else was available to help. Waiting wasn’t an option. There was no way around the job. It’s an example of the type of challenge that requires you to shut up immediately and get to work.

I just talked to the wife, and I told her no more breastfeeding in bed. She agrees. She wants to sleep, so she is open to ideas. She is more amenable to being led when her approach is causing her trouble.

Now it’s time to get up, attack the protein problem, attack the scheduling problem, and fix it so we don’t get up in the afternoon again tomorrow. I failed this week, but with God’s help, I should be able to get us back on track quickly.

Still Richer Than You

I was wrong about something, sort of.

I predicted that leftists would rise up and turn American into one big riot zone when Trump took office for the second time, but it didn’t happen. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because everyone expected it, responses were prepared, and leftist terrorists are cowards. They don’t like committing their crimes when they think arrest and prosecution are serious possibilities. Nobody wants to be fired from Starbucks over an arson rap.

If they weren’t cowards, they wouldn’t wear masks.

While I was wrong to think a sudden conflagration of stupidity would arise, I believe I was right to think leftists would go nuts eventually. Look at what they’re doing to Teslas, chargers, and dealerships. Keying and burning cars and chargers. Trying to burn dealerships. Road-raging at innocent drivers, many of whom surely agree with their politics. Historically, the Tesla has been a badge of left-wing envirokooks.

Now some wackjob has created a website doxxing every Tesla owner and encouraging crimes against them. This is historic. We have seen leftists dox and torment people in the past, but this is a new low. It is the mainstreaming of Democrat terrorism.

A failed vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, gloated in public about the damage the vandals are doing, saying he got a boost from watching Tesla stock drop. Never mind that the state he governs holds a huge amount of Tesla stock in order to support state-employee pensions. Even as recently as 2000, you could not have convinced me that a major political figure would pop up on the web celebrating the results of domestic terrorism.

Instead of a quick kneejerk response, we seem to be seeing something more gradual; more like what happens as a baby becomes aware its diaper is dirty. The smiles fade. A frown appears. Groans begin. Soon, the mouth is screaming and the arms are flailing. It’s diaper Defcon 1.

With regard to “liberals” (not worthy of the name, without quotation marks), we are probably at Defcon 3, approaching 2. The military says Defcon 3 is “a readiness posture that requires certain portions of the assigned forces to assume an increased readiness posture above that of normal readiness.”

Leftists have forced our president and AG to make policy changes to combat Tesla-related crimes. I would call that “increased readiness.”

They seem to think they can break Elon Musk financially by making people afraid to buy Teslas and become their victims. That’s a very unsound theory.

I checked, and Musk’s stake in Tesla comes in at around 100 billion dollars. That’s something like 25% of his worth. If the terrorists manage to hurt Tesla really badly, say to the tune of 50%, Musk’s share will go down to around 50 billion. That will leave him with a paltry fortune amounting to an insignificant $350 billion.

Perhaps these figures are a little off, but the principle is correct.

So you terrorize innocent people, you subject yourself to prosecution, you ruin your employment prospects (could matter to some leftists), you destroy your reputation, and the net result is that the guy you hate only has two million times the median net worth.

Two MILLION.

Trying to destroy Elon Musk’s wealth by keying Teslas is like trying to tear down the Taj Mahal with a sharpened popsicle stick.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have even one billion dollars. What would I do with it? Sometimes I ask myself, and invariably, one thing comes to mind: I would get my truck painted. I used to think I would start flying my wife and myself around in first class, but now we have a baby, so it may be a decade before either of us sees the inside of a jet again. Anyway, a billionaire is an extremely rich person. Musk could lose around 99.75% of his worth and still be freakishly rich.

It is amazing that any leftist is stupid enough to get excited because Tesla stock drops a few points. Math isn’t for everyone, though.

Here’s what would really sting leftists if they knew it: they may not have hurt Tesla at all. Sure, the stock is way down from its peak, but that peak occurred before Trump took office, and the stock started declining in December. Also, Tesla has problems unrelated to Donald Trump.

Tesla stock has always been volatile. Tesla makes trendy gadgetry that doesn’t appeal to everyone. Its popularity waxes and wanes. I doubt Tesla stock would have continued shooting up this winter had Musk not joined DOGE, and I don’t think the vandals will be able to depress the price forever.

Personally, I am not a Tesla fan. I don’t care what anyone says; the cars are not ready for most Americans. The solar roofs are ridiculous. I was quoted something like $200,000, the roof would have been very ugly, and I would still have had to pay for electricity. Going “off-grid” is illegal in Florida. My feelings don’t matter, though, because enough people love Tesla to insure its long-term survival.

For the most part, the Tesla terrorists will hurt themselves more than anyone else, but they are still interesting because they are part of an increase in lawlessness, and lawlessness is a feature of the end times. Childishness and disorder will increase. Satan loves rebels, and he is doing a great job of turning human beings against order and legitimate authority. After all, he was the first leftist. Heaven’s failed revolutionary, exiled to the roof of hell.

We now have a political party largely dedicated to lawlessness. Lawless prosecutors have been appointed in major cities. Lawless mayors and state governments defy federal immigration authorities, even when it clearly benefits child rapists and murderers. Lawless judges are making patently absurd and even unethical decisions in order to harm a president they don’t like. And Trump himself is fomenting lawlessness to some extent. He rails against judges who disagree with him and says they should be impeached, which isn’t always true. A president should not do that. He strives to find ways to flout judicial authority. He quoted Napoleon, who said, “He who saves his country violates no law.” Apart from being facially absurd, this is a dangerous philosophy, and leftists are throwing it back in Trump’s face to justify their unending crimes.

I love President Trump, and I support him, but he is not Yeshua. He is a friend of Christians, but he is no man of God. He is not Spirit-led, and he sometimes does things that advance the agenda of the Antichrist, just as all leftists do.

I have always been disturbed by Christians who say Trump is the solution to our problems. Trump is a lot better than the alternatives, but he is still a secular figure.

I wonder about the Tesla-scratchers. Are they a temporary problem that will subside, or are they the seed of a larger revolutionary army of violent morons who will finally bring about a civil war?

Whatever the answer is, in addition to sinning and ruining their own lives, they are failing to harm the man and the ideology they hate. It is a pathetic spectacle of infantile self-destruction. Like leftism itself.

There’s a Person in There

It has only been 4 days since my last report on my son, but he seems to have changed a lot during that time.

When we brought him home, he was a jiggly ball of flesh that pooped and yelled. There was a little more to him than that, but not a whole lot more. He wasn’t totally incapable of thinking. He was smart enough to decide he liked bottles better than his mother. He did have a very limited number of modes, though. Angry mode. Hungry mode.

Actually, I think that covers it.

This month, everything changed. At first, we got glimmers of smiles. Now, he has periods of obvious, overwhelming happiness. This is nice, because in the beginning, he didn’t seem to have much in the way of positive emotions. He has also developed a very strong attachment to his mom.

I guess it makes sense that newborns aren’t the most positive people on Earth. It doesn’t do a newborn a great deal of good to tell the world he’s happy, but if he’s upset, everyone around him will try to fix his problem.

His negativity was a test of our patience. You want to be upbeat with your newborn, but it can be trying when you’re getting somewhere between zero and 4 hours of sleep a night and every time you interact with him, he screams as loud as he can, sometimes for quite a while. When the positivity starts to show up, you feel weight dropping off your shoulders. You realize how hard you were working, contributing virtually everything to the relationship and absorbing the very real pain of loud crying.

He screamed when he was hungry. He screamed when we changed him. He screamed when we bathed him. He screamed while he tried to poop. He screamed for other reasons we never figured out.

When a baby is screaming, you feel pressed to fix him, but often, you don’t succeed. Repeated failure leads to a feeling of powerlessness, like the feeling you get when you try to contact an airline for customer support. It’s discouraging, but you can’t quit.

At least with a baby, you know the problem isn’t that an entire industry is designed to cheat you.

Here’s an interesting thing I never thought about until this week: adults lose their voices, but babies don’t. They keep right on going. If I screamed as much as a baby, I’d lose my voice in an hour. How do they do it?

Earlier this week, we noticed that he was smiling a lot more than he had the week before. Yesterday and the day before, things really ramped up. Now he lights up with joy. His whole face shines with it. And we are finding out how to make it happen.

His favorite thing is the diaper game. You flop him onto the changing pad, and while he’s lying there, you take a new diaper and put it over his face. Then you pull it away. Then you put it back. Then you pull it away. He thinks this is the greatest activity there is. You put the diaper on a face that looks moderately happy, and when you pull it away, the smile is wide, the eyes are shining, and he is wiggling in ecstasy.

It also works with other objects, but right now, the diaper is king.

Yesterday, he started whacking his hanging toys in a much more vigorous, prolonged, and determined way. He must have gone half an hour the last time.

He has started trying to talk. It’s not impressive. He’s not ready to give elocution lessons. But it’s definitely an effort to speak. No words, obviously, but he is trying to express himself.

He thinks his mom is the greatest. She started spending more time with him in order to deal with some feeding issues, so they ended up lying in bed together a lot. He can’t get enough.

His new thing is the mom alarm. He sleeps next to her with one hand against her side to make sure she’s always there. If she breaks contact, he wakes up and and lets her know how he feels about it.

Their closeness has caused a problem. He wants to sleep with her all the time. I don’t always know what’s happening at night, because I conk out and sleep with a recently-developed dogged determination. I learned she has been letting him lie next to her all night.

Babies are not supposed to sleep in their parents’ beds. This is a new rule. New by my standards. They sometimes get crushed and suffocated. Also, adult beds are softer than baby beds, and it is believed the lack of support can cause crib death by making it harder for babies to breathe.

You’re not supposed to let babies sleep on their stomachs. You can’t even let them sleep on their sides. Because our son has been sleeping with Mom, he has gotten used to sleeping on his side. He also rolls onto his stomach to sleep.

I didn’t know this was happening, or I would have done something.

Now he hollers when we put him in the bassinet, and regardless of where he is, he may try to roll over. His mother wants to let him be, because moms spoil their kids. I have to be bad cop parent and put everything right. Now Mom is the parent who makes life cushy and cozy, and Dad is the guy who shows up to ruin everything.

We have to put him in the bassinet from now on, except when everyone is awake, and he is going to yell until he realizes he’s not going to get his way. Mom thinks it’s bad to let him yell. Dad knows it’s important for him to learn that yelling won’t always get him what he wants. He has to learn he can’t have everything his way all the time. Otherwise, he will sleep however he wants, and we could wake up childless one morning.

Mushy thinkers believe babies this young can’t be spoiled, but it’s very obvious they can, so I pay no attention to them. My son can’t be allowed to run the house. He can’t be encouraged in manipulating us.

When my sister was tiny, she used to tell adults off. She would put her hands on her hips and lay into them. The family thought it was funny, and they encouraged her. She became a hopeless brat and manipulator.

She always have to have her way. If you don’t do what she asks, she makes you miserable until you do, even if it’s something unimportant. No one can stand her. She has no real friends. Both of her parents said God should take her if she wasn’t going to change. She lost her law license, and she will never get it back. She has a felony conviction, as well as some felonies that were hushed up. She was disinherited more than once. That’s what can happen when you let your soft heart put your child in charge.

When a baby is very, very young, it’s important to get up and act when there is trouble, and sometimes its cries indicate real problems. This conditions you to get up and bounce around the house like a frantic pinball every time the baby isn’t happy. That mindset has to be recognized and destroyed. It’s not appropriate after the first few weeks. Eventually, your child has to get up and bounce around when YOU make noise. Your child has to fear you.

The “milestone” guidelines are not always helpful. They say a baby should not sleep on his back until he’s a year old. They say he should not sleep on his back until he’s at least 7 months old. They also say he should not sleep on his back until he can roll onto his stomach and back onto his back by himself. Who is right?

I think this kid will be rolling over both ways, at will, within a month. He is extremely strong and vigorous. His neck is like a steel spring. He kicks like a mule. The only thing preventing him from walking is his inability to balance.

He keeps exceeding expectations. I don’t know whether this is normal. I didn’t know it could happen. It must be a big blessing, but here we are, first-child parents, tabula rasa, and it’s one more challenge we have to figure out without much help.

What do we do when he is fully able to decide how he wants to sleep? We can’t stand next to the bassinet from dusk till dawn, turning him over repeatedly. Is it okay to tie his hands? No idea. If he can roll over, and he’s only 4 months old, should we let him do what he wants?

We have to find out.

Personally, I have doubts about the whole crib death approach. My best guess is that demons cause it, and medical science will never admit that. I have seen demons, Yeshua has visited me, and I have received miracles, so my outlook is different.

It’s very common for demons to attack people in their sleep. For some reason, demons love to stand beside beds or at the foot or head. It’s common for people to wake up and see them. I’ve seen a lot of them. My mother saw one. You probably know people who have seen them.

One thing they love is to shut off your air and paralyze you. When they do this, you may not be able to move, speak, or breathe. I have never been unable to breathe during these events, but I have had a very hard time speaking. Sometimes when these attacks occur, you will see demons in your dreams.

Many years ago, in a dream, I saw a beautiful young woman. I asked her who she was, and she said, “I’m a demon.” She pointed her right hand at me, and I could barely speak. I don’t remember how I worked it out. At least she told the truth.

I’ve told about the funniest demon visit I received. It happened here in this house. I woke up and saw a strange shape over the bed. I can’t recall exactly how it looked, and it wasn’t clearly defined, but I could tell it was feminine. It arched over the bed like a crane.

Demons don’t scare me at all, but I really hate them. When I saw this thing, I was furious. Not fully aware of what I was doing, I said, “Get out, BITCH.”

I doubt Yeshua ever said that to a demon.

I think crib death is caused by spirits that overcome weak and/or unprotected babies. I don’t think it could happen here. Since my wife and I have been together physically, spirits have not come to the bed.

This boy is developing fast, so I have to get on top of things. I thought I had a long time to prepare the house. Maybe I don’t. Kitchen knives, chemicals, tools…what if he starts getting into stuff next month?

It’s nice to see his systems come online, even if we’re not ready for all of it. He smiles when we change him. He likes his baths. He can see us and follow motion at least a couple of yards off. We’re getting a much-needed return on our investment. It will be great when everything is operational.

I just heard some squawking. Looks like someone is up and ready to give orders and present demands. Maybe if I stay in here just a little longer and stay really quiet, Mom will change him before I go check on him.

Another Day Free of Furious Pansies

Those heartless, selfish, entitled conservatives. I don’t know how much more I can stand.

Today my conservative neighbor really outdid himself. He texted me out of the blue and asked if he could send a wheel loader over to pull a stump out of my yard and move it to my burn pile.

The nerve of some people.

This is the same MAGA creep who showed up the morning after a tropical storm came through, cut a downed tree in two places, and moved it off my driveway.

How I miss Miami, where people showed up to do thoughtful things like parking their cars in the yard for parties and destroying the grass, stealing Xenon headlights and oriental rugs, and yelling at me for leaving my truck in the street for 30 seconds.

I miss the kids who egged my car and shot a ball bearing through the rear windshield of my truck. I miss the great neighbors who carried their trash across the street to put it in my pile.

I really miss the salsa fans who had loud parties in spite of noise ordinances, keeping me awake through closed windows until past 2 a.m. on weekend nights. It was great how they never cleared this with their neighbors or invited us. Being taken by surprise made it extra special and showed us how important we were to them. Those thoughtful, altruistic Hispanic customs always make for tranquil neighborhoods.

Is it racist to say it seems like everyone wants to live among white people? I guess it is, because they also want to live among people from Japan, Korea, and China. Leaving East Asians out must be racist.

Hispanic and black NEIGHBORS can be fantastic. Hispanic and black neighborHOODS, not so much. No one ever starts to worry when whites, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese move in next door.

I think the biggest problem with white neighbors is our tendency to form HOA’s. It shows why white people were the ones who invented Nazism.

It wouldn’t really make sense to count me as white when it comes to HOA’s. I’m a Southerner, and as far as I know, every last one of us hates HOA’s. But many of us can’t tell the difference between a front yard and a junkyard.

My current neighbor has a land-clearing business, so big machinery goes in and out from time to time. He put a couple of pole barns up, and he parks things under them. I could not care less. Anyone stupid enough to complain about a friendly neighbor who has a wheel loader and a backhoe should be barred from owning real estate.

We had a long conversation today. Due to my misanthrope status, he knows the other neighbors better than I do, and he gave me the lowdown on them. I already knew the people to the north were mentally ill because they had Biden signs, but he says they are hard core. The guy across the road from them is a jerk who flipped out because the land-clearing guy trimmed trees that hung over his property. He also trespassed to see what the land-clearing guy was doing on his own land. I believe he also had the Biden virus.

The wheel loader guy wants to park a big truck on his land at night. Ask me if I care. I thought he was already doing it. He is going to have to appear before some kind of county board or other. He wanted to know if I would write a letter. Of course I will. If he wanted to have a steady flow of big trucks up and down our road, I would not be happy, but going in and out once a day? Who cares?

We discussed the subdivision that borders us on the south. They are giving him hell because he sort of trespasses. The subdivision consists of little hobby horse farms, and there is a clear area that goes around it like a moat. It’s a bridle path. For many years, a family in the subdivision has been letting his family cross the path to enter their property to visit and swim.

He also drove small vehicles onto the path and went around looking for debris he could move for them, free of charge. He sometimes dumped the debris on his own property.

Now they’re mad, and they expect him to drive a mile and go around a bunch of properties to visit his friends. I think this is stupid. You never turn down free debris disposal. They should sign a paper saying he doesn’t have an easement, and they should let him continue to go over there as long as he owns his house. As things stand, he is not planning to move debris any more.

Has an HOA ever done anything good? They certainly do stupid things. The other day, I saw a story about an HOA that forces everyone to keep their garage doors raised. So no tools, I guess? No belongings allowed in garages?

The HOA president is a reasonable guy who always wants to make peace, but it seems some of the blue-state transplants who live there have not figured out that this isn’t Massachusetts.

While we were talking, I found out the loader guy is raising pigs. I had no idea. I told him we had deed restrictions that barred raising pigs. First time he had heard of it.

He said he kept them on mulch to kill the stink. It must work, because I’ve never smelled anything. I told him I didn’t care if he raised elephants as long as they didn’t smell. I also said he shouldn’t tell the other neighbors.

I was actually glad to know he had pigs, because if times get hard, pigs will be necessary. They are the cheapest source of four-legged protein. If they can be raised here on the QT, it could keep my family fed some day. Although I suppose deed restrictions won’t mean much if things get that bad.

He has three kids. He told me they don’t get to use screens. No video games. Brilliant. They’ll develop their brains instead of just their thumbs.

I invited my neighbor to come use the shooting berm whenever he wants, and I am probably going to hire him to remove some stumps. I should take them some brownies to show gratitude for the help.

What are people in blue cities doing today? Trying not to make eye contact with perpetually-enraged pansies looking for reasons to bully them. Waiting for oil protesters to have their hands unglued from the roads they use to get to work. Being arrested for defending themselves. Sitting in lawyers’ offices, trying to find ways to prevent their kids from being taken away and pumped full of wrong-sex hormones.

I don’t know if I will ever fully appreciate how blessed we are.

Clearly a Form of Squatting

I guess I should provide a report on our parenting experience.

My son is making his way through his second month on Earth. He is healthy and about as well-adjusted as a baby can be. Even the good ones scream a lot. He has put weight on faster than expected. This morning, we had to retire a romper that was supposed to last him several more weeks.

He has a funny toe that will need to be looked at, but he has no other problems, and he has never been sick. That’s a good thing, because his mother will surely flip out the first time mucus starts running out of that little nose.

He is still very strong for his age. He was the product of an induced labor because of his weight and his gigantic head, so he should be behind other babies, but handling him is like wrestling an alligator. From the time he was two or three weeks old, he has been able to lie on his stomach, push himself up with his arms, and hold his head up. He has never complained about being placed on his stomach, although his mother is afraid that if he goes more than 5 minutes, we’ll have to make a new baby.

We were having him checked out, and the doctor started hollering, “This is four months!” I had no idea what he meant. He’s Nigerian. It turned out he was talking about my son’s strength. He had lifted my son by his arms, and my son held his head up. The doctor was amazed. My son was a month old, and the doctor said he shouldn’t have been able to hold his head up until he hit four months. Which makes you wonder why the doctor did the test.

His legs are very strong. He has no problem holding himself and even jumping as long as I provide balance. When I hold him across my lap in a recliner, I have to make sure he doesn’t push against the arm with his feet and leap out onto the floor.

I don’t think he knows what his hands are, but he grabs things with them all the time.

We had to take the newborn pads out of his car seat, and he has been in second-stage diapers for a while now.

Mom says he gives off masculine energy. No argument there. You could look at this kid from a quarter mile and know he was a boy. He is rambunctious and vigorous. His voice sounds masculine. He thrashes around and punches and kicks his parents. He doesn’t cry when he gets hit in the head with a phone or banged against the inside of the utility sink. I don’t think the mental illnesses of homosexuality and gender confusion will be issues. Like my mother would have said, he’s as rough as a cob.

He has started smiling for the right reasons. We think. Experts say early smiles are based on gas or other disappointing causes, but he is coming up on the age when babies smile because they’re happy, and as usual, he is a little bit ahead. He likes to whine and holler when I change his diaper, so I play with him and bug him until he smiles, just to ruin the fun of being in a bad mood.

He has giggled occasionally for a week or two. That’s a relief. You get tired of a baby who has three modes: angry, hungry, and sleepy. When he engages, it makes you feel like you’re dealing with a person, not just an object that requires constant maintenance.

I don’t know how the parents of autistic kids survive without reinforcement from their children. Now that we’re getting some real feedback from our son, we realize how draining it was to do without it.

We’re learning how to cope with him. At first, every cry seemed important and was taken as an urgent call for help, and we didn’t know which cry meant what. Now we realize some of the crying is just plain stupid, so we’re not always supposed to jump up to help him. We are also better at figuring out whether he’s hungry or trying to poop. Those are the two main reasons he cries.

When he starts the poop cry, you don’t grab him and change his diaper. If you do that, he finishes pooping right after you put the new diaper on him, or maybe while you’re trying to stuff him into it. You let him wait until he shuts up. Then there’s a pretty good chance he’s finished.

Experts say babies aren’t suffering when they do the poop cry. Apparently it’s a way of building up pressure behind the poop to push it out. When he does the poop cry, as soon as the poop moves, he goes back to being cheerful and oblivious. Instantly. If he were in pain, he wouldn’t do that.

We haven’t figured out how to identify the tired cry, but then we’re not sure he ever gets tired. He routinely keeps us up until past 1 a.m. Right now, he is feeding as often as once an hour, so we don’t get a lot of windows during which we can put him to bed.

We found out that babies get a growth spurt at about 6 weeks, and when this happens, they may want to feed just about all the time. Of course, he got there a week or so early, and we didn’t know what was happening.

The hungry cry is pretty easy to spot, because he balls up his fists.

Boredom is something knew we’re going to have to figure out. I’m afraid this kid may be very, very smart. It could happen. His grandparents on my side were past the Mensa cutoff, I’m smarter than they were, and his mother is smart. I don’t know anything about my wife’s parents because they died young.

Leftism-tainted science tries to tell us any baby will be smart if given the right treatment, but it’s a huge lie. Genetics determine the child’s range of abilities, and you can’t move the high side by making him listen to Mozart. As for the low side, you could drop him on his head or raise him on a vegan diet that stunts brain growth.

People who aren’t smart very rarely have smart kids. I’m sure you can make a kid somewhat smarter or less smart by raising him in certain ways, but if Dad is a theoretical physicist and Mom is making advances in quantum computing, there is just about no possibility that Junior will not be very sharp, and if the parents are average, they aren’t likely to raise the next Archimedes.

If he’s really bright, it would explain some of the mystifying crying we’ve seen. I thought he was kind of like a potato with eyes, but I have learned that even at this age, babies want mental stimulation, and if he’s smart, he needs more of it.

I am not one of those parents whose mission is to create the next Leibniz. Those people are really misguided, perhaps because they’re not all that bright, themselves. They don’t know what it’s like to be truly, exceptionally bright, so they think intelligence is the answer to all of life’s problems. It’s not. A human being needs a relationship with the Holy Spirit, good habits, and a good personality in order to be a success, and by “success,” I mean a person who is saved and has a peaceful life of victory, love, and abundance.

I don’t mean a miserable, antisocial nerd who makes millions in tech, hangs out with incels and has no empathy. I certainly don’t mean a driven, spoiled athlete who throws up before every competition and can’t make himself believe Daddy loves him unless he wins trophies.

My wife wants our son to be a genius. Genius is lonely. It’s also not necessary. You can be a great surgeon or a good engineer without qualifying for Mensa. You can run an extremely profitable business you love without breaking into the top half of your high school class.

I would rather see my son go into business than a profession. College is the gateway to hell these days.

Genius makes it hard for you to find a mate. If you’re male and your IQ is 170, you’re going to be miserable with a 125 wife, and if you’re female, you’re going to need a 175+ husband unless you want to feel like your husband is your child.

Women need their husbands to be more intelligent than they are. They have a hard time dealing with men who can’t lead. They resent them. We’re not supposed to say this, but it’s true.

Math is merciless. If you’re in the 95th percentile, there aren’t many people in your dating pool.

If our son turns out to be really smart, I’ll teach him to cope with it. I’ll teach him he doesn’t always have to correct people. I’ll try to help him not to be snotty. I’ll tell him to be patient with others. I’ll keep telling him God will be distant from him unless he’s humble.

I’ll make sure he understands that brains and talents don’t make him more valuable than other people.

Anyway, we are doing a very poor job of occupying his mind, so I am going to work on it. He has a weird “baby gym” consisting of a colorful mat with hanging toys, a mirror, and an annoying keyboard he can play with his feet or his forehead, but he isn’t on it enough. I have been getting some other things. I am going to try to find things I can do with him, now that he is emerging from the potato stage. Eventually, we will find pursuits that will reduce his boredom.

He will start languages as early as possible, because they’re really easy for toddlers and babies. He will start music as soon as he is willing. Three isn’t too early. He will start reading at three or earlier. He will be introduced to math early. The other stuff…no one cares. You can learn history and so on when you’re 75. The abilities to learn languages, music, reading, and math drop off fast during childhood.

Here’s a great tip for coping with crying: get a set of Bluetooth earmuffs for shooting and connect them to your PC or TV. When the wife and baby make a racket, you will still be able to hear important things like The Lego Movie.

It works on wives whether you have kids or not, but you didn’t read that here.

Hygiene is getting easier. I insisted on getting a mesh seat and a sprayer for our utility sink, and they really help. At first, Mom was horrified by the idea of putting him in a utility sink, but now that she has changed about 3,000 poopy plastic burritos, she is all for it.

He got a little diaper rash, and she thought it was because I was scraping him with wipes. I learned that wipes don’t hurt babies, and I also learned you really need to dig in there and get everything out.

Poop bacteria turn pee into ammonia. Also, poo contains protease and lipase, two enzymes that eat flesh. Put it all together, and you get diaper rash. Scraping with wipes doesn’t cause rash. It prevents it.

A forceful stream of warm water is better than wipes. It cleans better, and it surely must feel better on irritated skin.

Our new policy is to hose him off late in the day so he will be cleaner during his longest time between changes. He likes the sprayer, so everyone is happy.

We have found that Vaseline is number one for the butt. We tried some expensive stuff, and he got worse. Now, I put on a glove, scoop out a generous portion of Vaseline, and pack it in there. Thank God for gloves.

I read that baking soda reduces the activity of ammonia and the enzymes. I don’t know if it’s true.

He no longer shrieks every time we change him, so we must be doing something right.

We got him a motorized swing. Everyone suggested it. These things move babies around and relax them. We got it for ourselves; let’s be honest. Anything that shuts him up is a blessing.

We stuck him in it, and he loved it. Went right to sleep. Then, of course, the world burst our bubble.

My wife read that you can’t let a baby sleep in a swing. What’s the purpose, then? I would really like to know. She also read that if he’s in a swing too long, he’ll get a flat spot on his head.

After listening to enough screaming, you start to ask yourself how much flatness is acceptable.

We could let him grow his hair long. Tell him he was born that way.

I have come to understand what’s wrong with baby swings. They’re too small. They need to make them big enough for parents. Put the baby in a broom closet and swing your way to relief.

An idea for a more enlightened age.

That’s about it. I guess talking will be the next major event. My mother said my sister spoke sentences at 6 months, so when I was merely very early, she thought I might be retarded. I don’t know what to expect from this one.

He better say nice things about his parents. We don’t have a broom closet, but I could build one.

Here’s a photo from earlier this month:

If you want good family photos, don’t pay a professional, learn about things like composition, and never EVER warn your wife or daughters before you shoot. Women ruin photos with their poses and preparation. Women have a range of about 5 trite poses you see over and over on the web, and unless you want your memories to look like Instagram, you need to shoot first and ask permission later.

Our son is unbelievably funny. We both enjoy him tremendously. I suppose things will be even better when he starts interacting more.

The Earth is a Garden, not a Factory

I learned something interesting today. Preachers tell us the Bible says were are to “die to self,” but that phrase and variants of it are not in the Bible at all. I don’t know who made it up or how long preachers have been saying it.

Yesterday, I heard Derek Prince mention dying to self, and I got what I thought was a revelation. When I learned that “die to self” was not in the Bible, I wondered if the revelation was real.

I have always had the feeling that if I “died to self,” it would mean I became a sort of doormat vagrant, living in poverty and letting people treat me however they wanted. I thought it meant ascetism. I thought I would have to give up everything I liked. I knew there was no way I could do it.

Yesterday, I thought about something I have been doing over the last year or two. I find myself thinking too much, trying to solve my own problems using my own limited mind. When I realize I’m doing this, I start speaking in tongues and prophesying, and I tell God I have no interest in my own thoughts. They come from a very limited and corrupt mind, compared to God’s mind, and they cause trouble.

Psalm 37 says, “Cease from anger and abandon anger. Don’t worry yourself; it only causes harm.” When I have a problem, my natural tendency, like that of every other intelligent creature, is to chew on it and toss it like a dog playing with a bone or a kid licking a loose tooth. It’s stupid, because it leads to stress, and I come up with bad ideas that make things worse or, at least, don’t give me better solutions God has in mind.

This is how the Talmud was written, not to mention a huge percentage of denominational doctrine. It’s how Catholics ended up worshiping statues and coins and writing about the brilliance of ancient Greek perverts like Aristotle.

I spend a lot of time conceiving ideas and trying to make sense of life. A natural person would think these activities were smart, but through them, I wasted most of a human lifespan and came to believe a lot of harmful notions that were not true. This was related to pride. I should never have thought I could figure life out.

When I work to allow the Holy Spirit to flow through me and flush out my own garbage thoughts, emotions, and desires, life goes smoothly, and God gives me real revelation that benefits me and others. Prolonged prayer in tongues is the main way I do this. It’s necessary, and it’s for every Christian.

Yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe this is the real death to self. Not putting on a hair shirt, living in a park, eating from dumpsters, and relieving yourself behind bushes while disturbing pedestrians with loud exclamations about the end of days.

Prince quoted a verse I can’t remember. It may have been Matthew 12:35: “A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.” I think he used the word “storehouse” instead of “treasure.” The Greek word in the text means a place where you store precious things.

The Bible says that through the Holy Spirit, God writes his laws on the tablets of our hearts. Not the written law of Moses and the blind scholars who followed him; the law of God’s own heart. If you’re a real Christian, you should have the Holy Spirit inside you, filling you up with good things and washing out the bad.

This is another reminder that Christianity is supernatural, just like voodoo and wicca. Cessationists throw out God’s supernatural power, which was demonstrated throughout the Bible, and tell us to leave supernatural power in the hands of our enemies. They say it isn’t for us. They’re no different from the people who said Yeshua had a demon because he was able to cast demons out. They’re like the generations of blind Jews who have said Yeshua was a magician.

It’s odd that any Christian could think God would allow witches and diviners to have supernatural power while denying it to his children.

A lack of supernatural power is a terrible evil. To the Jews, the absence of supernatural help was a huge curse. Because they were proud and could not benefit from hearing God speak, he cut prophecy off from them for 400 years, and afterward, it only came to those who accepted their Messiah. Jews who reject Yeshua haven’t had a prophet since Malachi, but ordinary Spirit-filled Christians prophesy a lot.

Satan is behind the church’s rejection of the supernatural. He created cessationism, and he uses people who swallow it to disarm the rest of us and open our gates to the enemy.

We are supposed to wear the armor of God. As used in the Bible, “armor” includes actual armor, shields, and weapons.

In Mark 16:17-20, God said this:

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Every last one of those acts is supernatural. The natural isn’t even mentioned.

He didn’t say, “They will make a huge, impressive hat and put it on an elderly male virgin who has never raised a child, and he will tell people what to do.” He didn’t say, “They will go to church three times a week and do 20 hours of volunteer work every month.” He didn’t say, “They will fly to Mexico and India and badger heathens into building churches out of plywood and tarpaper.” He mentioned supernatural things.

The idea of dying to self is intimidating, because we look at it from the standpoint of the flesh. The flesh knows it can’t be good, and here, it agrees with God, who said no man can please God in the flesh. But if God’s own heart is growing in you, you won’t have to transform your own personality overnight and turn yourself into a new Yeshua. Instead, your thoughts and inclinations will change, filling your storehouse with new things. Then you will be a better person not because you have perfect human willpower, but because you are doing the things your new heart wants to do.

With all this in mind, I believe “dying to self” is a Christian concept, but I don’t think it means what people think it means.

Paul said it was impossible to obey the law. He said that sin increased under the law. It was possible to obey in the sense that if you sinned, you could get forgiveness through sacrifices, but it was not possible to avoid sinning all the time. The written law was of limited assistance in changing men’s hearts and minds. It was completely possible to live under the law and remain greedy, cruel, and corrupt, like the religious leaders who arrested and beat Yeshua and got the Romans to torture him to death.

If you let the Holy Spirit remodel your core, you don’t just follow rules; you become the rules. God’s righteousness grows in you, and behaving correctly becomes natural instead of burdensome.

I believe things are going better for me than I thought. I really am dying to self. It’s happening. I am still pretty corrupt, but I’m on the right course, and that’s what matters.

Christianity has never been a destination. It’s a compass course. Yeshua was better off while he was briefly in hell than Satan was when he lived in heaven. Yeshua was headed for glory, and Satan was headed for destruction. Their courses were what distinguished success from catastrophe.

I believe that if people can grasp these ideas and put them to work, they can save themselves a lot of discouragement, and it could prevent them from falling away. You may be in prison or a mental institution or a rehab facility, and you may be a rotten person, but as long as you are walking toward Yeshua with the help of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you, you are doing fine.

Ask me Anything about Milk Ducts

Baby showers are not for men. I cannot repeat this often enough. It’s not proper etiquette to invite men, but people now do it anyway.

I have been invited to these things, but I don’t like it. I would rather send gifts and stay home. The novel practice of dragging men to baby showers seems to be part of the left’s effort to turn men into women, and besides, what could be more boring for a normal man than to watch a woman pull things like onesies and wipe warmers out of boxes?

Yes, it’s boring. I’ll repeat it. Heterosexual men, meaning normal men without demonic mental conditions that make them effeminate and cause them to envy women, will sit and nod with approval while a huge lady shows the guests the stuffed toys and bibs she just received, but most of us would much rather be somewhere else receiving thank you’s by text message.

In the old days, meaning, say, 15 years ago when there were only two genders, men were excluded from baby showers just as we are excluded from bachelorette parties. Everyone understood that we didn’t want to go and that we would spoil the atmosphere. Then came feminism, and suddenly, men were obligated to attend.

I don’t like baby showers. Trump needs to ban men from baby showers by executive order. But I have been to two lactation consultations as well as a meeting for breastfeeding mothers, and these things were my idea. I went to these things out of necessity, not because I wanted to be a cool chestfeeding dad who shares his wife’s underwear drawer.

Breastfeeding turned out to be incredibly complicated, and my wife and I are orphans with no female relatives anywhere near us. We lacked the usual advice sources. We needed people who were actually paid to study breastfeeding, and we also needed to talk to women who had been through it.

Thank God no trannies showed up at the meeting. Thank God our consultant and the women running the meeting aren’t drag queens. I don’t have to Google; I can assure you without checking that there are homosexual men teaching breastfeeding and forcing everyone involved to use terms like “lactating person” and “chestfeeder.”

My area doesn’t have much appeal for sexual deviants other than lesbians and gays who are drawn to horses. We don’t have perversion parades, and public sodomy involving people wearing only body paint and glitter is not something we have to deal with. Christians predominate here. I guess that’s why it has been our good fortune to be spared involvement with weirdos during the pregnancy and postpartum experience. We only had one male nurse, and he seemed normal.

The meeting was small, and I was the only man there. Most men of breeding age have to work on weekdays, and it’s not exactly unheard of for men who have free time to abandon the women they inseminate, even in our Christian area.

One young lady at the meeting was still pregnant. Smart girl. Smart for the most part, anyway. She was alone, and from the language she used, it was obvious she was not married to the sperm donor. Nonetheless, she mentioned Ocala’s biggest megachurch. She’s a megachurch member who lives in sin and who would presumably go to hell instantly if she died during childbirth. Imagine carrying your child to term and then going to hell before you ever saw him.

I have been to the church she mentioned. The pastor is an idiot; a motivational speaker who is a stranger to the Holy Spirit. I took my dad to the church, thinking there might be someone there who could help him, but the pastor, whose apt last name is Gilligan, preached a sermon on pagan meditation, calling it “mindfulness.”

This girl is trying to do the right thing, but the man who is supposed to lead her to Yeshua and the Holy Spirit is teaching nonsense and lining his pockets. He profits from keeping her condemned. He’s like a barrier contraceptive that prevents people from reaching God. Satan’s last line of defense against salvation.

Out in the non-Christian world, there are drug dealers, entertainers, liberal teachers, government employees and others who fight Christianity, and people have to deal with them all the time. Then they enter churches looking for relief, and they and run into goalkeepers posing as pastors.

We would be better off if God killed preachers who keep people from being saved.

They’re like Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. They claim they’re giving you the God of the Bible, but they’re really building up walls of kooky doctrine within you, to make it harder for him to enter.

Anyway, I have never had any desire to learn about breastfeeding, but now I feel like I could write a book. I envy dads who have not had the problems I’ve had. The normal thing is to pay the bills, hold the baby, make things easy for the mother, and let her deal with every aspect of feeding. It should not be necessary for a man to study breastfeeding or go to consultations. Unfortunately, we didn’t think to send my wife to classes when she was pregnant, and we got some bad advice that left us with problems that were hard to fix. I don’t think they would have been fixed had I not jumped in.

Now I have to jump out. I have to resume doing my job. I have to look after our business and property. Our son had to be weaned off formula, and my wife has to be weaned off excessive help. Sooner or later, she will have to drive to buy diapers without me. She will have to go days without handing me a bottle. I have enjoyed taking her and our son to doctors’ appointments, but she’ll have to get used to handling these things on her own the majority of the time.

Over the last month, I have been trained to be with my family constantly and to be involved in everything. Newborns are extremely demanding, and my wife didn’t have a sister or mother to stay with us and help. But he’s not going to need 8 feedings per day forever, and eventually, a diaper will last half a day instead of 5 minutes to three hours.

I don’t have much of anyone to advise me, so I am working to figure it out. How much of this stuff should I be doing this month? How about the month after that?

My wife hasn’t been inside a store since she gave birth. She barely goes outside. I do all the shopping. I get gas. This has been fine up till now, but no normal mother in America lives this way after the first month. She hasn’t had her hair fixed in about 6 weeks.

She was a mess after delivery, but that was weeks ago, and now she has no problem doing laundry or mopping the floor. She does these things without being asked. I’m not badgering an injured woman to do chores. She doesn’t need to be housebound any more. She can drive now.

I have realized I need to adjust my role as time passes and the baby grows.

I’m always going to be involved. I won’t be like my own father, who left the delivery waiting room to play pinball with his friends. I will know the names of my son’s teachers (probably my wife and me). I will hang out with him instead of leaving the house on weekends before he gets up so I can play golf. I will talk to him a lot and pass wisdom on. I will teach him how to do things. I will pray over him and speak blessings over him. But I’m not going to be his other mom.

Our roles are already different. Mom said he couldn’t be allowed to cry alone; I said he would get over it. Mom treats him like a delicate porcelain figurine; I stick my fingers in his ears, jiggle him around, and let him wrestle with my hands. Mom puts him in his special baby tub when he’s a mess; I use the utility sink.

She goes a little too far. I go a little too far. Together, we find the right course.

When he’s whiny and he cries for no reason, Mom reassures him. I tell him, “No one cares. No one is listening. Holler more. Your foot is still going in the romper.” I know he doesn’t understand, but it helps me with my attitude, and eventually, he will learn English, and I will have to say the same things from time to time.

Mom makes him feel safe, and we both make him feel loved, but I also challenge him. I put demands on him. Not big ones. I make him lie on his stomach for 5 minutes at a time. I leave him on his activity mat for half an hour instead of treating him like a growth on my belly that can’t be removed. I won’t let him have fast nipples on his bottles because he has to prefer his mother to a piece of plastic.

I’m not just his drill instructor. I’m also the one who pushes for skin-to-skin time and breastfeeding; things he loves. When I see my wife with a bottle in her hand, I make her explain and defend her decision. I remind her that being tired is not a good reason to use a bottle. I’m tired, too, but if he needs two diapers in 15 minutes, and it’s my turn, he gets them. If he needs something from the store, and I just got back from there, I get in the car and go.

She doesn’t resent me when I push her in the right direction. She keeps telling me how right I was to tell her to do this or that. She didn’t want to have the second breastfeeding consultation, but she was very, very happy on the way home, because the consultation made a huge difference. She didn’t want to go to the meeting, but she loved it, and she learned a lot. On the other hand, she feels terrible guilt for not listening to me about formula.

This is how leadership is. You’re unpopular at first, and then when you turn out to be right, everyone thanks you, and unless you’re lucky, they try to take the credit. You have to get used to ignoring the resistance, because it almost always turns into gratitude. It’s not pleasant to have someone fight you and even shame you when you’re trying to help them, but you have to remember, during the times of resistance, that the payoff will make it all worth it.

The more you cave in, the more you will be resented and contemned later. The same person who gave you a hard time when you were doing the right thing will blame you for quitting and doing exactly what they wanted.

This is a big problem in matriarchal cultures. I don’t know how Jewish men survive. So many of them are bulldozed by their wives.

A man is supposed to rule his house. Anyone who tells you different is your enemy and the enemy of God. And you can’t rule unless you spend a lot of time with God and let him rule you. All authority comes from time spent in the presence of God. A man who doesn’t submit to God makes decisions without God’s authority backing him up. He’s not a captain. He’s a mutineer. Mutineers get taken down by the same people they lead in mutiny.

The mutiny analogy is interesting. British captains could have men flogged and hanged. A sailor who defied and escaped his captain would be chased down by the crown and punished, because the sailor had defied the crown’s agent.

Sailors were terrified of their captains, even if their captains were short and frail. To them, the captain was the crown and the cat o’ nine tails and the gallows.

Mutineers were different. The leader of a mutiny had no one to back him up, so the other mutineers didn’t fear him much. If they slit his throat, they wouldn’t be hanged. They would be rewarded with his position.

God will back up a patriarch who submits to him, but if you live in a state of mutiny, you should expect to be defied and emasculated in your own house. You can’t submit to God unless you spend time in his presence. A book is not enough. Rules are not enough. The one who wrote the book is available. Naval officers don’t get their orders and their authority from books of regulations. Higher officers contact them and tell them what to do.

The baby was too warm, so I just took him to the changing table and put him in a onesie (with a picture of his face on it) and his first pair of pants. It’s not like I watched him get married, but it was a threshold. You can only wear pants for the first time once. Will every little change be reason for emotion? I wonder.

I guess you get over it eventually. Otherwise, it will be, “It’s his first bite of solid food!”; “It’s his first trip to the grocery store!”; “It’s his first trip to the other grocery store!”; “It’s the first time he’s gone to the grocery store in this onesie!”

Don’t ask for the car keys yet, kid. You have a ways to go.

My Son Will Thank me When he Realizes Why He’s not a Whiner

Sometimes when you get an answer that seems crazy, it’s because you asked the wrong question.

We are continuing to undo the damage we did by letting our son use a bottle during his first week of life. We are getting breastfeeding coaching, and things are improving. But today we learned something disturbing: breastfeeding experts don’t like pacifiers. We were advised to stop giving them to our son.

This is more than an inconvenience. It’s a direct threat to our sanity.

When we were at the hospital after delivery, the nurses let us use pacifiers, and it was very helpful, because it temporarily shut down one of the most horrible noises known to humanity. Since then, we have relied on our little rubber friends with great enthusiasm. I have probably shoved pacifiers in my son’s mouth at least 25 times a day. That’s just me, not the wife.

I should get more of them and shove them in my ears.

Sometimes he will be quiet for hours. Other times, a pacifier will only buy maybe 20 seconds of relief. My son is like a slot machine. You put the pacifier in, and you see what you get. Even if the silence is short, it’s worth the effort, because crying babies are worse than leaf blowers.

My wife claims the noise doesn’t bother her, but when my son is loud and close to me, I literally feel like my brain is shaking inside my skull, like a crystal goblet about to shatter from an opera singer’s high note. It even makes my eyeballs hurt. And he can scream loud enough to damage hearing permanently. It makes me wonder why babies don’t all go deaf their first year.

I don’t think my wife is totally honest with herself about the crying, because every so often, she admits she has had it. So if it doesn’t bother her, why is she tired of it?

It’s unfashionable to admit your baby is annoying, just like it’s unfashionable to say you wear nitrile gloves when changing his diapers. You’re supposed to enjoy your baby’s howls, and you’re supposed to think their poop is just like peanut butter.

I don’t know why we persist in lying to ourselves about these things, but we do. It’s like the lies people tell about childbirth being beautiful. If childbirth is beautiful, watching a surgeon do a liver transplant on a conscious patient must be gorgeous.

No one actually thinks childbirth is beautiful. It’s disgusting, degrading beyond description, dirty, and unbelievably painful. If we could somehow make terrorists give birth on command, we would have used it instead of waterboarding.

Actually, we wouldn’t, because childbirth kills people and waterboarding doesn’t.

Our method of childbirth is a curse. It’s not supposed to be beautiful. It’s an extreme form of punishment. See Genesis 3. It’s okay to be honest about it. God didn’t tell Eve that because she had listened to Satan, he was going to give her something beautiful. He gave her a small opening and babies with enormous heads, unlike any creatures in the animal kingdom. He gave her monthly torments that modern women go through 13 times a year for over 40 years. It’s not beautiful. Stop conning yourself.

If childbirth is so beautiful, why is it that women pay other women to have their babies, but no woman has ever paid to have another woman’s baby?

So anyway, I am now faced with a future without pacifiers, and it is illegal to put a baby in a soundproof bag. Things look bleak. He is very peaceful when he’s full of milk directly from the source, but it may be a few days before he is getting it that way all the time.

It’s worse for my wife, because she still feels a compulsion to pick our son up when he squawls. When she’s tired enough, she lets him wail, but she gets mad when she sees me in a comfy chair and my son a few feet away on the floor hollering bloody murder. When she’s alone with him, she carries or holds him in a chair for hours.

I have been getting into arguments about the crying issue. I keep saying babies get spoiled when you pick them up as soon as they start crying, and my opponents tell me I’m heartless and that my son will not love me when he grows up. Okay, only one person actually said that.

I have been Googling about crying babies, and to my dismay, I keep seeing “experts” saying you can’t spoil a baby by holding it too much. Today, I realized I was seeing this wrongheaded tripe because I was asking the wrong question. The correct question is, “Will it harm a baby to let it cry?”

The same self-anointed gurus generally admit that letting a baby cry won’t hurt it. They probably hate admitting this, but I can see why they tell the truth. They depend on having people ask them for advice, and if they kept telling people there was no way to get relief from months of constant screeching, no one would look at their websites or buy their books, and they might occasionally be beaten by haggard parents with blisters on their eardrums.

You can definitely spoil a very young baby. I know this because we spoiled our newborn son in about a day by teaching him that artificial nipples were better than real ones. If a newborn can learn one thing, he can learn others. That’s just common sense.

“If scream, then hold,” is not quantum mechanics. Most lizards could learn it.

Even if you could not spoil a small baby, however, it would still be okay to put them down and let them howl sometimes, because it does them no harm, and it may prevent parents from jumping out of windows.

Let’s pretend you can’t teach a baby to cry constantly by picking it up too quickly. Even if that were true, it wouldn’t mean jumping up and grabbing crying babies in milliseconds was a good idea. They don’t actually need to be grabbed as soon as they start crying, and parents are human beings with limits. Parents have to have a certain amount of care. We have to eat, sleep, and rest. You can’t do any of those things if you’re carrying a baby 18 hours a day.

A baby needs parents who aren’t on the verge of collapsing, but it doesn’t need to be protected from an occasional solo screaming session in a bassinet behind a closed door.

Here’s another important thing to remember: babies cry for bad reasons.

Helicopter parents think that if a baby is crying, something must be wrong, and it needs to be addressed. That’s a fantasy. Babies cry when things are going perfectly. The diaper is dry, the belly is full, there has been plenty of sleep, the baby has been held and loved, the temperature is fine, the baby is not sick, but the hole is still open and the noise is still coming out. It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing needs to be fixed, and if you shut the baby up anyway, you’ll probably have to do something detrimental in order to make it happen. You’ll have to overfeed him, cater to him too much, go without sleep, or do something else which is equally bad.

If you know the baby is fine, shut the door and go sit down for a while. This has worked ever since humanity has existed, and it will work now.

Right now, the heir to the throne is on a play mat about 6 feet away from me, yammering away like I shot his dog. There are no hunger signs. His diaper is very recent. His clothes are clean. Mom has probably held him for 10 of the last 18 hours. He has been breastfed for much of that time. Best guess: he is trying to poop.

I have read that some people solve the pooping-skills problem by shoving stuff up their kids’ rear ends. Supposedly this causes them to release and get relief.

Web sources say this is just a pacifier for the butt. It teaches babies to hold their poo until someone violates their no-fly zone(so to speak) with a hard object, and that’s a very bad habit.

I’m not doing it. I want to be able to look my son in the eye when he’s grown.

Mom just chickened out and held him for a few minutes, and of course, he shut up, although nothing else had changed. He got what he wanted. She’s getting better, though. She let him cry quite a while.

He is really cute, and we are crazy about him. I understand why it’s so hard for her to let him yell.

I asked her to add up all the hours she had spent holding him today, and she said, “Practically the whole day.” Not sustainable. Even if I had held him half the time, it would be too much for both of us, and I’m his dad, so I can’t give him the kind of time she can. I have other things to do.

We will win this battle eventually, if only because my wife will be physically unable to continue on two hours of sleep per night. I am not worried. We will get him off the pacifier and the bottle. He will not cry for hours on end, and we will not carry him constantly like an insulin pump.

He will become more independent, and we will be able to do things like mopping the floors and mowing the yard.

Looks like someone is hungry. I’m out.

The System Works

Interesting experience today.

As noted in an earlier post, my wife and I have had trouble getting our son to breastfeed. When he was born, my wife was not thinking clearly. She was exhausted and full of overprotection hormones, and I let her start the boy on formula. The nurses and I discouraged it, but we gave in too easily, and one nurse said formula was fine, which it definitely is not.

My son decided plastic nipples were the only real nipples. They are easier for babies to suck, and the bottle people put big holes in them so they pass milk and formula much faster than real breasts. Babies get spoiled. Moms get spoiled because they finish in 10 minutes instead of 45 to 60. Spoiled babies raise hell until they get what they want, and moms give in because they are spoiled and also worn down. Dads don’t put their feet down because we live in a castrated society in which Satan has shamed fathers into failing to look after their families correctly.

A reader asked if my area had a La Leche chapter or whatever it’s called. It does not. It does have a breastfeeding office at the Health Department. It’s mainly for poor women on a program called WICS, but they’re not jerks about it. They gave us time. A few weeks back, we got some coaching from a lady named Debbie, and today we showed up without an appointment, and she saw us again.

As luck would have it, our soon-to-be-ex-pediatrician’s office is across the street from the building where Debbie works. We had to see the doctor today for a routine visit. We were asked about our concerns, and we brought up the breastfeeding issue. We couldn’t get the baby to latch properly. There was pain and bleeding. Feedings weren’t successful.

Our doctor, an old Nigerian guy, dismissed our concerns.

This doctor gives people free formula. We should have known this was a red flag. Formula is nearly poison. Nobody should push it on women who may be able to breastfeed. Formula causes diabetes, obesity, allergies, and a bunch of other problems.

We suspect formula companies are giving him free merchandise in order to hook low-income and low-information mothers. Somebody has to be paying for it, and I doubt our third-rate United Healthcare insurance is the source.

He said breast milk from a bottle was just as good as breast milk from a person. Well, I’m no doctor, but I can read. What I have read is that the breastfeeding process itself carries very important benefits for mothers and babies. It helps women’s uteruses shrink. It delays restoration of fertility. It relaxes babies. Today we were told it makes breast cancer less likely. These are just some of the benefits we have been told about.

Isn’t breast cancer a serious problem? Isn’t it worth trying to prevent?

I don’t think the many professionals who say breastfeeding is beneficial are imagining things or lying, but I do think there are doctors who lie to help companies promote medical products. Actually, I know it.

When we left, I told me wife she should call the health people and see if we could arrange an appointment with Debbie. We got an endless hold, so we decided to drive over and walk in. Before long, somebody found Debbie, and we were in her office getting priceless advice.

It turned out my wife was leaning forward, and she wasn’t waiting for the baby to open his mouth wide enough to get everything into it. Debbie told us something amazing. A baby can open its mouth 140°. So basically about like a blacksnake or a great white shark. Ladies, it does not matter how wide your equipment is. A baby can handle it. You could probably put your fist in there.

Debbie got the process started, and before we knew it, my son was totally absorbed. In maybe half an hour, he pumped himself full to bursting, and then he showed his approval by losing consciousness. Perfect.

He was quiet all the way home. He has been quiet almost all evening. He has fed a second time. Our problems are solved.

Now we can put the breast pump away. We can put away all but a couple of bottles, which we will use on rare occasions when normal breastfeeding isn’t practical. My wife isn’t in pain any more. I’m going to throw out what’s left of the formula.

Formula is hard to digest, and a bottle baby can’t regulate its intake even if it receives milk, so now we know our boy’s digestion will be optimized. He won’t have to digest palm oil and cow proteins, and his innards won’t be hammered by inappropriately large feedings that are hard to process.

Maybe he won’t scream before he poops now. I hope so.

My wife is over the moon, and so am I. We have had to do a huge amount of work in order to keep the bottles coming, and the irregular nature of bottle feedings ruined our schedule. It will be hard enough when our son is feeding normally. We don’t need bottle problems making things worse.

She told me she had felt despair. She had resigned herself to months of misery. She thought it was normal. Now she realizes things are going to be much easier, and her relief is immeasurable.

She is very happy I started getting patriarchal and controlling instead of sinking into the modern American wuss-dad mold. She sees that it saved us. I think it has increased her confidence in me. It will make things more harmonious. Leaders who don’t lead cause chaos and confusion.

I was afraid I was being too dominant, but I wasn’t being dominant enough. I’ll bet 90% of American husbands are not dominant enough.

I should have done better from the start. I will do better from now on. I will spend more time with God, increasing my submission to him. That will give me authority to rule my family, and it will help them submit to him and me.

The pediatrician has a couple more things to do for us, so we will wait a while to hand him the mitten, as P.G. Wodehouse put it. We will quit talking to him about feeding.

I am wondering if we can go back to our original pediatrician. He’s not covered by our insurance, but I am willing to pay. The issue is whether our insurer will let him refer us to in-network specialists when needed. If so, we will go back to him in a heartbeat.

We should have taken breastfeeding classes before our son was born, but as a man, I could not have guessed that sucking a nipple was complicated. In retrospect, I think delivery classes would have been worthless compared to breastfeeding classes. During the delivery, I never had a challenging decision. It was all simple and intuitive. Easy to figure out on the fly.

If you’re planning to have a baby, learn from our mistakes. Don’t even consider using formula unless you literally have no choice. Don’t use bottles except on rare occasions. Don’t give up on yourself or your baby. Find the right people, and they will get you hooked up. It can be done. Don’t listen to anyone who says breastfeeding is merely a nice option for affluent women and disgraceful women who choose to betray the memory of Susan B. Anthony by raising their own children. It’s the proper and normal way to feed children, and if it were not, none of us would be here.

Fake Milk is Feminist Poison

My wife and I have three big problems as new parents.

1. We are new parents.

2. We don’t have any relatives to tell us what to do with babies.

3. The healthcare industry is full of flakes who provide bad information about baby care.

Things are working out nearly perfectly, except when it comes to one major issue: breastfeeding. We were able to figure everything else out.

When we were at the hospital, my wife flipped out because she thought our son was starving. She was loaded up with hormones that made her a little delusional and pretty assertive, and she felt way too protective. It was hard to tell her anything, even though she knew nearly nothing about babies and she was surrounded by women who cared for them for a living.

She insisted on starting the boy on formula, and this was a gigantic mistake which is causing us problems weeks later. Major problems. It is a threat to our son’s future health and even his life expectancy.

The hospital ladies pushed my wife to wait for nature to take its course and forget about bottles, but they didn’t push very hard. One of them said something stupid. Concerning formula, she said something like, “It’s perfectly all right.”

It’s not perfectly all right. Formula is garbage, and it’s very harmful to babies. I’m sure there are lots of feminists out there who would disagree, because feminists are idiots, and formula makes it easy for them to hand their nearly-estranged babies off to illegals and have Enfamil pumped into them so they can go to work and end up with children as crazy as they are, but formula is to breast milk as Skittles and Hot Pockets are to real food.

By the way, I’m not just trying to seem based when I link fake milk to feminism. Look it up. Feminists really have been behind the baby-malnutrition revolution. There are articles on the web intended to de-shame formula feeding. Sensible people have mounted a backlash against the feminist nutwads, and now there is a defensive backlash to the backlash.

I wish I had known feminism and formula were linked. Things would have gone down differently. Feminism came from Satan, and Satan is not the guy to go to for parenting advice. Eve was the first feminist and the source of the curse on women. Every time a woman screams during delivery, she can thank the mother of feminism.

Formula is for two kinds of mothers: those who can’t provide breast milk by any means and those who don’t care about their kids. I keep reading that you shouldn’t feel like a bad mom if you use formula. Yes, you should, because you are a bad mom. Unless you had no choice. I’m writing this as a warning, because some day, some dad or mom who is getting terrible advice from post-feminist nurses may Google for help, and that person will need a sane voice to cut through the toxic nonsense.

The website of a well-known hospital says this: “Deciding to feed your baby breast milk or formula is a personal matter.” No, it is not a personal matter, unless we should repeal laws protecting children from neglect.

It involves two people. It may involve a selfish, immature woman who is willing to harm her baby’s health. The other party is defenseless. Mothers should be told that formula is a last resort for the utterly desperate.

I trusted the hospital ladies, and I didn’t want to be an XY ogre about the whole thing, so I let them give us formula. If I could turn back time, I would put on a patriarchal show for them and make them leave the room while I set my wife straight.

She was exhausted. She was in pain. She was in no position to make important decisions. I should have stepped up to the plate, played bad cop dad, and looked after her and my son. If they try to give our next child palm oil and corn syrup, they will not be able to do it unless they can get the police to remove me from the building.

They were very nice. They meant well. But they were completely incompetent to give anyone advice about feeding babies.

I have been researching and making notes, and I have learned that lack of breast milk is extremely bad for babies. Not “less than optimal.” Extremely bad.

Check out this excerpt from my notes:

1. Breastfeeding protects your baby against common childhood illnesses such as ear infections and lower respiratory tract infections. Over the long term, breastfeeding lowers the risk of obesity, diabetes, asthma and much more. Breastfed babies have fewer allergies. Studies also link breastfeeding with higher IQ scores.

2. Breastfeeding helps with postpartum weight loss, delays fertility, increases a mother’s self-confidence and promotes bonding.

3. Breast milk is different from formula because it changes to meet the nutritional needs of your child as he grows.

You could stop at “ear infections,” and you wouldn’t need to say anything else to sell me. We tend to think baby ear infections are no big deal, but they are. They’re very painful. They can cause deafness. They tend to recur. They are often treated with surgery. The fact that a problem doesn’t kill a child doesn’t mean it’s not a major problem.

Deafness can make a person much less intelligent. Most people don’t know that. A psychologist who worked with people with learning disabilities told me. Many deaf people can’t read. The deaf have lower IQ’s. I mean retarded lower.

I have a first cousin whose son is asthmatic, and he had to take allergy shots every week when he was a kid. His asthma used to put him in the hospital. Of course, mom kept right on smoking in the house. He’s also obese. I don’t know if she gave him formula, but knowing what a selfish person she is and how backward our Appalachian culture is, I’ll bet she did.

If we don’t cut out formula, and our son grows up to be a fat diabetic with asthma, severe allergies, a hearing aid and an IQ of 90, we won’t know for sure that we caused the problems. On the other hand, we will know we might have.

Fake milk is harder to digest. It is harder to tell when a bottle-fed baby has had enough. Babies are more likely to vomit formula. Parents like to say “spit up,” like it’s not as bad, but the correct word is “vomit.” If your food made you vomit several times a week, would you keep eating it?

Formula doesn’t contain anything that gives a baby immunity. Breast milk does. How is this stuff even legal? Did immunity suddenly become unimportant just because Germaine Greer decided women should be ambitious sluts?

How many babies have died because their immune systems were stunted by formula?

“We’re doing fine because we use breast milk in bottles.” Sorry, people. You’re not doing fine. You’re giving substandard care. It’s not just the formula that matters. It’s the breast.

Breastfeeding makes a woman’s uterus contract so her body returns to normal. Why didn’t the nurses tell us that? How many women have had problems because they didn’t know this? It’s not a minor concern. It’s important.

Breastfeeding stimulates lactation. Skin-to-skin contact fights postpartum depression. It regulates the baby’s temperature. It makes babies feel safe and loved.

Yesterday my buddy Mike, who raised two sons, told me something very wise: he said my wife and I will be inconvenienced from now on.

You may think you can give your baby a bottle most of the time and then cram a quick breastfeeding session in when it’s convenient, but it doesn’t work like that. Breastfeeding is supposed to happen around the clock. It’s supposed to be very inconvenient. If what you’re doing is convenient, you’re doing it all wrong. You’re supposed to accept the fact that a feeding session can take 45 minutes. You’re supposed to accept getting up in the night, over and over. You had a baby. You obligated yourself. Your convenience is not a factor to be considered.

I’m going to quit helping feed the baby so much. It’s the cute modern thing to do, but it’s bad for everyone concerned. I don’t think it’s bad for me to give him a bottle of breast milk once a day, but he needs the real thing over and over every day of his life. Consistently. Feeding sessions with me should be cameos.

I don’t care about changing diapers or doing laundry. No one ever got asthma because his dad did laundry. Giving milk to babies is a woman’s job. Period.

FYI, bottles are designed badly. I know it’s 2025, and human beings know absolutely everything now. Sure. But baby bottles let milk flow too fast. They spoil babies and also tired mothers who don’t want to spend 6 or more hours a day nursing. I think they’re designed to addict, not to nourish. The people who make them know perfectly well that they flow too fast.

I can get 120 milliliters of liquid into my son in about 10 minutes. That is not an acceptable rate. When he goes to his mother, he may take 5 times that long to fill up. Which will he and his mother naturally prefer? Obviously, the bottle.

We are using the slowest-flowing fake nipples there are, and they are still way too fast. My wife wanted to move to faster ones, but I told her we needed to keep him on the slow ones until he got fed up with them.

If you’re a future Googler, let me spell it out for you. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you formula and relying on bottles are okay. The enablers won’t be around to pick up the pieces in 40 years when your daughter is whale-fat, single, and childless, rides around the grocery store in an electric cart, and has to have bariatric surgery. They won’t appear by magic and heal your baby when he is screaming from ear pain at 3 a.m.

If you can’t provide your own breast milk, buy it. Find a relative who is lactating. Do what you have to do. Don’t go down without a fight.

My son has gas like a water buffalo. He has prolonged periods of discomfort because of it. I’m not sure his immunity is up to snuff. He is starting to look fat. I am getting him off palm oil and corn syrup. That’s that.

The recovery process is a little bumpy, but I took charge and explained things to my wife, and now she is on board. She feels terrible guilt about using formula. That’s appropriate. It’s not a problem to be fixed. I feel guilt about letting it happen. I should feel guilt. It’s the correct way to feel. I let my son down.

It’s going to work. The key is not to listen to my wife when the hormones tell her our son is starving. We put him on a scale occasionally. We can see that he has energy. We know the conversion will be successful.

I told her something. I said her son was going to put her to the test for the rest of his time with her. There would be one test of wills after another. I said he had to know from the start that his parents would stand together and not let him run the family. Once he knows that, he will be at peace. He will quit pushing and accept his place. As long as he sees chinks in the armor, he will instinctively try to pry them open and pit us against each other, and that will bring chaos and misery.

He may cry because he misses the bottle. To that, I say what I say when he cries during diaper changes: “No one cares.” I say that to him all the time. “No one cares, buddy. Holler all you want.” If he had his way, I’d give in and let him lie in poop.

When he is all grown up, he will be very glad we didn’t turn him into Jaden Smith. He will never resent us for standing firm when he had stupid ideas to sell us.

I am to submit to God. My wife is to submit to God and me. My son is to submit to God, me, and my wife. That’s the system. If I have to be the bad guy sometimes, so be it. I have seen the monsters enlightened feminist dads raise.

Women Can’t be Husbands

I forgot to write something last night.

I got a condescending, presumptuous, rude email from a Mormon cousin I have met twice in my life, and she asked if she could perform a pagan (Mormon) rite in which my dead father’s soul would somehow be “tied” to Mormons in the afterlife.

The last thing you want from Mormons is to be tied to them in the afterlife, because Mormons who understand Mormon doctrine properly and accept it are not Christians, and they should expect to receive eternal damnation for practicing a non-Christian religion.

My father is with Yeshua in heaven, safe forever. He can’t be tied to children of perdition who are screaming in flames like Joseph Smith. Do all the rituals you want. My dad will never know. But God will know you threatened his children.

The request accompanied links to some folders containing pictures and documents from my dad’s side of the family. At the time, I thought her main motivation for contacting me was to share this material, but now I’m wondering if she had the photos for a long time and decided to use them as a pry bar to open a crack through which Mormonism could enter. The online folders and files I downloaded have recent dates, so maybe I’m too suspicious.

I was extremely blunt in my response to my cousin. I was civil, but I made it clear that to us, Mormonism was as bad as Freemasonry and African demon worship. I told her doing this Satanic proxy rite would be a violation of boundaries. I was civil, but I didn’t leave anything unsaid. I didn’t want to leave her any hope that would stimulate continued proselytizing. I wanted to utterly crush her confidence in her ability to persuade me. I strove to put out the light at the end of the tunnel.

Later, I asked my wife if I had overdone it, and she said my cousin was the problem. She said it was rude of my cousin, whom I don’t know and wouldn’t recognize if she walked into my house right now, to send me an email asking me to involve my family with her fringe religion, which she knows is contemned by actual Christians.

I forgot to write about my wife’s great performance in her proper role.

Her response shows how important it is for a Christian who literally knows God to marry another Christian who literally knows God. Not someone who memorized the Catholic catechism. Not someone who prays old prayers in books written by committees. A person who speaks in tongues, has visions, experiences miracles, and receives revelation and correction directly from God himself.

It is possible, after a confrontation, to gaslight yourself. You may doubt yourself when you were absolutely right. My wife reinforced me and helped me not to regress.

If I had married a typical spoiled American feminist who puts men on trial all day, worships the cult-promoter Oprah, does yoga, believes there are many ways to God, and thinks a bologna sandwich is the product of murder, I would have had to sleep in a separate room last night.

Well. My wife would have had to sleep in a separate room. This is my house, and I’m the man. My wife is the queen and priestess, but I am the king and priest, according to the command of the most high. I wouldn’t let anyone, even my wife, run me out. I have a responsibility to God, my wife, and my son not to allow myself to be bullied by those under my authority.

Thank God I have no mother-in-law butting in. Not saying I’m glad my wife’s mother died young. That’s a tragedy and a great loss, and it made my wife’s life much harder and colder. But there are guys on Reddit asking strangers for permission to speak up when mouthy old women with weak husbands come to visit.

I am not a natural leader or a macho man. I’m not assertive by nature. I don’t like telling other people what to do. I don’t like confrontation. I like being left alone. But I recognize my holy obligation to stand in front and lead this family. God curses men who won’t lead, and those curses hit their families, too.

There aren’t “many ways” to God. There is one way, and this is why Yeshua says he is “the way.” It’s why he says the gate is narrow and the path is tight. It’s why he says the road to damnation is wide.

When I’m forthright with people who are out of line, my wife never says, “You were right, but you could have handled it differently.” She backs me up. She doesn’t discourage me from doing my job.

Now that I think about it, she married me largely because I was direct. I was advised to post dating profiles that didn’t offend anyone, in order to cast a wide net. Instead, I told people exactly what I was, and I said they shouldn’t bother me if they had a problem with it. I shrunk the net. I stood up for the Holy Spirit. First thing you know, I had my wife. And the person who advised me is still single 4 years later.

I was stupid before God corrected me. When I was young, I thought marriage was an equal partnership. I thought men and women should share decision-making power. That’s all BS. Godly women want their husbands to make decisions for them. They don’t want to hold a referendum every time the family decides where to go out for dinner. They want to know where their lane is, and they want their husbands to leave them free to stay in it and get things done. It’s not fair for me to drag my wife into my job while expecting her to do hers as well.

Sometimes we have little disagreements, and sometimes I say something like, “I’m your husband, and this is what’s going to happen.” It doesn’t always go down well when I say it, but later the same day, everything is harmonious. It doesn’t drive us apart. It brings us closer. Several times a week, she tells me what a great husband I am. I don’t know if I would go that far, but if I’m doing well, it makes sense. A great wife should have a great husband. Great wives help God build great husbands.

I remind her to respect the system, and she listens. If I make a mistake, it doesn’t mean she should relieve me of command and take control. We have to believe the system God designed is more important than any single matter. Having a house where God’s authority can’t flow through proper channels is much worse than blowing a minor decision that can be rectified later.

All this would surely sound like abuse to your typical Oprah fan. Those are the ladies who end up giving their favorite baby names to cats. They use sperm donors to have daughters who have themselves skinned to make fake male genitals that don’t work. No one cares what the deranged and deluded think. When you want seamanship advice, you don’t radio the captain of the Titanic.

I dodged plenty of icebergs, and I was an iceberg, myself. By the time God brought me someone wonderful, he had corrected me well enough so I wouldn’t be a disastrous husband.

So yes, Mormonism came from Satan, I don’t care who doesn’t like it when I say so, and I will not let a desire for people’s approval ruin my family’s connection to the God who loves us.

Offending the right people can correct them or, if they can’t be corrected, drive them away permanently. Either way, it’s a win.

Pimp Your Nursery With this Tricked-Out Poo Cart

Tonight I asked my wife if she thought I was too harsh with my Mormon cousin who asked if she could involve my dead father in a sick pagan ritual, and my wife said my cousin was the rude one. She said my cousin had crossed the line, trying to push her weird non-Christian religion on Christians.

That is true. I can’t imagine emailing my cousin out of the blue and asking if I could help her renounce Mormonism and then lay hands on her and get her started praying in tongues. What if I asked her if I could do a Christian ceremony renouncing her parents’ wacky beliefs by proxy in hopes of getting them out of hell? I doubt she would have taken it well.

Mormons are very sensitive. I know that because I incensed one by criticizing their sacred underwear and posting a photo of it. It’s a real thing. He said it was deeply offensive even to mention it, which doesn’t ring true. It sounds like a trick to try to chill speech about anything that makes Mormonism look as bizarre as it actually is.

Mormons are all about deception when it comes to PR. For example, if you look at Wikipedia, you can tell articles about Mormonism have been written by lying Mormons, because they’re packed with lies and try to make Mormonism look completely reputable and reasonable. It is neither. It’s a shady faith started by a guy who was convicted of charging people to locate underground gold veins using a special stone which talked to him or something.

PR is the reason Mormons hate the word “Mormon” and call their cult the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It’s why they created an “informative” website with a URL containing “churchofjesuschrist.” Like it’s just another Christian church, and nobody who founded it claimed to read scriptures off imaginary gold plates he kept in his hat.

My aunt didn’t wear special underwear. Never mind how I know; it’s an ugly story and a sore spot with me. I don’t see how my uncle could have worn it, because it would have shown when he was dressed for hot weather. Maybe they wore it when they went to the local temple and pretended to believe Mormon myths like the one that says the Garden of Eden was in Missouri.

As for my cousin and her request, any person with good sense and good manners would know not to do what this woman did. Her good intentions don’t make it okay.

It’s good to have a wife who agrees with me on the important things. We help each other not to gaslight ourselves.

My cousin wants to make sure we all end up in Mormon heaven for eternity, which is ironic, since Mormonism was designed by damned spirits to lure people to hell. Joseph Smith. The Mormon false prophets. My cousin’s parents, almost certainly. Well…certainly. That’s the bleak reality.

They were atheists, and they had many chances to change. I, personally, tried to reason with them at least once.

While my aunt and uncle were attached to a Mormon congregation, they didn’t actually believe any of the doctrine. One day, they went to the high panjandrum or whatever and told him they were atheists. He told them they should still stick around for the social life, and that’s what they did.

I’m never going to see them again, and neither is my cousin, even if she follows them to hell. The damned are forgotten. That’s part of the nature of damnation. They don’t get to be with their families.

If I seem cavalier about this, it’s because it’s too much weight for me to carry. As a mere man, I have no power to do anything for the millions or billions of people who are determined to reject Yeshua, and I certainly can’t help those who are already in hell. I don’t obsess on these matters. It’s pointless, and it would make me miserable. I instinctively move on. Not everyone can do that. I’m glad I can.

In other news, our new diaper-changing table is a hit. I got us a one-drawer US General service cart from Harbor Freight. It took forever to put together. Now that it’s in use, it’s a tremendous blessing.

We had a changing pad which was too big for the cart, but when I jammed it in as a stopgap, I found it actually worked better than a pad that fit properly. One end sits higher than the other, and this keeps the noisier end of the baby higher than the less-noisy-but-far-from-silent end. I believe this is good for him, since he is usually full of liquid.

I bought the magnetic paper towel and glove attachments, and they are working fine, although for some reason, the glove attachment is a little too large to fit Harbor Freight glove boxes correctly. Harbor Freight buys from different manufacturers, so I guess the glove people aren’t the people who make the attachment.

I got out of Harbor Freight for about $175, including tax and two boxes of nitrile gloves. An Amazon table and gloves would have run around $155. It would have been too big, and it wouldn’t have been as good.

My wife loves it.

The baby can’t rock it or roll out of it, and the pad is wedged in there, so if I have to leave the room to get something, I just strap him in and go. If something gross gets on the pad, I can yank it out and take it to the shower a couple of feet away.

The footprint is much smaller than that of a dedicated baby table, and the wheels are a big help. When we’re done having babies, the cart will be useful for other things, whereas an Amazon table would have to go to the dump or charity.

If you’re planning to spawn, consider getting one of these things. In return, you can tell me what you know about noise-canceling headphones that can be tuned to baby-voice frequencies.

Couldn’t be much better.

Too Much, Too Late

Yesterday I got a disturbing email from a first cousin I don’t know.

My dad came from an extremely dysfunctional family. His dad was a local politician in Eastern Kentucky. He worked as a county clerk and also as a sheriff. People say he was brilliant and brave an so on, and my dad thought he would have been a very big deal had he been able to go to college. People say a lot of things that aren’t true, however.

He was probably pretty smart, because his wife was not bright at all, yet his children were very intelligent. On the other hand, he was a violent alcoholic who beat his wife. An old story says he beat her bloody on the steps of the county courthouse. He died at 41 because he drank bad moonshine that probably had methanol in it. His kidneys failed, he swelled up with fluid, he went into convulsions, and he died.

Relatives have made excuses. His aunt claimed he died from food poisoning. People closer to him have admitted the truth.

My grandmother was like an empty glass. I probably saw her 10 times in my life. She was civil to my sister and me, but she remained a stranger. She and her two daughters did not make the 4-hour drive to help my mother when we were born. I recall her sending Christmas presents to us one year and one year only. She had very little personality. When we visited her and her husband in their small apartment in Oak Ridge, the only books I saw were supermarket-grade novels.

It appears my cousins called her “mamaw,” which is Appalachian for “granny,” so I guess they had some sort of affectionate bond with her. On the other hand, most of them are Mormons, and I have learned that Mormons cover up ugliness and failure in their families.

My aunt was a nominal Mormon, and she was a horrible mother, but her Mormon kids wrote her an obituary that would have made Florence Nightingale jealous. Maybe my grandmother was no warmer to them than she was to me. I know that when she became old and infirm, she used to curse my aunt and hit her from her wheelchair.

When I was grown, her relationship with my dad barely existed, and what little there was of it was not inspiring. One day she called him and said she needed money, so he sent her $3,000.00. Later someone who was concerned asked her why she needed the help, and she said, “He’s got all that money, and I love spending it.”

However trashy my mother’s family may be, that is beyond the pale. Her mother would have jumped in front of a train before pulling a stunt like that.

After I was an adult, my father and mother and I spent a couple of days with my grandmother, the sisters and their husbands, and a sister’s youngest daughter in my dad’s waterfront condo in Panama City Beach. My grandmother told us a couple of things about my grandfather. She said he was very brave and that it didn’t scare him at all to face a man with a gun. Later she told my mother she had just said whatever would make us happy. As if I cared what a person I didn’t know did 50 years ago.

Apparently she assumed my mother was also okay with lying and treating men like children and with destroying family history. But my grandfather did arrest two armed men after one of them had broken his leg with a lucky shot, and he then drove them to jail in a car with a manual transmission, so there must have been some truth to what she said.

She also looked at my dad and me and said something like, “I wouldn’t take anything for the two of you right now.” That was odd. Did she mean it? Was her lack of involvement with my family just due to shyness or the fact that my dad was a very unpleasant person? Have I misjudged her? Or was she trying to maintain good relations with a son who might send more money? I don’t know, because I didn’t know her.

My best guess is that I have been fair. Shy or not, you can get yourself to the post office and send your grandchildren Christmas and birthday gifts, or at least cards.

My feeling is that it’s all on her. If our relationships were lacking, it was because a grown woman chose not to be proactive with her grandchildren. You can’t hold children responsible for starting and building relationships with adults.

Maybe she is one of the reasons I have never had the feeling that anyone missed me, cared if they ever saw me again, or wasn’t willing to abandon me at the drop of a hat. I’ve always had the feeling that if I made anyone angry, they might cut me off instantly and never talk to me again. They might treat me the way my grandmother did all her life.

I have no doubt my dad was unpleasant and disrespectful to her when he was young, because he was that way with everyone, but we didn’t do anything to deserve to be ignored.

She never showed any signs of affection to us or anyone else when I was present. In that respect, she reminds me of my sister. I’m not like that. Even my parrot has a bare spot where I rub his fat every day.

To this day, I am not sure whether she and her second husband had one, two, or three sons together. That’s how unfamiliar I am with my dad’s family. I am sure the husband had at least one son before he met her, and I know at least one son belonged to both of them. He was, frankly, trashy. He was of average intelligence, unlike my grandfather’s kids. I don’t think he ever got a degree. I saw him two or three times in my life. He visited us once with his parents when he was in his early teens. I believe this was before I was born. He gave my mother reason to think he was likely to molest my sister, so that cooled things between her and him quite a bit. She found him in her bedroom on her bed on his hands and knees, looking down at her.

He also used the bathroom curtains to wipe his rear end, and that didn’t endear him to anyone. My mother didn’t have much money to work with back then, so she made some curtains from towels, and he grabbed them because there was no paper in the room. That really burned her up.

The web says he died in 1988. I had to check. I didn’t remember. I know he had cancer. He smoked. I can’t remember when my grandmother died. I would have to check. It would have been around 1990. It didn’t occur to me to go to the funeral. I don’t know if my relatives thought that was weird, because I didn’t know them well enough to have any kind of communication with them.

I guess they were offended. That would have been the natural thing.

A strain of psychopathy ran in my dad’s family. I believe my sister is a pure psychopath, and my dad and his older sister were on that spectrum. His mother didn’t seem cruel like her son, daughter, and granddaughter, but she did seem emotionless, except for anxiety. I don’t think she possessed any warmth.

My dad’s sisters had almost nothing to do with us until I was in my thirties, and at that point, we only saw them when there was some need or they wanted to freeload, staying at his house, at his vacation properties, or on his boat. When they visited the Panama City Beach house, they arrived first, bought groceries for the house, gave him the bill, and asked him to reimburse them.

I have one cousin on that side whom I like. His eldest sister’s stepdaughter. His sister abused and beat her for no reason, systematically, while favoring the blood daughter she had had before marrying her second husband. The stepdaughter is a very sweet, sincere, gentle person. Unfortunately, she is now some kind of Mormon minister, and she is a leader to a large number of women. She believes American Indians are really Jews. Like the ones in Blazing Saddles. The whole 9 yards, I guess. Very sad.

I don’t want any interaction with these strangers, apart from praying my minister cousin comes around and accepts Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. I don’t dislike them, and it would be fine to have dinner with one or two I don’t know some day, but I don’t want to get together with them and start pretending we’re real cousins. It’s too late for that. Every time I saw them, I would be thinking of the past and how we had never had a normal relationship.

They have grown children and grandchildren. I assume. How would I know? All the things cousins would ordinarily share during their lives are over with. “Little Bobby’s prostate screening came out negative!” “Suzy’s hot flashes are getting better!” Too late.

I should also add that while my cousins maintained pretty close relations with each other over the years, they never once showed any interest in my sister or me, so they can’t barge in now and expect me to have the normal feelings cousins have for each other. These are not my cousins except on paper. You can’t reap what you don’t sow.

I also did nothing to cultivate relationships. I never had the feeling I was supposed to be close to them. Didn’t occur to me.

They haven’t shown any interest in freeloading, so that’s good. Maybe they’re not like their parents. My dad’s boat is long gone, along with the vacation homes.

They may be rich. All of the eldest sister’s kids are Mormons, and Mormons do pretty well.

This brings me back to the email.

The eldest sister and her second husband had one child together. A girl. I have seen her twice in my life.

She seems like a very nice person, although she is her mother’s daughter and her uncle’s niece, so if she’s a psychopath, she came by it honestly.

Until the email came, I didn’t know how to spell her first name. My first cousin. I know I have seen her name a few times during my life, but you don’t retain information you don’t use. The email mentions a husband named Mike. She probably has kids and grandchildren. Mormon.

She sent me a link to an online folder containing family pictures and documents such as my grandfather’s draft registration. That was nice of her. On the other hand, she also asked if she could perform some kind of Mormon ritual on my dad’s dead soul. This made me very angry. I am a Christian, and Mormons are not Christians. Mormonism is a pagan cult based on Christianity. Mormons deny the central, essential tenet of Christianity, which is that we receive salvation by faith, not works. If you believe in salvation by works when you die, you will go to hell unless there are extenuating circumstances.

Mormons have a reputation for being rude and aggressive in their proselytizing. They send rude young men out to spend a year of their lives chasing people on the street and badgering them about joining the cult. Christians are supposed to rely on the Holy Spirit to draw people. Mormons lack the Holy Spirit, because they are pagans, so they rely on aggressive sales tactics. I didn’t appreciate being subjected to this by a relative.

Mormonism is very unpopular for a cult that started nearly 200 years ago. It has a big media presence in the US, but they make up less than 2% of the population. Mormons claim the figure is more like 5%, but Mormons have a history of lying about their religion and its successes, so I believe non-Mormon sources. After all, the religion itself is a lie, started by a notorious con artist known to local authorities.

Perhaps the aggression and rudeness are based in the knowledge that an unpopular church with beliefs that fly in the face of common sense needs hardball promotion in order to survive.

I see Mormonism for what it is. Not a harmless branch of Christianity, but a cult created by Satan in order to destroy the real church, defame God, and increase the population of hell. The Mormons think Yeshua is Satan’s brother. They think Yahweh, Yeshua, and Satan are aliens who live on another planet. They believe a tiny number of people will be resurrected, and that those people will make it because they’ve done a really good job of obeying the rules and competing with other Mormons. Their beliefs are only a little less bizarre than those of Scientologists.

I’m not sure why they evangelize so hard. If the odds of being saved are so low, and there is a cutoff, what’s the point? Is it just to prevent people from drinking caffeine and alcohol, prior to spending eternity in Mormon hell along with all the other also-rans?

Christianity is different from Mormonism in that it acknowledges that there is no limit to the number of people who can be saved. It makes sense for Christians to try to increase the flock, but we don’t run around in black pants and white shirts, hectoring people for not believing in the angel Moroni and the white salamander.

What possible reason could God have for limiting salvation to a few people? He’s not the admissions committee at Stanford. It’s not like there are a limited number of parking spaces up there. He created the earth just so he could fill heaven, so it’s pretty obvious he’s not going to grade on a curve and only accept the A students.

When a person tries to involve me or my relations in a cult that sends people to hell, it makes me angry. I can’t help that. It’s a presumptuous attack on our souls. It’s an attempt to put us in flames for eternity, instead of swimming in love and peace forever in the presence of our perfect father and more brothers and sisters than could ever be counted.

I’m not reluctant to talk straight to such people. We are supposed to fear God, not people, and especially not people who threaten to take us and our children to hell.

I don’t think performing sick rituals involving the dead can cost the victims salvation, but for all I know, demons would go forth from the scene of the Satanic rites and try to bring down the victim’s descendants. This is the kind of things demons, losers who have nothing better to do, would try to pull. I don’t want disgusting Mormon spirits bothering me, my wife, my new son, our parrot, or even the cattle that wander around outside the house.

I might be okay with them going after the squirrels.

I am sure my cousin meant well, and I tried to be polite in my response, but I was blunt. I told her Mormonism was not compatible with our beliefs. I told her my dad died enveloped in the Holy Spirit, in peace and equipped with eternal salvation. I said any effort to involve him or my family in Mormon rituals would be upsetting and a failure to respect boundaries.

I was forceful. Maybe I was too forceful. I was forceful because I knew Mormons had a reputation for being pushy, self-righteous, and inconsiderate. Not knowing my cousin, I was afraid she would continue to pester us and upset my wife and me during the challenging first month of our son’s life.

Maybe I overdid it, but she had it coming, because she really crossed the line, and I’m sure she knew better. I have zero regrets. She had a lot of gall, sending us that condescending, tone-deaf, poisonous nonsense. Am I too harsh? Maybe she doesn’t realize how out of line she was, because she lives in a Mormon bubble and assumes everyone loves her cult and thinks it’s part of Christianity. Maybe she thought we would think she was doing us a favor instead of trying to write our names in Satan’s book of death. I don’t think an intelligent person could be so oblivious, but if so, she needed to see things from the other side in order to temper her behavior.

Mormons need to know that no one else considers them Christians and that their outreaches are seen as attempts to drag people to hell.

As for the photos, we received a total of 57 items. I was able to recognize some of the people or deduce their identities. Others…no clue. I will have to look them up. We got a couple of photos of my dad as a kid. I guess that’s good. We got photos of my great-grandparents and at least some of their parents. I thanked my cousin and said I would show my son this stuff when he was old enough to understand it.

As for my mother’s side of the family, before inheritance-greed and the dishonesty of a few cooled the love, we were close. I had the key to my grandparents’ house, I could have shown up any time in the middle of the night, unannounced, and they would have thought it was completely normal. It was my house, too. I could take whatever I wanted out of the refrigerator or deep freeze. I shot my grandfather’s guns without asking permission. I hung out with my grandfather all the time. I spent lots of time with my cousins. I liked my aunts and all but one of my uncles. We spent Christmases at my grandparent’s home. Gramps gave every grandchild a hundred-dollar bill every year. He gave us calves and sent us the money when they were sold. Before things went sour, we attended each other’s funerals.

I knew a bunch of my great aunts and uncles. I used to spend afternoons at my grandfather’s older brother’s house. I wouldn’t need a score card to pick most of them out of photos.

I don’t know whether I offended my cousin or not. I can’t say it matters much, because in terms of impact on my life, it would amount to less than offending the receptionist at my dentist’s office, whom I see once every 6 months and who has never approached me about involvement in a Satanic cult. We will never spend Christmases with these people. My son and my wife will never meet any of them. We will probably be separated from them for eternity because they will be in the lake of fire with Joseph Smith and the angel Moroni, if he exists. Our real and eternal family is the collection of people God joined to us through our shared faith.

My father’s relations and I should have done better, but when a family is this cold and crazy, you can’t expect any kind of a harvest. My borderline-sociopath dad and his borderline-sociopath sister were never equipped to create a tribe that gathered for huge family reunions.

When I thank God for my son, I thank him for my nation. He’s more than a baby. Like Isaac, he is the source of whatever nation springs from my loins. He and his siblings will surely do better than my dad and his sisters. They will have a chance at dwelling in God’s secret place all of their lives, and in the end the ones who listen will find rest in heaven.

MORE

Well, I have to correct myself.

I said Mormons think God and Yeshua (whom they appear to consider separate beings) live on another planet. This is not quite right, although what they actually believe is worse. They think Yahweh used to be a man, and he became God because he was so good. Or something. Of course, the God of Christians has always been, as the Bible says repeatedly.

Mormons think God has lived on another planet. Where they think he lives now, I am not willing to Google to find out. Park City, perhaps.

Also, while I did read that Mormons think only a small number of people can be saved, it appears that is not true. My understanding now is that they think only a small number will be really close to God in the afterlife, which is not what Christianity says. Like Buddhists, they have a weird system of heavens which, like their notion of the current whereabouts of the almighty, I am not willing to research or expound on.

They really do think Yeshua and Satan are brothers. The Christian and Jewish scriptures clearly say Yeshua is God almighty. Obviously, no created being can be the brother of the most high.

Flag Down for Bringing a Walker on the Field

Someone on the web created a thread asking for unpopular opinions. When I saw it, I knew it was destiny. This is what I was made for.

I did quite a bit of writing. For one thing, I pointed out that pizza doesn’t go with beer. That must have made heads explode.

Pizza is acidic and a little sweet. It often contains oregano, a bitter herb. Obviously, you don’t pair that with a bitter beverage. Soft drinks and red wine go with pizza. Tea is acceptable. Beer? Insane.

I think people who drink beer with pizza are generally low-end beer drinkers who drink to get drunk. I think they must be people who drink really bad beer, chilled to the freezing point to kill the awful taste. People who drink stuff like Bud and Coors always drink it as cold as possible, and the reason is that when it warms up even a little, it tastes like seltzer with soap and a little sugar.

I think these people are likely to eat bad pizza from Papa John’s or Domino’s, and they just want something to wash it down and give them a buzz.

Beer goes with steak and rib roasts. It goes with Mexican food and seafood. It works with cheeseburgers and fries. Forcing it to get along with pizza is ill-advised at best. And nothing is worse than smelling other people’s beer-and-pizza burps while trying to eat.

If you think beer goes with everything, go eat an apple and chase it with a beer. It’s right up there with toothpaste and orange juice.

I also said Elvis was a lousy singer. It’s true. Elvis became famous because he caused girls with weak fathers to become sexually aroused. His early performances were basically riots, with little bacchantes fighting the ushers, tearing off their own underwear, and throwing it on the stage. People forget that. Today we make fun of people who call rock and roll the devil’s music, but it’s true. Any music that makes you throw your dirty underwear at people has some connection to hell.

Women still throw their dirty underwear at entertainers. It’s gross. They throw it at Justin Timberlake, for example. They throw it at the kind of guys who look like they take it home and put it on.

They should have men in Tyvek suits gather it and put it in medical waste bags. Someone could catch something.

Sinatra also mesmerized young tramps, but he was also an excellent singer whose style was innovative and unique. Jerry Lee Lewis was a much better singer than Elvis. Sam Cooke was far better. There were a lot of excellent male singers back in Elvis’s heyday. Nat King Cole. Eddie Arnold. Jim Reeves. Ray Price. Johnny Mathis. Ray Charles.

You can go into restaurants and bars today and still hear Sinatra recordings. Elvis? Not so much. It was never about the sound. It was about the pelvis.

I complained about sports worship. I said that if I wanted to watch overpaid illiterates work, I’d turn on The View.

I said I didn’t like it when people assumed I watched sports. People come up to me and try to make small talk about men I’ve never heard of, playing games I didn’t watch. “How about that Mahomes?” Who?

I pulled that name out of the air just now because I’ve seen it in headlines. I don’t know who he plays for or what his position is.

What if I went up to random men and said, “How about that Carl Friedrich Gauss? Is he the GOAT, or what?” He’s a fascinating guy. How can they not find him interesting? We wouldn’t have electronics or, well, any kind of serious technology without his discoveries.

Some guy responded and said I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

How thick can a person’s head be?

Me: I never watch football. It would be great if the stadium where the Super Bowl was played was obliterated by a meteor and replaced with a Buc-Ee’s.

Him: You must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

What?

This is completely typical of my experiences with sports fans. “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” They can’t believe a man who doesn’t watch sports can exist. It’s like they’re under a spell. And they are. Demons are filling their minds with absurdities.

It also bugs me when men with hurt feelings try to tell me how empty my life must be because I don’t watch sports. What possible reason could you have to be angry at me for not sharing all of your hobbies? Do I get mad at you for not knowing how to weld?

I look down on you, sure. But I don’t get angry.

Kidding.

Yeah, my life is empty. I love my wife, and I spend a lot of time having fun with her. I don’t turn the TV on as soon as I get on and ignore her while I fill the house with obnoxious crowd noises and pray I don’t lose my ill-informed, emotion-driven bets, which I didn’t tell her about. Oh, the emptiness.

I have all sorts of time for my interests, like prayer, cooking, shooting, writing, and using tools. I get to spend time with my pet. I get to sit in the recliner with my son on my chest and relax in an atmosphere of pure love.

Empty, empty, empty. It would be so much better to be outside a stadium, trying to dodge as kids try to spit on me on my way in. I’d really rather be paying $11 each for cups of extremely bad beer and then standing in a quarter-inch of other people’s urine in packed men’s rooms. I long to get caught up in post-game brawls where people fight to defend the reputations of spoiled young athletes who pay armed men to keep fans away from them.

If only I could spend 4 hours fighting traffic, trying to get home from a stadium after my team lost, avoiding eye contact with drunk road-ragers and praying I don’t get stopped at a DUI checkpoint.

To get average seats for my three-person family, I’d have to shell out almost $500. I would happily pay $100 to be allowed to stay home.

But I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

For $500, I can get my son a brand-new CZ 457 Scout in .22LR, and he can hand it down to his son. But no, I’d rather watch grown men play a game created to amuse children. When are the duck-duck-goose playoffs?

On a related note, I said Bill Burr was an idiot. A lot of men think he’s a genius and the world’s last straight shooter. A regular guy with a platform. Hello? It’s an act, and he’s an entertainer. If he were telling the truth, they wouldn’t call it an act.

Rock Hudson made romantic comedies with women. Just saying.

He’s not smart, and he’s not one of us. Normal men, I mean. He’s just another showbiz liberal, kissing the rings on the hands that feed him.

He has crippling TDS. Right after dozens of people died in the unnecessary LA fires, he appeared with another fool, Jimmy Kimmel, and made jokes about people who criticized California’s fire preparation and response. He ridiculed them. He stupidly asserted it wasn’t possible to put fires out with ocean water. He didn’t even think about the insensitivity of doing all this while bodies were literally still warm.

California and LA officials themselves have admitted they blew it. They admitted it in Donald Trump’s presence soon after Burr made an ass of himself. Talk about jokes aging badly.

Burr says he–“HE”–doesn’t get tired of winning football games. He supports the Patriots, and he uses the words “I” and “we” when he talks about them. “I don’t get tired of winning.” “We won.”

If Bill Burr is still capable of running 40 yards, he would probably do it in a minute and a half. On the field, he would move like Joe Biden trying to find his way off a stage. You could measure his vertical leap with a feeler gauge. His most likely tool for stopping an NFL pass is his forehead. Who is “we”?

You know those videos of drunken fans rushing onto football fields, careening around at 6 mph, and then having angry players turn them into Tex-Avery-style murals? That’s what a Bill Burr NFL cameo would look like, except maybe he would keep his shirt on. They would peel him off the turf like a fruit roll-up and bury him in a map tube.

If Bill Burr played in a game, he wouldn’t sit on the bench. They’d bring in a hospital bed and a bag with a zipper on it.

Bill Burr has never “won” a game. The people who win are paid to be there. If you have to pay, you’re not part of “we.”

Ticket Taker: Ticket, please.

Bill Burr: Ticket? I have to get in! We’re playing today!

Ticket Taker: Okay, pops. Ticket and DNR.

Burr says he feels bad for days when “WE” lose. Seriously? I don’t mean to be insensitive, but if the plane carrying the New England Patriots flew into a bus carrying the Kansas City Chiefs, I would be fine. I would be very sorry to see it happen, I would feel bad for everyone who knew them, and I would probably pray for their loved ones, but 15 minutes later, I’d probably be watching Paul Harrell videos on Youtube.

If your emotional wellbeing depends on how well a bunch of total strangers play a game you stink at, you need an intervention, because your life is devoid of meaningful pursuits. Burr felt jolly and sassy after dozens of people died in fires caused by incompetence, so maybe something in his head needs to be adjusted.

Some people got annoyed with me, but that just proved I was doing it right. If they wanted me to make them happy, they should have posted a popular opinion thread.

3

I have been asking myself whether I should write about the recent addition to my family. I don’t want to give cowardly, underdeveloped Internet nuts power over my wife and son. On the other hand, we have strong prayer lives, I can easily (both physically and mentally) kill anyone who endangers us, I’m in a jurisdiction where the police will pat me on the back for it and possibly take me out for ribs, and I feel I owe something to people who have read this blog for years.

Some people have been reading since the beginning, two decades ago. I have gotten to know a few people, even if at a distance. I have prayed for them. I have met a handful. I don’t know if I can call people I’ve never met friends, but if not, some are pretty close to it.

I think this is the first photo I took after we brought him home. It was not staged. It’s amusing, and it should also serve to send a message.

I thought it was really funny. We were extremely sleep-deprived and barely knew what we were doing. We tossed him in the bassinet and started squaring the house away for bed, and a couple of minutes later, I saw I had left him near a carry piece.

Not a problem, since he was not able to rack the slide at that point.

Second photo, equally funny:

He was due to wake up at any minute, and I wanted to shoot some video. I rushed around looking for something to weigh the tripod down. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and then I saw some bags of .45 ACP handloads. Perfect.

He is healthy. He is happy and peaceful except when it’s time to be changed, and I wear ear protection for that. He really is as cute as the picture suggests. Not all babies have curb appeal early on, and we have learned that it’s a blessing. The staff at the hospital didn’t want to let him go home. I know they give good treatment to every baby, but it was pretty obvious that being really cute bought him some extra favor. They loaded us up with stuff we weren’t supposed to get.

I thought it was a little unusual for a baby to be this cute, so I asked people if it was just my perception as a parent, and apparently he is objectively cute.

The delivery process was a horror. They told us to go in at 4:45 a.m. on a certain day. Then after we had gotten up in the middle of the night, they told us to wait another day. Then they called us in at about 6:30 the next morning. Then they ran the air conditioner all night, and it was 53 degrees outside.

It was so cold, we put 6 blankets on my wife, and her hands still shook. I got the staff to yell at whoever ran the air conditioning, and we got them to provide two electric heaters. I slept in a winter coat with insulated gloves and two pairs of socks. The room warmed up the next morning at about the time labor got into gear. Then it got too hot.

The labor itself was terrible, which means it was normal. For medical reasons, we had to finish without an epidural.

It seemed much worse than it was, because we were both exhausted from lack of sleep and lying in a freezing room. The whole experience should have been much better.

We both had the feeling that the labor process was a crushing ordeal, but later we agreed that the main problem was that we had been deprived of sleep and subjected extreme cold. If she had gone into labor rested and warm, it would have been painful but quick and bearable, and it wouldn’t have taken us several days to get over the stress.

We are getting an acceptable amount of sleep now, although sometimes I start to doze off in a chair, and I make mistakes I wouldn’t make if I were rested.

The baby was 80th-percentile big, but he was not fat. He is heavy. He is now wearing stuff for 3-month-olds. He seems very strong. I thought newborns were like rag dolls, but he wrestles with us pretty forcefully. Yesterday he insisted on rolling onto his side. When I corrected him and put him on his back, he rolled back onto his side instantly, in spite of being swaddled. He lifts himself off his mother’s chest with his arms.

His eyes were very dark when he was born, but today, suddenly, they’re blue. I don’t know what to expect later.

He was hairy from the get-go, and the hair on his head is nearly black and pretty straight.

He feeds like a horse, so no problems there yet. He was supposed to lose weight, but I think he’s going the other way.

He seems to smile and light up when I bother him, which is a father’s duty. Web sources suggest the smile may be from gas, however. He has that to spare. He seems to like us. He appears to have fun sometimes.

For a long time, I prayed for God to give me a house of love, and now I have it, so don’t give up on your important prayers. I don’t think my son will ever have to know what it’s like to live in a dysfunctional home.

That’s about it. Don’t expect a lot of updates. We give our thanks to everyone who prayed for us.