First Evaluation Goes Poorly

I found this on Yelp today. Really disappointing. I didn’t even know he had an account.

★ 1 (1 review)

Baby X. said

“These are the worst parents on Earth. I regret giving them my business. I wish I could give them zero stars. Not sure what stars are.

The one that gives milk is not too bad. She generally does what I tell her. But sometimes I have to scream for over 20 seconds before the milk arrives. Unacceptable. She also stuck a thermometer up my rear end to make me poop. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but this just seems rude. And what’s the rush?

She sings stupid songs about changing my diaper and giving me baths. No one wants to hear that, lady. Just do your job. If you’re going to sing, can’t you learn a real song instead of singing things like, ‘Changing baby’s diaper! Baby, baby, baby!,’ 300 times?

The other parent is useless. When I cry to get my way, he says awful things like, ‘No one cares. No one is listening.’ Then he actually laughs. He tells me to get over it. I banged my head on the laundry sink, and he told me to rub dirt on it. Sometimes when he walks by, he points his finger at me and says, ‘Shut it.’ He doesn’t even slow down.

He even imitates my crying. Frankly, he doesn’t have the pipes for it.

He made the milk parent leave me in the bassinet to cry just because it was two a.m. and she hadn’t slept in a day. Then he wouldn’t let her respond to my commands. Okay, yes, an hour of 500-dB shrieking later, I fell asleep, but I still feel violated.

The thing that gets me the most is the insubordination.

When he changes my diapers, he wears earmuffs and gloves. I find this insulting. He also covers me so I can’t pee on him. I pee on the other one like 10 times a day. She’s always wide open, like she’s in the end zone and it’s 4th down. She never learns. Anyway, what’s the big deal? How else am I supposed to amuse myself? It’s not like I have a lot of options.

He keeps telling me my head is big. Dude. Have you looked in a mirror? Do you have one wide enough? Body-shaming isn’t cool any more.

This is why I throw up on you more than the other one.

What I really hate is the way he makes me laugh when I’m enjoying a good sulk. He pokes my cheeks and plays peekaboo. He tickles my ears. First thing you know, I’m grinning and flopping around like a total sellout.

It’s not fair playing peekaboo. It’s the funniest game on Earth. It would break anyone.

I wanted to put an ad on Facebook, hoping to hire new parents, but at this point I am totally illiterate.

My advice: be born to different parents. If at all possible, be born to Will Smith and his wife. They really know what they’re doing.”

Just wait, kid. One day you’ll ask for a car.

Shot but no Beer

I don’t plan to put my son’s name on the blog, but I keep violating my resolution not to blog about him, so I’ll have to call him something. For now, I think I’ll go with “Herr Mozart” because these days we are supposed to turn all babies into Mozarts.

So today Mozart went to the pediatric surgeon to see if he had an oral issue that made him slow breastfeeder. He is not a slow bottle feeder. Much the opposite.

Bottles come with nipples made to move milk at different speeds. A 1 is a very slow nipple, and a 3 is a fast nipple. You don’t want to drown your newborn with a 3.

One problem people have with bottles is that the move milk faster than women’s bodies, so babies drink too fast. They end up overeating, so to speak, they may throw up more milk than is normal, and they may get really spoiled. Who wouldn’t prefer a #3 nipple to a #1 mom?

Experts teach mothers to do paced bottle-feeding. Essentially, this means you hold the bottle horizontally so the milk comes halfway up the nipple. This prevents gravity from pumping milk into a baby that has to drink it to avoid drowning, and it is also supposed to make babies drink more slowly.

Not Mozart. We got him slow nipples, I do as the experts say, and milk flows into him like foreign bribes into a Biden. I don’t know how he does it.

With Mom, he latches on and takes a nap. Every so often, he takes a little milk. Then he conks out again. He lies there, blissfully snoring and breaking wind, as long as she permits it. He doesn’t fill up.

Mom was convinced he had a lip tie or a tongue tie. These are little strips of flesh we all have, connecting our lips and tongues to our bodies. If they are not made just right, they can prevent babies from opening wide enough to feed well.

The pediatric surgeon said he didn’t see anything that needed to be corrected, so now instead of being trapped in the “Mom wants to know for sure” vortex, we can move forward.

I knew he did not have a problem, because he has breastfed well in the past, and because when he uses a bottle, he opens like a python swallowing a stray dog.

A friend of ours has fed two kids successfully, and she called it. She said Herr Mozart was lazy. The surgeon said the same thing today. Our friend said he liked sleeping on mom. She told us to take off his clothes and make him uncomfortable so he would stay awake and get feedings over with. A warm, comfortable baby is an unmotivated baby.

Mom’s cooperation has been spotty, because, well, she’s Mom. The enabler.

Now, with confirmation from the surgeon, we have agreed to stick with my friend’s approach. Assuming Mom behaves.

He’s doing okay. He’s a little behind on height, but he is way ahead on fat. It looks like he gained over a pound in under two weeks, and he grew half an inch.

We also took him to the health department for shots. Don’t ask me why, but his not-great pediatrician told us to do this instead of giving him shots himself. That guy has to go.

We got him fixed up for several common diseases, and we will get two more shots next week. I didn’t want his body to have to deal with side effects from like 52 different vaccines at once.

The health department is a good resource. They have been very helpful with breastfeeding. But it seems odd to go to the county instead of doctors. I am old, and until this year, I had never been inside a county health department building. This county has a lot of low-income people, so I think standards are different here. Pediatricians ask for your Medicaid number without even asking if you have real insurance, and they pimp formula without asking whether you would rather give your baby actual milk. Formula is for poor uninformed people and for feminists who want illegal aliens to raise their babies.

Everyone we saw today thought he was wonderful. He is still very cute. That hasn’t worn off. It’s still paying dividends. When pediatricians who see 50 babies a day see your baby and gush over how cute he is, you know he’s unusual.

I was very happy to get the vaccinations and lip business over with, so I came home and treated myself to a nice toasted bagel with Sam’s Club smoked salmon. I found out that Sam’s sells very good salmon for half as much as supermarkets, so I no longer feel bad about eating it, and I plan to keep it up. That means I have to get back to making bagels.

The only decent bagels I can buy here without driving 25 minutes come from Publix. They’re made by the Einstein Bros. chain. Every Publix has a little cabinet containing Einstein bagels. Unfortunately, old Jews or maybe fat gentile girls get in there early every day and clean out the plain bagels. By the time I get there, they are usually gone, and nobody really wants a sesame-seed or asiago bagel with salmon on it. They usually have “everything” bagels. These are like bagels rolled in coarse dirt. Incomprehensible.

So now I have to get back to working on my own bagel recipe. And I have to figure out how to make garlic bagels.

It’s amazing how bad the Internet’s bagel information is. The recipe ought to be everywhere, but the web is full of bad recipes and wild guesses. Pages with recipes contain phrases like, “These are pretty good…”

I made some bagels back in November, and they were real bagels, but they were not inspiring. I have to resume.

It appears I need to try a hydration rate of 55%. Some recipes go as high as 64%, which is idiotic. That’s Wonder Bread territory. A bagel has to be dense, and that means low hydration.

I’m going to crack a Schneider Weisse, do some figuring, and get to work. I am never going to beat old retired Jews to that Einstein Bros. box.

We are Goldstein

Let’s compare two sitreps.

Me:

Woke up in my nice Sam’s Club memory foam bed. Prayed in tongues and prophesied for 90 minutes. Grabbed my beautiful son, who was in prime morning-baby mood, and messed with him while he burbled with joy. Noticed that he had pooped on his romper during the night. Took him to the laundry room, put him in the special seat in the utility sink, and rubbed him all over with a hot, soapy washcloth while he grinned and tried to eat water drops that got close to his mouth.

Diapered the baby, put the poo items in the washer, threw out the carefully-wrapped diaper, and handed the heir apparent over to mom, who was thrilled to have him back.

Went to the living room and ate a gorgeous toasted bagel with cream cheese, slices of Bermuda onion, smoked salmon also from Sam’s Club, and decaf with too much cream and sugar. Watched a Top Gear clip and made fun of the British.

Unidentified Mainstream West Coast Leftist:

Went on Tiktok wearing a Dodgers jersey. Small confused dog also wearing Dodgers jersey. Screamed in torment about the L.A. Dodgers visiting the White House. Called two talented baseball players DEI hires. Ripped jersey off self. Tore dog’s jersey off so roughly she should be cited for animal cruelty. Announced her plans to burn her jerseys, sparing one that belonged to a player who missed the White House visit because he hurt his ankle. Complained that things should be different, because this is the Age of Aquarius. The demons she worships are letting her down. Imagine that.

Two people. Same world. Same country. Same week.

Leftists are the people who have planted their perversion-celebrating antisemitic flag on joy and love. The people who supposedly do life right. The rest of us–the Gomers and Goobers–are supposedly the miserable potato eaters who don’t know what we’re missing because we’re too stupid and too busy committing incest.

Polls from left-leaning organizations say people on my side are happier, better-looking, and even less mentally ill than the snowflakes, even though they make more money and tend to be more educated. Even the polls are deluded!

Red life is wonderful. The South is the most-fun place there is. I’m missing out on so much hatred and fear.

A young guy bought the house across the private drive a few years back. He bought it from a great older couple, Russ and Sally. Russ played basketball at LSU. As Southern as they come. Heavy accent. He was an ignorant incest-committer who could not read. No, actually, he was a very smart guy with a math degree. He made his money selling medical stuff because the job market for mathematicians isn’t all that great.

The young guy has a land-clearing business. I just wrote a letter for him, telling some authority or other to let him park his diesel grapple, truck, and equipment trailer on his lot. He has a wife and three kids. The kids zip around the property on a quad. We get along great. He came over here and moved problem trees for me without being asked or paid. In fact, he asked permission.

So far, neither of us has left the private non-HOA subdivision wearing black PJ’s from Urban Outfitters and carrying bottles of pee to hurl at the cops. None of the residents of these two properties key Teslas. We haven’t screamed at the sky.

I hang out with my wife and baby son. We pray. We occasionally host overnight visitors. I shoot in the yard. I like running around in the utility cart and working with the chainsaws and the tractor. My lot is so big I have to use a cart to get around, and I have to use the phone to communicate from one end to the other. I write on my blog. I brew beer.

We must be doing something wrong. We could be living it up in Times Square or any neighborhood in Seattle, pooping on the sides of police cars, setting fire to ourselves over Ukraine, calling for the murder of all Jews in Israel, and telling our son he’s a girl.

The other day I told my son I had assigned the male gender to him. I’ve told other people. It gives me a laugh. I tell him not to be a fruit or a leftist when he grows up.

If we’re doing so many things wrong, why is life so good?

My buddy Mike has a son who married a leftist. Their marriage is an equal partnership, so it’s really a matriarchy. They are not interested in our white, European-looking, colonialist God.

Mom is a fake vegan who sometimes eats things like cheese. Dad plays along when he’s in the house. They have two small girls. The last one came in seriously underweight at birth. That’s what happens when you don’t eat meat. Vegetarianism is very, very bad for the unborn and for children. Even our left-leaning medical establishment says so. Know what you’re supposed to eat while breastfeeding? Protein. Look it up.

Guess what breast milk is, by vegan standards? An animal product. We’re not really animals, but leftists think we are. Anyway, they think breast milk is okay for babies, but as soon as they’re weaned, it’s time for sickly white fluids concocted from things like oats and soybeans. Soybeans are toxic until they’re cooked, and they’re full of female hormones, but okay.

Mom and Dad bought their first baby a lesbian costume. A grey sweatshirt with a rainbow on it and a pair of masculine-looking jeans. I would rather have God strike me dead than let me put homo clothes or girls’ clothes on my boy. It astonishes me that there are parents pushing their kids to adopt abomination. A baby is literally better off dying in the crib than going to hell. There is no purpose in having children to fill up hell.

They used to get mad at Mike for using words like “she,” “her,” and “girl.” Like the first baby’s sex was a secret she wasn’t supposed to know. Now they find themselves using these words themselves. I wonder if they cudgel themselves later and sleep in hair shirts made from fake hair. They have even put dresses on the baby.

When the son found out my wife and I were having a baby, he told Mike he wanted to know what we were planning to do to help him cope with life under white supremacy. No joke. My plan is to make sure my son knows there are only two races: God’s family, and everyone else.

They worry all the time. They live in fear. They have little free time. They are unhappy. They are angry at good people.

Life here gets more peaceful all the time. We don’t worry about the future, because someone is planning it for us. I call our house the House of Love, because it’s true.

Here on the blog, I express a lot of annoyance, but that’s not reflective of the atmosphere here or my general attitude. I don’t go around in real life fuming about the world, and I do not hope conservatives start shooting our persecutors. I would like to be raptured. I want to be elsewhere when people on my side look for payback.

Mike’s son and his wife are normal. More typical of this age than my family. That’s terrible.

The centrifuging of society has progressed to an extreme degree, and Satan’s smug children are getting heavily concentrated at the bottoms of the tubes. Their contempt for God’s children is deep and impenetrable. Their hatred is hotter than ever. The spring of future violence is compressed almost to its limit.

Today I read about a poll. About 55% of Democrats said assassinating the president was at least somewhat justified. Elon Musk? A paltry 48%. We’re talking about cold-blooded murder, if it can ever be correct to say leftists have cold blood. It boils all the time.

Democrats are now showing up at hate events wearing hats like that of Luigi, a video game character. They symbolize agreement with Luigi Mangione, the cowardly liberal nutwad who murdered an innocent insurance executive on the street.

Imagine this happening during the last century. What if this were 1964, and Republicans were wearing T-shirts bearing the image of Oswald the rabbit, showing how happy they were that John Kennedy’s brain had been splattered all over his wife’s dress and expressing their hope that more murders would follow?

Couldn’t have happened.

Here’s irony: Luigi hats feature a big “L” on the forehead. What is that the universal symbol for?

Couldn’t be more appropriate. Satan is THE biggest loser in existence, and his children are losers. I mean that literally. Satan is incapable of being blessed, but he is a curse magnet. A black hole for curses. They can fall in, but they can’t get out. His kids are the same way, but curses can’t stick to real Christians.

As usual, things are even worse than I thought they were. How can this be sustainable? If a very comfortable majority of Democrats admit they think it would be good to see the president murdered, and it’s okay to wear a hat celebrating the killing of a husband and father who was no threat to anyone, how long can it be before Democrats start traveling in armed mobs, shooting everyone they think MIGHT be a Trump supporter, true Christian, Zionist, or Jew?

I see that we are lucky leftists hate guns, because it hinders their progress. If conservatives wanted to put death squads on the street, we could do it today, but angry liberal men tend to be weak, soft individuals who don’t know guns work. When you see them running around in their conformist black pajamas (because black is the color of love and joy), you can’t help noticing that their necks and their wrists are often about the same size. They are taking a long time to prepare.

I think Democrats are becoming like Muslims and the Irish-Americans who funded the IRA. Some are willing to become terrorists. The others are not, but many of those who are not are willing to support terror in private.

Let me digress. I learned something interesting the other day from a secular historian. In the early days of Christianity, people dressed normally at funerals. They wore cheerful colors. They knew they were celebrating people’s entry into heaven. They started wearing black because the Catholics and the Orthodox, who ran pagan organizations pretending to be churches, adopted pagan funeral customs. For pagans, death was terrifying.

Now it’s like every leftist event is a funeral. A funeral for civilization and love. They even root for the end of humanity. They think human beings are an infestation, and the world is like a house that needs to be tented for termites.

We are what gives the world purpose. Without us, it would be better to destroy it and save animals suffering.

It’s important to maintain perspective. If you don’t check leftists out once in a while, and your own life is easy and peaceful, it’s not hard to forget that the ship is sinking.

Life is Easy for the Cute

My son is still alive, so apparently letting me take care of him for up to two hours at a time is not as dangerous as his mom thinks. I am not a tiger. I do not eat my young.

Things are going very well. He is ahead on every obsessive-mom metric I can think of except for height, and he has over 20 years to work on that. He is fatter, stronger, and smarter than most kids his age.

We are changing pediatricians, as I have probably written before. The old Nigerian guy we picked has such a thick accent even my wife has no idea what he’s saying. He is completely dismissive of breastfeeding, and he appears to be receiving bribes from formula companies, because somehow free formula mysteriously appears in his office, and he gives it away.

My cousin told me the doctor should be giving us height and weight percentiles at every visit, but he doesn’t. I pushed him to do it, thinking it was a simple thing he knew how to do, but he had to go to his computer and find the same website I would have used.

The last time we went, a well-dressed white lady was at the clerical window having a too-long conversation with the clericals. I thought it was odd that someone with nice clothes and clean shoes–and no children–would be in a pediatrician’s office in Ocala, and I soon learned that my suspicions were well-founded.

That happens more and more as I get old.

She was some kind of industry shill, and she was arranging something with the practice. Maybe she was a formula shill, or maybe she gets paid to put doctors together to make mutual referrals. Maybe she was pushing Ozempic for fat babies. I don’t know, because they never mentioned a product.

I should have gone outside to see which series BMW she drove.

The baby is fine, but there is constant tension between the mom way of doing things and the proper, correct dad way. Mom wants him to lie on his back and have paid servants massage his extremities and feed him milk from a 24-karat bottle. Dad wants him to begin SEAL training.

He has had feeding problems because Mom taught him to sleep in her bed and to breastfeed while covered in multiple layers of clothing. He decided she was a pacifier to help him sleep, so he didn’t make much effort to take anything in. He just lay there snoring with one hand on Mom to make sure she didn’t try to escape. The Mom alarm. The ankle monitor of baby moves.

Last night, I got Mom to talk to a friend of mine who breastfed two kids, and the friend set her straight. She said he needed structure. He needed to be in bed at night, ignored except for necessary feeding and changing. She said the lights needed to be out at night, and the baby needed to be uncomfortable so he would not fall asleep at the nipple. She said to take the romper off so he would be a little cold.

My wife is convinced that our son will die if we expose him to 75-degree air without two or more layers of clothing, but as I have repeatedly told her, crib death is caused by heat, not cold. My friend backed me up, saying her kids sleep best at 69 degrees. It looks like a lot of mothers have killed their children by wrapping them up like little moon astronauts.

I don’t think my wife fully understands that in America and Europe, “room temperature” generally means 68 degrees. Florida has given her a skewed perspective.

He is trying to talk now, although it would be a pretty big stretch to say he has formed words. When he says something that sounds like a word, I repeat it back several times, thinking there might be a chance. And there might. Who knows? It has happened to others. My mother said my sister spoke sentences at 6 months. Strange that I turned out to be so much smarter than she did.

My sister, I mean.

Between my sister and me, it is not a close race.

We have an appointment to have our son’s mouth looked at, to make sure he doesn’t have either of the common deformities that make it hard to latch onto nipples. I’m sure he’s fine. He has opened his mouth plenty wide in the past, and today while he was in a good mood, I pried him open to check, and I couldn’t find any issues.

Once the appointment is behind us, it will probably be clear that we, not a deformity, are the problem.

I should not complain about my wife being overprotective. There are a lot of moms out there sitting in bars while their mothers or strangers look after their kids. Then there was Barack Obama’s mom. Enough said about her.

We have had a number of diaper blowouts. We have used bottles to get more milk into him, and apparently, it works. He has developed a gut.

My wife hated my idea of bathing him in our laundry sink, but when he started having blowouts, I started tossing him in there, because it was the best way to confine the mess and get rid of it. We got him a mesh seat that just fits in the sink. I added a spray nozzle to the faucet. Now my wife loves it and prefers it to the plastic whale-shaped tub she bought him.

I think the tub is no good because it just dilutes the filth without getting rid of it. You put the dirty baby in, the filth sloughs off into the water, and then you dry him off, leaving filth residue all over him. The spray nozzle sends filth down the drain.

We dump him in the seat and go through an elaborate procedure to get his clothing removed and into the washer and his romper removed and into the trash. The poo never touches anything important.

The whole business was my idea. The sink. The spray nozzle. The procedure. Everything. I’m a Southerner. We hate poop.

The baby loves doing it my way. He can’t get enough of the sink. He loves being hosed with warm water.

My wife saw me washing him, and she was amazed that his leg didn’t come off when I grabbed it and used it to lift him so I could spray his back and butt. His expression didn’t change at all. She had been overdoing the gentleness, like parts were in danger of coming loose.

I lift him and blast him right on his Mongolian blue spot. Mom didn’t know these spots existed. Pretty much everyone who isn’t white has them at birth, and on some people they’re permanent. Our son has a big blue area all across his vast rear end. My wife didn’t know Africans had these spots, but of course, they are harder to see on Africans.

I feel pretty smug about the sink. Experience has vindicated my ideas several times, and it’s always sweet.

He has gotten way better at pooping. He used to scream like crazy every time he had to go, but it’s much less tumultuous now. Apparently, he had something called dyschezia. It means you’re pushing hard from above while clamping shut from below. It’s a coordination problem. Now he just growls like a Rottweiler during each push, and everything moves along as it should. It’s like, “GRRRRRRRRRRRR!! GRRRRRRRR!! Ooh! OOOH!”, and then a big smile. He goes through this a number of times during any given poo, so I try to wait until he looks happy. That suggests he has finished and he is ready to hand everything off to me.

Mom thinks he should be changed while he’s still growling or screaming, because she thinks poo stings his rear end. I think that’s wrong, because he has no diaper rash and no broken skin, and he sleeps just fine after pooping without cluing us in.

I just made him wait for a change, and he calmed down. He was grinning and cooing with joy while I fixed him up. I call that another score for Dad.

This week he is falling out of love with the pacifier. His hands are taking its place, which is convenient for us. We don’t have to run for a nice, sanitized pacifier. He can just ram his nasty, filthy fingers in his mouth for long intervals of free amusement that also build up his immune system.

He’s much more fun now that he laughs and smiles and tries to have conversations with us.

I did not have much use for kids before he came along, and I thought babies were gross (which is actually true). I knew some people believed that people who didn’t care for kids shouldn’t have them, but I figured I would love one if he was mine, and of course, that is what happened. No problems at all.

I also worried that I would love my children too much, and that is still a concern. Sooner or later, you have to let them walk outside and face the world by themselves. I have been thinking he will eventually need to go to day care from time to time just to learn how to socialize, and that will be tough for me. Will there be bullies? What about all the sick kids with snot and vomit all over them? Will I be able to trust the attendants?

One thing is for sure. I will never let him spend time in a facility where a man works. It is not normal for a man to want to be around tiny children that belong to other people. I don’t want homosexual pedophiles anywhere around my son. If we ever walk into a place and see a fruit wearing foundation and glitter, we will turn around and walk out.

Pedophilia appears to be much more common in men, and I don’t think that’s because statistics are flawed.

Now that my son reacts to me more, I enjoy interacting with him more. Before everything started to come online, I liked being with him, but after a session got to a certain point, it had more to do with duty than enthusiasm. I wanted his brain to develop. I wanted him to know he was loved. I wanted him to have physical activity so his coordination would progress.

I still haven’t gotten him to shoulder a rifle yet. Give me a month. I am working on it.

This is my Mom, Consuelo Similac

It’s Sunday morning in the House of Love, the primary structure of the Heavily Armed Gated North Florida Compound.

Already, unreasonable demands have been placed on me. I was expelled from my warm bed at 8:30, which is practically before dawn, so I could put a new diaper on the compound’s quality control inspector, and then I had to feed him.

He is definitely the quality control inspector, and we nearly always fail. The bassinet? Fail. The pacifier? Fail. The type of Vaseline we apply to his protesting butt? Fail. Nothing is quite up to his exacting standards, and we suspect he has been searching the Internet trying to find our replacements.

I dumped about 6 ounces of milk into him after exercising the privilege of cleaning his nether regions, and he promptly passed out. He lay in my lap with his eyes closed and his hands extended as though he had something important to say, but nothing came out except snores.

I hope.

Once he was out, I renditioned him to the bedroom, where his mother will be very happy to hear from him when he wakes up and fills the air with skull-splitting shrieks that could mean almost anything.

We can’t figure out where all the milk is going. I mean…we KNOW where it goes, because we’re the ones who collect and dispose of it when he’s done processing it. But we don’t understand why he drinks so much.

We think he should be getting about a quart a day, but I would say he’s way over that. I think he would be content to suck continuously through a hose.

He is getting less crabby all the time, so we frequently have the pleasure of interacting with a small human being instead of some sort of furious rodent in a baby suit. Last night, he smiled all the way through a diaper change. I don’t think his mother drugged him, so the explanation must be maturation. His, not mine.

Cranking up the intensity of my Bad Cop Dad routine is really paying off. I don’t like standing up to his mother or listening to him scream because I’m not giving him what he wants, but it turns out that if I do my job, everyone gets more peace. Mom sees that my ideas work, to her utter amazement, so she’s happy. The heir apparent behaves better and seems happier, too.

He got spoiled because he slept in our bed, so he screamed when we tried to put him in the bassinet. I told his mother to put him in the bassinet and let him cry himself to sleep, and the problem went away. He also became much more pleasant during the day. Then Mom started letting him sleep with her during the day after breastfeeding, and the screaming resumed.

I told her we had been inconsistent. He doesn’t know the difference between sleeping in bed at night and sleeping in bed after breastfeeding. Both have the same effect. I told her to let him cry last night to readjust him. He yelled for about 20 minutes and then conked out peacefully. He has been a happier baby ever since.

Mom kept wanting to pick him up and make his world perfect (from the baby standpoint), but I told her to wait. I thought she was likely to get angry with me. When he shut up and went to sleep, she was the opposite of angry. It made her night. I think it also helped her realize her husband wasn’t a total idiot.

I am part of a brainwashed generation. Dads and moms are supposed to be equal partners! Patriarchy is bad! When a woman is offended, it means her husband is way out of line! All that stuff is excrement. Wives look for leadership, just like children. If you supply it with confidence, take unpopular positions, and tough it out, they end up rewarding you with gratitude and respect. If not, you become the Tim Walz of dads. A panderer everyone laughs at and walks on.

I would say it’s the Reagan/Trump philosophy of leadership. Be confident that you’re right, stick to your guns, and even people you disagree with will feel compelled to follow you.

Pleasing the crowd is not leadership. It’s submission. Tim Walz pleases crowds of sick, unhappy, fatherless people by telling them their pathological ethos is right in every respect, and he makes them worse by submitting to them. Trump tells crowds how things are and what’s going to happen, so he improves them.

If I submit to God with humility, and I’m thankful for my place under his authority instead of resenting it, my wife and children will be more likely to submit to me. That’s how it works.

The older I get, the more God shows me about the state of the world. He keeps showing me how correct our old ideas were and how sick the post-Sixties generations are. He tells me to stop being ashamed of what I believe. He tells me I’m right. He tells me he told me these things.

Life is going beautifully for us. This is the best time of my life so far. But we do have problems, and the biggest challenge is getting breastfeeding right. I look for information all the time.

I joined a forum, even though I didn’t want to. I know forums tend to turn toxic after I’ve been involved for a while, because spirits turn people against me. This is especially true of forums that involve topics popular with women. When a traditional male who belongs to God shows up, the venomous, rebellious whore spirits send irrational fury into the modern-minded ladies. Even the ones who don’t have male genitalia.

I got a tiny bit of helpful advice, but before long, dozens of women were giving my posts the old thumbs-down, and not because I had done anything wrong or violated terms of service. They were violating TOS by voting against me simply because they disagreed with me.

Here is the main thing that made them angry: I said I wanted my son to keep breastfeeding instead of taking any kind of sustenance from a bottle, because I believed it would give him a strong bond with his mother (obvious) and that men who had strong bonds with their mothers in childhood treated women less like objects as adults. I also criticized our lame pediatrician because he handed out free formula and refused to discuss breastfeeding problems with us or refer us to a consultant.

They went after me like the bacchantes on Orpheus. When I said formula contained corn syrup, palm oil, and whey, someone accused me of promoting myths. Go read labels and tell me I lied.

As background, I’ll tell you about our soon-to-be-former pediatrician.

The first time we went to his office, the girls there asked us what kind of formula we used so they could give us more. I didn’t understand this. Who was paying for the formula? Not the insurance company. Not us. Not the doctor. So who? I thought it was odd. They weren’t offering my wife and me groceries, so why feed the baby?

When we told them what we had, they said it was better than what they had, so they didn’t give us anything. Fine with me, since I wasn’t expecting anything, and we were trying to get off formula.

My wife and I talked in the parking lot, trying to figure this out. I said formula companies must have been giving the doctor their products in order to get mothers and babies hooked.

Turns out I was right.

I can’t tell you exactly what happens in our doctor’s office, but I have learned that formula companies give away a lot of formula. They give it to hospitals and doctors. I’m sure they give it to organizations. Maybe food banks. They tell hospitals that if they give formula to families that don’t need it, the hospitals will receive free formula for unusual children who can’t get nutrition any other way.

They also bribe doctors to take formula. They give them checks. They send them to conferences and arrange speaking engagements for them.

I don’t know about medical conferences, but in other fields, conferences work like this: they send you to a known center of earthly knowledge, like Vegas or Nassau, they get you drunk at their expense, they buy you great dinners, and often, miraculously, local women who don’t seem to have jobs show up out of nowhere and ask to spend the night with you.

I’m not saying women like that are whores.

I’m not SAYING it.

I don’t know whether our doctor is being paid or whether he risks STD’s at conferences in Jamaica. Maybe he’s a philanthropist, he really believes in formula, and he loves spending thousands of dollars a year, giving things away to people he ordinarily bills. Call me cynical, but I think he’s being paid.

The purpose of giving formula to care providers is not subject to reasonable debate. Reasonable minds may not differ. The purpose is to discourage breastfeeding and convince mothers to buy formula. Then they get hooked, they don’t learn to give their babies proper nutrition, their breasts dry up, their babies come to love the plastic nipple and overfeeding, and they have to keep paying the formula pushers.

As for breastfeeding, I don’t want to get into a lengthy lecture about well-settled medical science, but I will say that the CONSENSUS (that lovely word liberals love) is that breast milk is much better for babies than formula, and breast milk straight from the mother is much better than breast milk from a bottle. I’m not willing to argue about these things with breastfeeding flat-Earthers. What I say is true, and it’s common knowledge.

Anyone who says it’s okay to use formula except as a last resort is either lying or ignorant. I can prove that by citing one fact, all by itself: breast milk contains antibodies. Withholding antibodies leads to disease, and disease kills babies. Therefore, unquestionably, formula kills children.

The majority of formula-fed babies will not die from unnecessary infections. That’s true. But the ones in the minority do. And have. You wouldn’t say it’s okay to withhold whooping cough shots from babies because most babies that get the disease live, now would you? Most people who spent their lives driving cars without safety belts or airbags were never seriously hurt in accidents. Would you buy a car like that to carry your kids to school?

There are other serious problems with formula, but as I said, I’m not going to waste a lot of time defending obvious, established truths.

Do babies that breastfeed have better bonds with their mothers? Of course. Come on. Getting off work at Goldman Sachs at 8 p.m., rushing home to the Upper East Side, and grabbing your bewildered, formula-fed son out of the arms of Consuelo the poorly-vetted illegal immigrant every weekday for 8 years makes you the gringo aunt and Consuelo the mother.

Do men who had good relationships with their mothers treat women better? I don’t know, but I know it worked for me. It’s a reasonable guess, and anyway, why wouldn’t you want to have a tight relationship with your baby?

My son is a mama’s baby, and I consider that a huge blessing. It amazes me that there are parents who are jealous because their babies love their husbands and wives.

So anyway, women became enraged at me for saying what I said, giving me zero credit for the best possible intentions toward babies and women. Why?

The answer is feminism, which was designed by Satan. Eve was the first feminist in the Bible, and look who put her up to it. When Adam was cursed, the first thing God convicted him of was not eating a fruit but listening to the voice of his wife. Look it up. Adam was supposed to rule and make unpopular decisions like his father, but he let his wife treat him like her baby son and persuade him to try a drug. This explains why corrupt old churches love to portray Mary as God and Yeshua as a helpless baby who can’t even talk. Satan likes tiny little men and big, blustery women, preferably with really short hair.

One of the main reasons formula exists is to permit women to abandon their children and become breadwinners. It helps dethrone men and, in doing so, dethrone God, who rules families through men. Formula is practically sacred to feminists. Until recently, I didn’t know how furious feminists got when people criticized formula. They become even more unhinged than usual, because to them, an attack on formula is an attack on their ability to usurp male roles. It’s almost as bad as saying fathers are important.

I used to have the idea that feminists loved breastfeeding, but I didn’t understand the whole picture. They love exhibitionism, because it gives women power over weak, lustful men, so they want slutty women to be able to display their nipples in churches and restaurants. This is why they push to force the rest of us to endure bare-breasted feeding when they could just as easily toss cloths over themselves. It’s not about taking care of babies. It’s about being ruled by daddy-issue demons. “Daddy said you had to wear a bra to school. Show him what you can really do!”

God’s ways are completely internally consistent, because Yeshua is the Prince of Peace, and peace is almost literally synonymous with order. Satan’s ways, including feminism, are internally inconsistent. This is why feminists yap about their right to parade around naked and force people to watch them breastfeed while also working hard to discourage breastfeeding and push formula.

I guess the formula brigade must be getting even more militant now that demonized men think they’re becoming mothers and sick girls are having their healthy breasts amputated.

No man has ever breastfed, although my understanding is that some grotesque creatures have forced helpless babies to suck hormone-induced secretions from their nipples. If formula is bad, then the whole transsexual ethos has a glaring flaw normal people can exploit when they try to correct others. If you’re a real man, you can’t ever breastfeed, and if you’re a woman who had her breasts cut out so she could pretend to be a man, you can’t breastfeed, either. You have to use formula or find breast milk somewhere.

Now you know why you get bad and inconsistent advice about feeding babies. It’s feminist buffoonery. Many people are not concerned at all about the welfare of babies yet push formula as hard as they can because it’s a tool to pick at patriarchy.

Patriarchy is a holy idea. It is correct. God is completely male. Yeshua is completely male. God is our father, not our mother. The people who symbolized God in the Bible were uniformly male.

Patriarchy is essential to humanity’s success, but we have rejected it, so we have failed. You and your family can succeed, but humanity is dying.

I thought I understood how hostile humanity was to maleness, but I was wrong. It’s much worse than I thought, and the attacks have contaminated just about all of us internally. God has changed me a great deal, but I find I still have to remind myself to spit on old habits of feminist thinking and grind them under my feet. I have to push myself to be a proper king and priest in my house.

I really hate this place. This world. I don’t know what I’m doing here. My life is easy and pleasant, but there is no place for me among humanity.

The earth’s filthiness and worthlessness become more apparent to me every day. This place is so unfair to God and his people, it defies understanding. Human beings are so impervious to love and reason, they have made themselves garbage and excrement, incapable of being saved and repaired.

The more God changes me, the more I have to endure what he endures. He is perfect. He is helpful. He has the best intentions and all the answers. But he is hated and rejected. To whatever extent I am like him, I am also hated and rejected. Only the evil inside me is embraced by the world. I can’t help people much at all. When I try, I get pushed away, and the people who pushed me away most effectively were preachers and church volunteers.

If I can’t help anyone, why should I be here?

Abraham prayed for Sodom and Gomorrah, and God agreed to spare these cities if 10 righteous men could be found. God only found one, and we know what happened. I suppose there are still enough people or Earth who can be saved to keep the rapture from happening this week.

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.

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.

Rodents Will Fall Like Rain

Baby maintenance continues to be challenging, but the difficulty decreases incrementally day by day, helped along by a decrease in the mother’s conviction that I am too stupid to keep a baby alive for more than 15 minutes. Things are going well. The breastfeeding picture keeps improving, I finally got Mom to let our son go for a stroller ride today, and I’m getting way better at making up plausible reasons why I can’t change the diapers.

I’m starting to experience moments during which I think about interests other than the care and welfare of the heir apparent. Today I thought about shooting.

I got myself a Tikka T1x bolt-action .22 with a too-expensive Athlon scope, and I love it. I decided I wanted to have, finally, a very nice semi-auto as well, and I thought I would be able to make one from my Savage A22. I learned some bad things about Savage, and I eventually ordered a Ruger 10/22. My first in rifle length.

The new 10/22 has a plastic stock, a short barrel, muzzle threading, and a built-in scope rail. It’s perfect for my plans to shoot squirrels with a silencer.

I shouldn’t say “plastic.” It’s like calling a G.I. Joe or Han Solo “action figure” a doll, which it is. Okay. Polymer. The 10/22 has a polymer stock. Hope everyone feels better.

What are polymers? Plastic. Moving on…

I bought a very fancy Kidd trigger assembly for the Ruger, so now all I need is a scope. The gun has no iron sights.

I went overboard on the Tikka, blowing over $400 on a first-focal-plane Athlon Helos 2-12 something or other with a mildot reticle and internal illumination. The scope is perfect for what I plan to do with it: short-range squirrel sniping, and targets up to 100 yards.

For the Ruger, I want a cheaper scope, which will have the virtue of being cheaper and also costing less, not to mention being more economical.

I don’t plan to shoot the Ruger at 100 yards, because I would expect that to be depressing due to the low quality of rimfire ammo and the high likelihood that the Ruger will never match the Tikka. I decided I needed 9x at the top end.

I already have a very nice scope that would work. A UTG Bug Buster that cost me something like $70. This scope is ordinarily associated with airguns, but it will work on a .22. It’s illuminated. The glass quality is fine for under 100 yards. It has parallax adjustment. It can focus on things as close as 10 feet away, hence the name “Bug Buster.”

So I bought one for the 10/22.

No, I didn’t. And I didn’t move the old one to the 10/22 from my Marlin Model 60, because then the Marlin would have no scope.

The Bug Buster now runs about $160, so it’s not the bargain it used to be. It’s right up there close to scopes made by real companies. I am no longer tempted to take a chance on it. When it was $70, I could say, “Well of course they cut corners. It was cheap.” Now if I find a problem, I’ll have to say, “This thing is nearly as expensive as a real scope, and look at it.”

I am thinking of an Athlon Talos 3-12x40mm. It’s made by a real company, but it’s only around 50% more expensive than the Bug Buster. It’s illuminated. It focuses down to 45 feet, which is good enough for squirrels. It has parallax adjustment.

What is parallax? It’s complicated to explain, but basically, if a scope’s parallax setting is off, and your pupil isn’t perfectly coaxial with the scope, your round will not hit the point of aim. The error may be small, but I am planning to shoot through squirrel brains, so small is way too big.

Parallax is distance-dependent. Many scopes have fixed parallax settings. That’s fine if you’re shooting a big honking deer Ray Charles couldn’t miss, but when you’re shooting at a tiny squirrel brain, it means you can only count on hitting it when the squirrel is at the distance for which the scope’s parallax is set.

No self-respecting squirrel would make it that easy.

I was studying up on scopes, and I kept wondering why so many had no parallax adjustments, and I realized it was because deer were so big.

It was surprisingly hard to find what I wanted. A lot of scopes had everything I wanted except parallax adjustment. A lot lacked illumination. The Athlon alone had it all.

I should probably get a second Bug Buster, but I can’t make myself believe a scope that sold for $70 during Trump’s first term can suddenly be worth $160 during his second term. Maybe it is, though. Maybe it was wildly underpriced back then.

I like mildot scopes, but Athlon only puts illumination in the MOA version of the Talos I want, so I guess that’s what I’ll get. It doesn’t really matter for squirrels. If I can’t guesstimate how big an inch or half an inch on a squirrel is without subtensions, I am not likely to hit him with the finest mildot scope on Earth. I should be able to say, “The dot is on his head, at this range the POI will be half an inch low, so I put the dot a Jujube’s width above his skull.”

Guessing at holdovers should be easy, but shooting with the wrong parallax setting would cause problems.

I think.

If I can get away from the house, Walmart, Target, and the pediatrician’s office long enough, I will try the Ruger with the spare Vortex Diamondback I put on it, and I will probably order the Talos. When it arrives, maybe I can start checking various brands of ammo in the Ruger and the Tikka. Then I can spray squirrel brains all over the farm, and I will be content at last.

It doesn’t take much to make me happy. Just the simple things.

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.

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.