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.

Too Much, Too Late

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This brings me back to the email.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I might be okay with them going after the squirrels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MORE

Well, I have to correct myself.

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

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

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

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

Any Room Where you do Anything is a Workshop

We cheaped out on nursery furniture. We went Chinese. It looks okay, and it works, but it’s not Thomasville or Ethan Allen. My wife figured we would get rid of it in a few years, and she has seen that selling used furniture is a waste of time, so she thought we should save some money.

I agreed. Contain your astonishment. This was after she bought him designer socks, 450 burp rags, an electric wipe warmer, winter coats that won’t fit him until next year, and his own vacation home in St. Bart’s. Hard as it may believe, I, too, felt it would be okay to economize on a bed and dresser.

And a motorized nursing recliner. Because our other three recliners were just wrong. Sigh.

We have been using a changing pad instead of a changing table. My wife insists on changing our son in the bedroom suite instead of the nursery, because walking the extra 15 steps is just too much. Meanwhile, her elderly husband has no problem making the trip at 3 a.m.

She wanted to keep the changing pad on top of the bathroom counter between our sinks, but I put an end to that after finding a poopy wipe in the sink where I brush my teeth. Unlike moms, dads don’t suffer from poop blindness.

We have been putting the pad on the Chinese dresser and changing him there. It works fine, but he is getting stronger and more rambunctious, and we have realized we can no longer rationalize running out of the room to get things we’ve forgotten and leaving him on top of a dresser with no straps or Velcro or chains or anything to hold him in place. We have to get some kind of dedicated table that will restrain him, and it has to fit in our bathroom.

We could get a table made for the purpose of changing babies, but they are not all sturdy, and a lot of them take up a huge amount of room. I want to be able to get in and out of the shower without turning sideways. I found a product which is clearly a lot better: a US General service cart from Harbor Freight.

The cost is not that much higher than that of a crummy Chinese table that will fall apart if the baby breaks wind forcefully. The cart will outlast all of us, the top tray holds 350 pounds, the cart has a ball-bearing drawer that holds 75 pounds, and you can get magnetic attachments to hold paper towel rolls and boxes of nitrile gloves.

I don’t go near his butt without gloves. Make fun of me if you want. Doctors and nurses use gloves to keep baby poo, and for that matter all poo, off their hands, and I see no reason why I should do things any differently. Somehow the fact that he’s my baby is supposed to make me love his poo and think it’s delightful when I get it in my hair or, God forbid, my mouth. Maybe if I took enough estrogen, this would make sense to me, and I would also no longer be able to parallel park. Poo is always poo. I don’t care whose it is.

When the diaper (his) comes off, I have my PPE in place. Electronic shooting earmuffs and poo-proof gloves. Every time. I have considered using my grinding face shield as well.

It’s true I can’t hear my wife’s helpful suggestions when I’m wearing the muffs. But enough about the perks.

My wife is getting much more fatigued with his squawling than I am, and she goes in without ear protection, so obviously, I am right. Once again.

Hope she doesn’t read that.

The nursery furniture is (still) white, and the bathroom tile is blue. The local Harbor Freight doesn’t have any white carts, but blue is in stock, so I think we’re all set.

Our brains are still not right. I am probably up to 5 hours of sleep per night, but I still make mistakes like calling the pacifier a passport or even “the Passover,” and I can’t remember any number longer than three digits. My wife leaves things on a hot stove and only remembers to flush the toilet about 80% of the time.

This morning while talking to my wife, I expressed my newfound admiration for Donald Trump. He’s about 80 years old, he sleeps even less than we do, he’s been doing it for decades, and he runs a real estate empire, a social media empire, a crypto empire, and the most powerful nation on Earth. Is Diet Coke the answer? Maybe we should buy a few cases.

He tweets ingenious, convoluted tweets at 3 a.m., combining regime-boosting assertions with triggering criticisms of his enemies that provoke them to get out of bed and do Google research so they can post their ineffective replies. If I tweeted at 3 a.m., it would probably look like this:

Dr. Merkwerdichliebe837691 · Feb 21 @ PlzKidnapMe · 3hr

Someone tell m3 how to get this baby to quit spitting o7t the Passover

Joe Biden sleeps 18 hours a day, some of it with his eyes closed, and in a presidential debate, he told the world he finally “beat Medicare.”

What does that even mean?

Maybe it will make sense to me in a few more days, when the little elephants on the baby’s pajamas start dancing and winking at me.

The wife has been reluctant to let me use man solutions to baby problems. She eventually agreed to let me use brewery sanitizer to kill germs on things like bottles and nipples. Big win for me. That stuff is fantastic. It’s called Star San, and you just spray it on and let it dry. Costs about $25 for a year’s supply.

I think Star San got her ready for the tool cart, because she liked the cart right away.

Her helicopter mom inclinations are slowly drying up. The baby is beating them out of her. In response to his noise, she has started telling him he is just going to have to cry for a few minutes. This, instead of hurtling into the living room, sweeping him up in her arms, and wrapping him in the baby sling she bought from Amazon while I wasn’t looking.

We looked at the web to find out whether we should pick him up the instant he starts crying, and of course, just about every source said yes. But this is the web, and these are people who spend their lives writing about babies. They are almost certainly left-wing flakes who think meat is murder and 11-year-old tomboy mastectomies are health care. They claim there is no point in letting a newborn cry and that a newborn can’t be spoiled, because newborns can’t learn anything.

Yeah, okay. Our newborn learned to insist on plastic nipples in about 15 minutes, and it took about a day of excessive mothering to teach him screaming for half an hour would get him a ride on Mom’s belly. He can learn just fine. Maybe leftist newborns can’t learn. That would make sense. It’s consistent with their behavior as adults. “Socialism will work if we just do it RIGHT this time!”

Leftists insist grabbing kids the instant they start to whine won’t ruin them. They say things like, “We picked up little Bodhisattva every time zhey cried, and zhey came out just fine.” No, zhey’s not fine. Not if he has blue hair and nipple rings, wears ladies’ undergarments, and posts proud tweets about his upcoming elective man-parts amputation. If he buys bras that match his bright green beard, he’s not okay. You have to say no to kids sometimes.

Two words for anyone who disagrees: Jaden Smith.

My aunt used to pick her second son up every time he cried, and he turned into a real-life Chuckie. Broke everything he touched. Used to run through the house naked, screaming, every time she told him to take a bath. He used to hide under the bed, and she would get a broom and jab him. When he was about 6, she smacked him because he was making everyone miserable, and he reached up and slapped her face. I thought the world had come to an end, because I couldn’t believe God would permit it to go on after that. The other adults used to fantasize together about beating him.

He was the only kid my grandfather ever beat, and that includes my sister the felon, so no, I am not in favor of scooping babies up the instant the noise starts. Doors were invented for a reason.

Speaking of hormonal quirks, my wife can’t taste salt very well. My understanding is that this is caused by the same hormones that make her clinically insane. I mean, “highly concerned about the welfare of her baby.” Before she moved here, during the Biden famine panic, I bought about 6 cartons of salt to get me through the next few years. After she got pregnant, they started to vanish. One day she told me to buy salt, and I said to get one of the cartons out, and she said they were gone.

I used to go through about 1.5 cartons a year. I would guess she now goes through 8 all by herself. I have a dredge I use to shower large items with salt, and I used to refill it maybe once a year. It seems like it’s empty all the time. Maybe when the hormones subside, I’ll be able to find salt when I need it instead of refilling the shaker every time.

Anyway, she seems to be returning to her old stable self.

Well, here is good news. I have just been informed that our son the genius has finally learned how breastfeeding works. I better get up and battle the wife so she doesn’t send her family pictures of him in action.

Help Help

The wife and I are still in “baby jail,” as a close friend has termed it. He and his wife raised 5 children, and somehow, neither of them ran off in the middle of the night and left misleading clues for the police.

We have not left the house simultaneously in several weeks except to see doctors, and I am told I can expect this to continue for several more weeks. Meanwhile, we continue bonding with the baby and working hard to fill his needs and desires. Some would call this love. Others, Stockholm Syndrome.

Some acquaintances claim we keep the baby at home for three months. Due to my wife’s reluctance to drive on safe, well-maintained American roads in a car with about 46 airbags, and her belief that if I am alone with the child for longer than 8 minutes he will die, listening to our friends’ advice would mean I would be visiting Walmart, Target, the dump, and various takeout restaurants alone well into spring.

The up side is that now I don’t have to pay any attention to my wife while shopping. She can give me lists, but I can always come home and say, “Darn. They were out of $10 organic avocados again.”

He outgrew his newborn diapers almost before leaving the hospital, and some of the 3,000 identical onesies my wife bought on Amazon are getting tight, so things are moving right along. Yesterday, I bought his first toys, not counting an electronic elephant a friend bought him. I got him a stuffed cow that has a built-in rattle. I also got him an actual rattle. Finally, I got him a colorful mat that has a built in electronic keyboard. Eventually, he is supposed to kick the keys with his feet in order to drive his parents insane with the same recorded noise we have already heard 9 billion times.

I showed him the cow, and he acted like I was showing him dryer lint. My wife waved it at him–the exact same thing–and he was immediately entranced. Who says delivery isn’t important?

Supposedly, multicolored shapes are about as interesting to him as IMAX is to a fully-formed human being, and we are supposed to dump him on the mat on his belly so he can stare at them and enjoy hours of mental exertion and entertainment. Personally, I think he will just poop on the mat.

I am trying not to get excited about “milestones.” He seems to be on schedule or way ahead on everything, and he is as strong as an ox, but every parent thinks his kid is the next Mozart/Einstein, and then they go on to run forklifts. In the end, we know what he will be: a human being. Not a Marvel character. If he writes his first symphony at 8, fantastic, but being one week ahead of other babies doesn’t prove anything.

My wife kept telling me not to let his head roll backward, and I had to show her that I had nothing to do with it. From the womb, he was able to push his head backward with enough force to lift his body, and he never got tired of doing it, mostly while I was holding him and his mom was hovering nearby in hopes of finding fault.

He has no trouble doing pushups during breastfeeding, and he has punched me in the face at least twice.

Getting him changed can take as long as half an hour, because it’s like trying to put a confirmation dress on a bobcat. Put foot in romper. Put other foot in romper. Put first foot back in romper. Try to catch flailing fist for insertion in sleeve. Insert. Put both feet back in romper. Put arm back in sleeve.

I have finally learned I’m not breaking his arm when I force it into his clothes. He fights back so hard it seems like I’ve hit the limit on his range of movement, but it always turns out he’s just asserting himself.

I have slept about 15 hours since he was born, and my wife has slept even less because she sits awake and stares at him obsessively, as though he were about to pop open and rain prizes on us. I think the last green vegetable I ate was either mold or cole slaw from Sonny’s BBQ, which would have happened early last month. At this point, I’m not completely sure I could pass a dementia screening.

He behaves very well except when he’s full of gas, so that gives us about 16 hours of relatively pleasant interaction during a typical day. His gas is shocking in frequency, duration, and volume. It’s hard to believe it comes from an object that fits in a briefcase. My wife insists it’s not her.

It turns out babies have to learn how to poop. I should know better than to let anything surprise me. I had just assumed God programmed this skill into us. Evidently, they push with the diaphragm while constricting the other end, so they’re like Popeye in the old cartoon where he stood on a ship’s deck and tried to move it by blowing into the sail. One day he will learn to loosen up down below so things can actually escape. As of now, he generally spends about half an hour screaming before anything constructive happens, and between screams, he’s as cheerful as Joe Biden at the beach sniffing a baby dipped in ice cream while depositing a Burisma check in an account in Tortola.

I learned he needs to be placed on his belly to shut him up…I mean help him with the gas. Somehow it helps it move along. It’s kind of astonishing that a person can feel relief when another person toots in his face and passes out, but this is my personal surreality.

I also learned that if you want a baby to hold onto a pacifier, you try to take it away from him. You plug it in and then start yanking on it, and he will suck harder than ever just to spite you.

I don’t know who invented the pacifier, but now that I understand this invention’s value, I can’t believe there are no statues of him.

If only they made them with straps.

Our backward laws, I guess.

My purpose is becoming apparent to me. The ways of fatherhood are working their way from my lower brain to the cerebral cortex. I have realized a lot of my job consists of challenging and annoying him. His mother treats him like a Faberge egg, and I am here to remind him that this life is full of aggravation and disappointment.

She feels she has to pick him up the instant he cries, so now she is kind of a prisoner, wandering around with a thousand-yard stare and a sleeping baby in a sling on her belly. I thought putting an end to that was the whole purpose of giving birth.

When I hear him cry, I make him pass a test. Is he in pain? If no, question 2. Is he hungry? If not, question 3. Is he just screaming again because he can’t figure out how to poop? This is usually the answer.

If it’s 3, I let him scream for a few minutes, because there is no way to stop it, and picking him up will just put his mouth close to my ear so I can be robbed of my remaining high-frequency hearing. I figure he’s going to yell until the job is done, and there is no point in grabbing him and changing him just so he can fill a new diaper two minutes after I put it on. Sometimes rolling him onto his belly helps, but if not, well, life is hard, and a few minutes of squawking will just build up his lungs.

Not that they need it.

I also play with his hands and feet and poke him in the cheeks, subjecting him to strategic dad-annoyance so he will become manly and never wear skinny jeans or become confused as to what sex he is.

Or eat organic avocados. The only organic thing boys should eat is dirt.

The Internet says never to let a baby cry even for a second, because later in life, it may cause him to grow a backbone and secrete testosterone. Whatever. The Internet thinks Rachel Levine is a woman.

I don’t think there is any way to placate a screaming baby while getting stuff together for a diaper change, so I am at peace with my approach. But then I’m the guy who wears electronic shooting muffs while wiping his butt.

As of this writing, my wife is coming around. A little while ago, while he was screeching like a steam whistle for some unknown reason, I found her at the kitchen table, calmly looking at her phone.

As I have said, I am going to try not to write about the boy much on this blog. It is proving hard to resist.