Dad Is Fat (15 page)

My kids love going to movies, and I enjoy taking naps during those movies. Sure, I’m not thrilled to pay twelve dollars to take a nap, yet it always seems worth it. I’m not even concerned that I’m missing the film, because I know I’ll have another dozen times to see it at home when my kids watch it on Netflix or force me to buy it on iTunes for a thousand dollars.

Movie
+
Popcorn
=
Dad can nap

The grandeur of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge is a great activity that attracts many New Yorkers and tourists. The views are amazing, and it’s free. Unfortunately, little kids are not big walkers. About one-third of the way across, they will start complaining that they want to “get off,” and you will have to explain to them that this is not an attractive option. You keep them motivated by the great pizza place on the other side, but be prepared to take a forty-dollar cab ride back to Manhattan.

A dad has to take his boy to a baseball game, right? Well, I didn’t want my then three-year-old son, Jack, growing up and saying, “My dad never even took me to a baseball game.” So we went. I picked up Jack at nursery school and took the long subway ride up to Yankee Stadium. I proudly announced to Jack that we were going to the ballpark. He seemed excited. I seemed excited. We arrived early and entered the stadium. I bought him a ten-dollar hot dog and we went to look for our seats. Suddenly Jack belted out, “Aw man!” What? What happened? How could he be disappointed already? The game hadn’t even started! “Dad, this isn’t a park! You said we were going to the park!” We struggled through three innings and three more ten-dollar hot dogs before we got the hell out of there. Dad-and-son Yankee game, check!

I don’t mean to brag, but I dressed him that day
.

Probably the most expensive thing you can do with your children in New York City is to take them to a Broadway show. We’ve seen
The Lion King, Mary Poppins, Shrek, Annie
(twice), and
Beauty and the Beast
(twice). The thing about having a bunch of kids is that you end up doing once-in-a-lifetime things more than once in a lifetime. Suddenly your new baby is four years old and that show is still on Broadway, and now
she
wants to see it. Sometimes the snacks at intermission cost you about as much as the overpriced ticket. I’ve yet to leave one of these shows and think, “Well that was worth the money.”

I’d lived in New York twenty years and still hadn’t seen Lady Liberty in person. I’d had friends from out of town come and visit, and they would always want to take the ferry and see the statue. “No thanks, tell her I said hi.” When they came back, my out-of-town friends would rave about the experience. Once I had children, I knew I had to take them to see what all the fuss was about.

One Saturday morning, I had the brilliant idea that it would be a perfect day to visit the Statue of Liberty. I wrangled our then three kids down to the South Ferry Station, where the Statue of Liberty ferry departs. When we arrived, it became apparent that ten zillion other people had the same brilliant
idea. Realizing that my children were too young to notice a difference, we took the Staten Island Ferry instead. My children were just thrilled to get on a boat. I pointed as we passed the statue. “There she is, Lady Liberty!” I was a hero.

(See Statue of Liberty but replace Staten Island Ferry with a taxicab.)

Through all of my visits to these great places, I have learned that the one thing they all have in common that makes any of them worthwhile is that you are there with your kid spending quality time. That’s the most important thing: Quality time. The only other thing that could top the experience is quality time
and
a big pastrami sandwich. That would be
quality
quality time.

If you have no idea what I look like, I am a very pale person. My photo on the book cover was retouched to make the glare from my skin easier on your eyes. Hey, the publisher wanted to sell books. Trust me, I am a very pale person. No, I’m paler than that. Yes,
that
pale. Even when I look in the mirror, I think, “Wow, I’m pale!” I’ve never tanned. Growing up, I hated being pale. I was the whitest kid in an all-white community. Ironically, in a way I was the minority. As a kid, I was called “Whitey,” “Casper,” and “Albino.” Other kids would ask, “Why are you sooooo pale?” I realize this is a minor form of bullying compared to what some have gone through, but to the ten-year-old me it was brutal. I felt like an outcast. I was the pale kid. I sometimes think that in addition to the influence of my father, I pursued being funny just to add an adjective before “pale.” I would be the
funny
pale kid. So when I was asked, “Why is your hair sooooo white?” I’d respond,
“Because my father is a Q-tip.” It got a laugh. It still hurt, but the laugh made it more bearable. Eventually I embraced my paleness. I even learned to laugh at my paleness. Now imagine five miniature versions of me, but not as dark skinned. During the summer, my children need sunscreen applied to them every ten minutes or they will die. I feel like I’m raising vampires. “Don’t open the fridge, you’ll kill yourself!”

Prior to having children, I never went outside. Well, I never went outside to
enjoy
the outdoors. I guess I’m what you would consider indoorsy. I didn’t even know what a long-sleeve sun shirt was or how humiliating it is to wear one. Now I’m the proud owner of two long-sleeve sun shirts. One for formal swimming pools and one for casual swimming pools. Let me tell you, there is no boost to the ego quite like putting sunscreen on the top of your balding head, but I think swimming in a pool in a long-sleeve sun shirt is up there. Wearing a long-sleeve sun shirt in a swimming pool makes it impossible to not look like a moron. People always seem to look at me like I fell in.

“Is that guy just swimming in his clothes?”

“That’s the worst suicide attempt I’ve ever seen.”

I suppose our family paleness is entertaining to the outside world, but it adds another thick, white layer of difficulty to parenting that most people don’t consider: sunscreen. Whoever decided that the protective goo that pale people need to slather liberally on their skin should be white and actually make them look paler is just cruel. But that’s only the first problem with sunscreen. To fully grasp the commitment that sunscreen demands from me, consider the following. I hope this will be an
easy book to read. If you wanted to, I suppose you could read this book in a few hours. That is roughly the time it takes to properly apply sunscreen to one of my children. Now multiply that by five. Now add in the fact that I have to sunscreen myself. Now you understand why I hate the summer. “We’re going to the beach next week? Well, I’d better start putting sunscreen on them now.” True, we are Catholic, but I sometimes feel that it’s the sunscreen industry that is more pleased that Jeannie and I have so many children. We must be dramatically increasing overall sales.

It’s not just the look, the cost, and the time involved in putting sunscreen on a child, it’s the battle. My kids have no idea why they would have to wait to have fun while they are smeared with chemicals all over their face and body. They scream. They cry. “It burns!” The process of applying sunscreen just highlights the preposterousness of raising pale kids on a planet that revolves around a hot burning star that emits poisonous UV rays. I can never tell if the concerned looks from strangers are because they think I am torturing my children or because I am dressed like an out-of-shape Superman at the beach. Does anyone know where I can get a red swim cape?

For some reason those bastards at
Sports Illustrated
didn’t think this was “cover worthy” for their swimsuit issue
.

Newborns arrive as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, or as I call them, dummies. Every parent must start from scratch and teach them everything. Kids have a whole lot of learning to do. Of course, not from me, because I also am a dummy. The apple doesn’t fall far from that thing it grows on. Luckily there are classes, activities, and, of course, school.

I really wasn’t prepared for the amount of classes offered to little children. When I was a kid, there was only preschool and watching television. Now, the moment after conception, there are classes specifically geared toward your fetus. For example, there is prenatal yoga. It’s a lot like a regular yoga, but it has the word
prenatal
before it.

Once your child is born, the “classes” for one- and two-year-olds run the gamut from pointless to useless. You are essentially paying an enormous amount of money to take your baby to some room in order to interact with them. Parents sit
in a circle on the floor and sing horrible songs led by some well-intended struggling musician as the two-year-olds run around the room screaming and try to hit each other with the musical instruments that have been handed out. Toddler classes are no better. Toddler soccer is like watching a political discussion on cable news. It starts off serious and ends in embarrassment for all involved. “Waaaaah, he stole my ball!” Yeah, Jack, that’s the point of the game.

Luckily, as your child gets older, the good people that run these classes continue to take advantage of parental enthusiasm and guilt. When she was six, my daughter Marre was in a dance class that ended with a performance that parents had to pay $35 to get into. That’s right. I had to pay to see my six-year-old twirl around the stage for five minutes dancing a routine she learned in a class I paid for her to attend. The experience was made complete when I opened a fundraising letter from the “school” the next week.

Eventually children start actual school. When I was single, I never understood those commercials with the parents celebrating the end of summer. Now I understand that around mid-August, all the summer camps are over and you’ve run out of constructive things to do with your kid and you are desperate to get them out of the house. You’ve grown tired of your four-year-old pointing to words and asking, “What does this say?” Apparently it’s not okay to respond to them with, “It says, ‘Learn how to read.’ ” You don’t want to get rid of your children, but you do want to get rid of them for a couple of hours a day.

School seems like a perfect solution. Your precious child will learn something, and most important, you will be able to
use the bathroom in peace. My only problem with school is when it starts and ends. Preschool boils down to a couple of hours a day for you to run errands. Elementary school starts at the ungodly hour of 8 a.m. Yes, in the morning. Given that a first grader can’t put on a T-shirt properly, they will need help at the even ungodlier hour of
7 a.m
. Since I decided to raise an entire basketball team that can barely dress themselves, I have to wake up, too.

It’s not just getting them to schools, it’s what they can and cannot bring with them. When I first moved to New York City, I remember hearing stories of little children bringing guns to elementary school. Thankfully this trend is over, but it has been replaced by little children bringing far more dangerous weapons to school, such as the peanut butter sandwich. During the first weeks of school there are e-mails and e-mail reminders instructing parents that children are forbidden to bring anything containing nuts into the school. I realize a nut allergy is no joke, but I can’t think of one child growing up that had a nut allergy. Now they are more common than Velcro sneakers. Today it seems every other child has a nut allergy. Sometimes I think, “Why don’t they just open a school for children without nut allergies?” I’m all for small class size.