Last weekend there was a big hullabaloo down on Clement Street, a shopping district close to our apartment that is basically an overflow-Chinatown without the European tourists. A little-known fact about San Francisco's actual Chinatown is that during daylight hours, there are more Germans there than Chinese people. But few Euros venture out to Clement street, a place that manages to smell like decaying fish and monosodium glutamate 365 days a year. It is probably my favorite street in the city. On Sunday we approached it from 3rd Avenue and I saw Juniper's eyes light up: Ponies.

There were ponies in the street! The Chinese guys who drive the beat up old Nissan trucks filled with ten thousand flattened cardboard boxes had been banned from dangerously weaving between pedestrians on Clement Street this day to make way for ponies! Huzzah! Street Fair Weekend! Trodding in a Sisyphusian circle were seven miserable ponies and a deflated donkey that looked like it had been donated by Juan Valdez's morbidly obese cousin Gordo after daily rides up to Machu Picchu for fifteen years. These creatures seemed so depressed I don't even think dooce would have held it against them if they'd stood in front of Matt Lauer's microphone and taken Brooke Shields to task by saying, "Honey, you think having a baby is demoralizing and depressing? Try walking in a circle ten hours a day and every five minutes have another scabby lil' urchin climb onto your back and pull your hair and slap your neck while digging their grubby lil' heels into your haunches. And you thought life was boring on that island in The Blue Lagoon. . . sheesh."

Next to the ponyride was a petting zoo, otherwise known as the "Caged Area Where TERRIFIED Domesticated Animals Run from Shrieking Toddlers All Day." Now, ordinarily, I might have been deeply-saddened and disgusted by the pen of chicken wire thrown together in the street and the mangy animals being pawed by all manner of riffraff and pint-sized hooligan. But I am now a parent, so I was like, "How much? Two dollars? Sweeeeet."

Inside the petting zoo, Juniper pet some roosters, some timid floppy-earred rabbits, a goat, two pot-bellied pigs, and a freakin' duck. The whole time there was this creepy couple (dorky white guy, non-English-speaking-pregnant-south-Asian woman who acted like she might be developmentally disabled) literally shoving little kids out of the way so the woman could coo and pet the animals while her husband stood guard to ensure that no little kids interrupted her petting. I was a little afraid she was going to start biting giant chunks of flesh out of the pot-bellied pigs. The petting zoo was being run by these two bored middle-school-aged girls and their mother who trucked the animals down from Sonoma County. I'm not some nutty vegan anti-domestication of animals nutjob. I have worked on a farm. I understand these things. But those animals' hearts were constantly racing and they seemed so unhappy. As I held Juniper above the mangy feathers and hides of chickens and goats I couldn't believe I was supporting this, but I justified it in my mind by concluding those terrified creatures had better lives than their brethen in the high-density feed lots of Agriculture Corp., USA. Sure, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has determined that almost all petting zoo animals go on to be slaughtered once they lose their "cuteness," but goddamnit they made my daughter happy. At the time, I also didn't even realize that petting zoos are also kind of dangerous: If your kids don't wash their hands carefully afterwards, they run the risk of exposure to E. coli. bacteria and all manner of hookworms, roundworms, tapeworms, pinworms, whipworms, bladder worms, porkworms, broadfish worms, flatworms, and flukes. More than 100 kids were infected with e. Coli at a petting zoo at the North Carolina state fair last year. Four children exposed to and extremely dangerous bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus) at a petting zoo the Central Florida Fair this past summer and they suffered from kidney failure. Those subtle minds over at PETA have put together a nice brochure detaling all the dangers in case you weren't feeling guilty enough about supporting such a little family enterprise.

I did wash both our hands thoroughly and covered them with that stinging alcohol shit Wood hands me every time we're in a scat-filled situation. No worms, no diarrhea, or e. Coli, or kidney loss thus far. But I have been haunted by my eagerness to support something that 9 months ago I would have found abhorrant. I wonder to myself: "How many times will this happen? How many times in my life will I compromise my integrity for that look in her eyes, that screeching joy she makes when she reaches out for something she wants and that I have within my power to give it to her, no matter how I feel about it?" I would climb ten thousand mountains just to see that look on her face. Cripes, I know someday I'm going to take her to Disneyland or something to get that look, even though I'd rather live for a month eating cold sheep's intestines in a Mongolian yurt that spend five minutes in the magic kingdom.

We're parents. This is what we do.