Things have been a little contentious around our little apartment lately. Some nights I just can't help but feel that there is a pugilistic contest of epic proportions taking place on the squared circle inside our bedroom, the mat inside Juniper's crib. It's a wooden-doweled cage match to the death. No Holds Barred.

Over here in this corner, wearing the blue trunks with the full head of hair and the sizzling pecs is Dr. William Sears, attachment-parenting guru, virile father of eight children, and co-author of "The Baby Book." Many consider Dr. Sears to be this generation's Dr. Spock (some dare call him "America's pediatrician").

And in this corner, in the red trunks, with the steely-gaze of a Republican pundit and the paunch of a moderate beer drinker is Dr. Marc Weissbluth, Dr. Sears' mortal enemy, advocate of the "cry-it-out" or "extinction" sleep solution and author of Cindy Crawford's favorite childrearing book, "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child." Beloved by smug hoards of well-rested parents, Dr. Weissbluth thinks Dr. Sears is, to put it mildly, full of shit.

In our household, we were early enamored with the Sears method. We co-slept with the kid for six months. For those first few harrowing weeks she always slept our arms; she fell asleep with Wood on the couch or with me in the rocking chair. When she cried we did everything we could to stop the crying. I walked her around the block a thousand times. We danced in our living room to the stereo turned up loud. We were known to turn on the vacuum cleaner to distract her from the sound of her own sobbing. And we bounced. We bought a gigantic yoga ball and we bounced and we bounced and we bounced.

Eventually when she fell asleep, either through breastfeeding or through bouncing, we would lay her gently in her co-sleeper and pray we'd get a few hours where one of us didn't have a child in our arms. This rarely happened. More often than not, Wood would end up with a sleeping kid in her arms, on the couch. In the morning the baby would sleep on my chest, my hands keeping her arms from flailing while I tried to salvage some last moments of sleep.

In time she would sleep longer on her own in the early evening. Still, when she eventually woke screaming we would rush to comfort her, pick her up and start the bouncing or rocking all over again. She always wakes up a few times a night to eat. This has worked out for us okay, and we told ourselves over and over that it would get easier.

But it hasn't. It has only gotten worse.

She wakes up four or five times a night now, and it is getting harder and harder to put her back down. The 4:30 wakeup is the worse. We decided a few days ago that we were going to look at Dr. Weissbluth's book again. I had originally dismissed it as poorly-written and harsh. I looked to see what Dr. Sears had to say about Weissbluth and his method:

"The style of parenting called self-soothing, which is creeping into the "Let's have babies conveniently" mind-set, emphasizes techniques of teaching babies how to comfort themselves---by leaving them alone or setting them up to devise their own methods--- rather than allowing babies to rely on mother or father. On the surface this sounds so convenient and liberating, but watch out for shortcuts, especially in nighttime parenting. This school of thought ignores a basic principle of infant development: A need that is filled in early infancy goes away; a need that is not filled never completely goes away but recurs later in 'diseases of detachment' – aggression, anger, distancing or withdrawal, and discipline problems.” – William Sears, ‘The Baby Book’

KAPOW!

Jesus, could we really take that risk? If we let her cry it out so we can start enjoying evenings with white russians and DVDs that we don't have to pause every half hour when she starts crying, would we be fating her to an adolescence spent smoking cigarettes out behind the alternative high school? Would it make her harsh and mean? Would it make her not-so-sweet?

Sears originally came out swinging. I have never been able to shake those words. They haunt me. But as time went on, I grew less than impressed with the results of his methods. So I went to Dr. Weissbluth to see what he had to say about attachment parenting:

"Some parents bend over backward to appease their child. 'I want to avoid the strict parenting I received.' This may lead to the absence of limits. Parents who are too sensitive to their child's needs risk enabling their child to become too dependent on their caretaker. These children do not learn to read their own signals and require an adult to do it for them. Children crave order, and setting limits is one way to that end. Harsh commands, physical punishment, or power assertion produces children who have higher levels of guilt and exhibit parent-pleasing behavior. It is even worse when, after becoming too harsh, spanking too hard, or letting your child cry too long, you quickly rush to hug your child. This sends a very mixed message to your child. Your child starts to think that crying is what you need to do to be hugged." Marc Weissbluth, 'Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.'

BLAM! ZONK! POW!

Motherfucker! Weissbluth comes out swinging. So what you're telling me is that if I don't let her cry it out, and I go to her and comfort her every time she cries, I'm actually teaching her that she needs to cry in order to get me to come to her and show her that I love her? And that over time this is going to create a myriad of social and emotional ills if not immediately rectified? So, Dr. Weissbluth, if I don't follow your advice, my little girl is going to turn into an emotionally-needy attention-starved drama queen? Does that mean I'm going to have to go to bad high school performances of Oklahoma! and Brigadoon in fifteen years? Cripes.

The choice is between that and a surly, withdrawn rebel? What kind of choice is that?

Dr. Sears started the round extremely strong, scoring lots of early points, keeping Weissbluth on the defensive until just a few days ago. Wood, exhausted, told me she was ready to start extinction. Sears will tire you out, man. I'm just waiting for my hair to start falling out and for powder-blue drawstring pants like my dad wears to start looking really comfortable. This baby is turning me into an old man. Extinction has been inconceivable for seven months. We've got an old lady who lives in the apartment above us who stomps on the floor every time we make any noise. There's nowhere we can go in our apartment to escape the crying. Wood's hormones can't take it, so she has been going out for long walks while I sit and listen to the baby choke and wail. It took almost an hour the first night before she finally gave up. It was about 40 minutes the next night. We have to swaddle her to keep her from banging a tin cup against the bars of her crib and throwing flaming pieces of paper at us. I'm alone tonight (Wood is at a retreat in Monterey, sleeping well, hopefully). Juniper went down while feeding so I haven't had to let her cry it out.

And I don't know what I'm going to do when she wakes up.

[Ding Ding] End of Round One.

Weissbluth is now on the offensive. We'll let you know how he's faring in a few days.

Wood's friend works at Herman Miller. She gave us this stool for a wedding present. For our anniversary, she gave us a bunch of miniatures of Herman Miller classics, including several miniature walnut stools. Wood and I have been kind of puzzled about what we are supposed to do with them.

Then it struck me: doll house.

I am going to give this little girl the world's coolest dollhouse. Someday, in a few years, Earring-Magic Ken will be giving Hipster-Bangs Barbie a totally fabulous makeover while she sits on one of those Eames walnut stools in her pomo dollhouse that could have been designed by Robert Venturi. Hipster-Bangs Barbie will throw great vintage 2001-era parties where Lesbian-Mustache Midge (a conceptual artist) will toss back the tiniest little mojitos with Afro-Centric Christie (a recent runner-up on America's Next Top Model). My girl's dolls are going to throw the best parties, even if those brutish He-Men crash them right when the Chocolate Fondant is being served.

So I went online and investigated whether the daddytypes mentality has invaded the world of dollhouse designers and manufacturers.

For the most part, it hasn't. Unfortunately, 99.9% of dollhouses are Victorian Queen Anne monstrosities where any doll inside instantly becomes an old spinster named Miss Narcissa Murple who spends her days dusting doilies and sitting in her parlour playing the Northumbrian Quadrilles on her autoharp. And that just ain't going to cut it for Hipster-Bangs Barbie and her multicultural-artist friends. Juniper is going to be a modern woman, and I need to give her a modern dollhouse, damn it.

There are two modern dollhouses that I was able to find: the Villa Sibi (designed by Christoph Bitzer and Wolfgang Sirch) and the Kaleidoscope House made by Bozart toys. Neither of them seems to be in production any more, and as you can see, they kind of suck. The one on the left looks like Cameron's parents' house in Ferris Bueller's Day Off that Ferris describes as "like a museum---it's very cold, and very beautiful, and you're not allowed to touch anything." I mean, can't you just see my Dutch-ass paying $600+ for that thing and then letting Juniper look at it, but not touch it? That isn't going to work. The Kaleidoscope House is better in that respect, but it looks like the producers of MTV's Real World gave a Trading Spaces reject designer $25 bucks to spend at Ikea to decorate the entire house (in other words, it looks like the last five Real World houses). Juniper needs something more substantial. Something made of molded plywood, damn it, or at least something more exciting than plastic.

So I did what I usually do about 5-10 times a day. I went to eBay. Turns out there are some pretty cool vintage modernist dollhouses out there. Vintage always trumps new in my book, anyways. But they're expensive. This guy will even design you a realistic San Francisco Victorian dollhouse. I wonder: if I sent him a picture of our Edwardian, could he make an exact replica of the house Juniper spent her first year in? That would be cool. But $6500+? Yeah right, dude. I'm sure some people still consider real estate a good investment, but $6500 for a doll's house is a sure sign that the Bay Area housing bubble really is out of control. Hipster-Bangs Barbie's cousin Midwest Becky could live in a fucking palace for that.

So I'll probably resort to my basest instinct: thriftiness. I will teach myself some simple AutoCAD, take a trip to Home Depot, zip up my Old Navy Carpenter's Jeans and Do It Myself. Either that or scour the dumpsters behind a bunch of architecture firms for rejected presentation models that could double as dollhouses. If it turns out that I can only find a model warehouse or a model factory, I don't mind. I'll strip out the insides and turn it into a killer loft.

Lesbian-Mustache Midge and SoHo Stacey would probably prefer that anyways.

In the latest chapter of the New York Times' "sloppy and insulting lifestyle journalism" week, today there's a hilarious article about gigantic yuppie strollers in Manhattan. I have two things to say about it:

(1) I'm afraid I have to side with the non-parents on this one. I agree that giant strollers in tight quarters are kind of annoying. I don't care if it's a Bugaboo or a doublewide Graco travel system, these things sort of defy courtesy in the urban environment. But I will pick on the uber-hip Manhattan parents featured in this article. You live in Manhattan, people. In deciding to do so, you entered into an implicit contract with 7 million other souls not to take up too much damn space. Carry your babies! Keep them close to you! When the baby is too big to carry, get a stroller that doesn't have more armor than a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I like umbrella strollers. Strollers should be like umbrellas. You should be able to leave one in a cab or in a Thai restaurant and say, "Eh, it was just a stroller. Another one will come along." You're pushing the thing down a sidewalk, not racing it in the Antigo Kiwanis Off-Road Championships.

The least you Manhattan Bugaboo owners could do is stop talking about all the advanced features and admit that you love your Bugaboo (a) just because it's pretty; or (b) because traffic and parking are prohibitively difficult and you can't roll around town in some ridiculous luxury car and that $800 stroller lets everyone know that you are, in fact, rich.

(as well as acutely aware of the latest classy celebrity baby trends highlighted every week two years ago in US Weekly)

Seriously, don't tell me about the shocks and suspension. I've got my palms over my ears and I'm yelling gibberish while you tell me about the shocks and suspension. Did I accidentally call into Car Talk? Did I walk into a Pep Boys without realizing it? Shut-the-fuck-up. Admit that it's conspicuous consumption and let's go grab a beer at one of those Manhattan bars with a stroller check so I don't have to keep looking at that gigantic red blight. I don't mind conspicuous consumption. What bugs me out is the denial of conspicuous consumption.

Okay, I know this isn't entirely fair. I'm being a total asshole. Bugaboos aren't even that big. They just seem big. The fact is Junebug doesn't like strollers and neither do I. I just don't like pushing things. It makes me feel like I should be collecting cans or something.

(2) I just so happen to have gone to law school with Elizabeth Khalil, the girl in the article who said (about using a big stroller): "I liken it to the SUV experience. . .it's just your mission to mow down everything in your sight because you can." With that quote she's made enemies of a million daddytypes readers. She is a nice person. And goddamn it, she's kind of right! Bugaboos and their kin are the SUVs of the parent-gear world. People use the exact same excuses to justify SUVs as Bugaboo owners use to justify their strollers. I respect the right to own and drive SUVs, but it just seems like someone who drives a Honda Civic ought to be able to call a new Hummer H3 a gas guzzler without the owner throwing a hissy fit. I simply contend that the same principle applies to strollers.

All the furor over this article and defensiveness over Bugaboos confuses me. Hello: you spent nearly a grand on something you will use for a couple years, tops. Can't you at least be good natured about how some folks might think that's silly? You know how big they are. Can't you just suck it up and admit they're a little cumbersome? I'm not saying you don't have the right to own a gigantostroller or use it. I just don't think it's fair to say, like ModernDayDad (or the author of this NYT piece) that these stroller-haters have issues "beyond the strollers" themselves. That seems kind of petty. The writer of this article loses it completely when she implies there are undercurrents of conflict between "people who have chosen to have children and those who haven't." This is just another example of a NYT writer who came to a shoddy conclusion before she set out to write the piece, and then molded her reporting to the conclusion. This isn't about barren old maids sickened by the conspicuous reminders of others' fertility; it's about rude parents with gigantic expensive strollers who fail to respect the rights of others and traipse about town with a sense of self-righteous entitlement! I have a baby and it annoys me too. What are my "issues beyond the strollers?"

Common courtesy still applies, people, and I do think it's interesting when non-parents speak out about behavior that may be invisible to us parents. Much love to the gigantostroller owners who are respectful of others. But the self-righteous parents? Christ, move to the suburbs if you're that sensitive about people getting annoyed by your expensive stroller taking up so much space.

Oh, right, then the "cool" factor of using one goes down exponentially. Therein lies the problem.

We're back in San Francisco, and about an hour ago I was sitting in the living room watching Juniper play with an empty water bottle filled with Wood's high fiber cereal, the only rattle she really likes. Ever since giving birth, Wood has been obsessed with fiber. Our kitchen cupboards are always filled with boxes of Kashi Go Lean and that Trader Joe's High Fiber Crunch cereal that tastes like dirty fingernail clippings. She hoards this cereal. She has to. She eats three or four bowls a day. She even makes her own bran muffins. I have heard her in the other room on the phone with her father discussing in detail their regularity (a subject close to his heart). I was pretending to drink the high fiber cereal from the water bottle and Juniper was cracking up, smiling at me as though she knew I was just being silly. I admit that I suddenly found myself crying right there, I was so filled with love and sadness that she has been growing up so fast.

Here are the things she can do now that she couldn't do before we left a week ago:

• On hardwood floors she crawls backwards smoothly in a sort-of baby moonwalk.
• She can pull herself up into a standing position all by herself. Terrifying.
• She can knock two blocks together in her hands and cackle at the noise (she also bangs on pots and pans with a wooden spoon now).
• She crawls (forward) anywhere she wants, fifteen, twenty feet at a time. She chased my parents' ancient blind dalmation around the house, screaming with glee.
• On the plane this morning she babbled constantly. "Dadadadadadadadadada." We have never heard her talk so much or so enthusiastically. She was the only person on the plane under the age of twenty-five (fucking business travelers with their laptops and their excel spreadsheets and their power point presentations about delivering a better domino's pizza). So her performance did not go over to well with the peanut gallery. Sorry to interrupt your reading of "The Trusted Advisor," dude. I'm sure it's a real page-turner.

The last time we traveled to Michigan and forced her to deal with all kinds of new, strange people and places, we noticed similar developmental "leaps." At the time I told myself I was just noticing new things because I was on vacation and spending time with her 24/7. But this time I'm not so sure. I swear she was either showing off for her grandparents or changes in her environment and schedule forced her to grow and adapt and do new things. Has anyone else experienced this, where taking the baby out of its comfortable environment and familiar routine results in all kinds of cool new changes?

Both Wood and I have read most of the popular theory-based child development books, just to get a sense of what's out there. Almost all of them stress the importance of putting them on a schedule. From the six a.m. bugle call and 6:30 reveille to the seven p.m. rendition of taps, Juniper's life is as scheduled and regular as a grunt's first week at boot camp. We figure this makes it easier on all of us, makes her more comfortable, and better for her long-term development. Weissbluth even suggests it is neglectful parenting to disrupt your child's sleep schedule by allowing the child to sleep anywhere but its crib.

I have always been suspicious of strictness of such suggested scheduling (and Wood's hesitancy to break from our own schedule). I sometimes feel like it's okay for her to fall asleep while we walk around town or stay up a little late to see friends or family or Dolly Parton at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival next month (hint, hint, Wood). I don't think her little world will come crashing down if she doesn't take a bath at night. Wood has been pretty good about letting her deviate from the routine occasionally, but this past week it was almost impossible to keep to it. And I'm wondering if it hasn't done her some good. Some of the books give a little lip service to the acceptability of deviating, but I haven't found any that suggest it may do some good (occasionally).

I know with myself, I love a schedule. I love the comfort of knowing when I come home I can play with Juniper until it's bath time, then maybe take a bath with her, read her a book and rock her to sleep. I love figuring out what to do for dinner with Wood (even if it involves bucketloads of fiber), watching a DVD and falling asleep on the couch until the first bugle call (around midnight). I get really grumpy when I know that schedule is going to be broken, either because I have to leave on business or I have to work late or I have some other obligation.

I have always had a comfortable schedule like that. I get very comfortable with my routines. But when I was nineteen I decided I couldn't continue to live in my home town where I had also chosen to go to college and one day in September nine years ago I got on a plane by myself and seven hours later landed in Dublin with nothing but a suitcase, and I walked west along the quays from the bus station to try to find a place to live. Those were some of my hardest days, not just because I was such a hayseed but because I had started dating Wood a few months earlier and it killed me to leave her like that. But in the end it was tremendously good for me (and us) to have that experience. For adults, it's positively cliche: If you just keep to a schedule, you will never change. You will never grow. Rolling stones, and moss, and all of that.

The same has to be true of babies. Scheduling them is useful, but a schedule shouldn't govern their entire life. Despite what the Baby Whisperer says. Seriously, why should I be taking advice from a woman who writes the way that Daphne from Frasier talks when the empirical evidence proves otherwise? Huh, love? I don't blame Wood for wanting to keep to a schedule. Those boobies are kind of a mandate for routine. I once worked as a cowherd on a small farm in western Ireland and I know how pissed those cows get in the morning if you deviate from their schedule, if you know what I mean.

So we're back from our trip, back to our Frisco schedule. Except I just got back from taking Juniper to Trader Joe's and based on the time zone we've been living in the past week, it was totally past her bedtime. I love carrying that baby around by myself in Trader Joe's. It's the closest I will ever get to feeling like a rock star. We bought Wood five boxes of her fiber cereal. She has been complaining that all we ate in Michigan was unhealthy crap and she barely got 25 grams of fiber a day. She needs to flush her system. I added the boxes to the stockpile in the cupboard, the fiber hoard. If we have an earthquake, and everything is figuratively and literally shaken, our lives torn apart and our schedule all shot-to-hell, at least I know my woman will still be regular.

Every time I go through airline security with the kid I get stressed out. The last few times it hasn't been so bad, but the first experience was so rough it has traumatized me forever. All three of us traveled to New York back at the end of March, when the kid had just turned two months old. We had never gone through security with an infant, and while I was psychologically prepared to be force fed breastmilk to prove that it was not, in fact, nitroglycerin, I thought they'd leave the kid alone. Wood was wearing a sleeping baby in a moby wrap when she set her diaper bag and carry-on down on the conveyor belt, and she had removed all metal from her pockets, but the guard flipped out when she tried to go through the metal detector with the baby in the moby wrap. We had to stand there, holding up the whole security line, while I unwrapped about seventeen thousand feet of black cloth in a strangely unerotic rendition of Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow's first sex scene in Shakespeare in Love. It was more like Boris Karloff and Zita Johann in the Mummy. When the moby wrap "bandages" were removed, one did not get the pleasure of viewing Gwyneth Paltrow's privileged little nipples, but an extremely angry, newly-wakened two month old lump of scrumpled face, a devil child that resembled our sweet Juniper. With the moby wrap off, they x-rayed it and insisted that Wood go through the metal detector without the baby, so she handed her to me. When it was my turn to walk through the metal detector, I did so gingerly holding the screaming baby in front of me.

Then the gheri-curled metal detector guard told me it was my duty as a citizen and a patriot to subject myself to secondary screening. I was not surprised. My name must be on a list somewhere, because I get shuffled off to the guy with the wand and sadistic grin just about every time I fly. But there wasn't a secondary-screener ready this time, so Gheri Curl forced me stand with the screaming baby right next to him at the metal detector for 4-5 minutes. Wood was at the end of the security area, helpless. They wouldn't let her come back and take (or even comfort) the baby. I still have crow's feet between my eyes from the looks I was giving that gheri-curled bastard. In retrospect, such looks probably did not help our predicament. Eventually, a dude showed up who could conduct a secondary screening, and he made me take my shoes and belt off and conducted the wand probe of my outline while another guy went through my bags. He then conducted a wand probe of the baby's outline as I held her out by her armpits. She was screaming. Wood broke back through the ranks of security guards and asked if she could hold her baby. "No," said the guy who seemed to be in charge. "The baby needs to be screened as well."

When they were done screening me, they asked if the baby was male or female. Female, I said, and the guy looked bummed. They had to go find a female screener. There was a guy there who confided in me while we waited for the female screener that his boss was a real asshole. Wood asked if she could hold the baby while they waited, and they ordered her outside of the security area. They were deadly serious. A female screener showed up two or three minutes later, and she ordered me to hold the baby up with my arms outstretched. I swear to God she proceeded to pat her down in her little pajamas, as if looking for the little deringer with which Juniper intended to hijack the plane in the name of jihad for the breastfeeding gods. She was screaming in righteous anger, after all, so she must be some kind of militant. Up and down the screener patted the little arms, the small of her back, the legs, up in between her legs and then she was done.

Then, for some reason they had to pat me down (in addition to the wanding), and the woman screener told me that she would hold the baby.

"No," I said.

These are people unaccustomed to having their commands responded to with anything in the negative. "No," I repeated. "If you're done with her, her mother can hold her. You're a stranger and there's no way in hell you're going to hold this baby while this goes on. That cannot be the appropriate procedure." What I wanted to say: "You've got to be out of your fucking mind, Ma'am. That baby is eight weeks old. Her grandparents have hardly held her, and you're just some fat lady at the airport."

To my surprise, the woman relented, and let Wood take the shaking, terrorized baby and nursed her back to calm in the seats where businessmen usually re-tie their ferragamos. I, meanwhile, had to undertake what seemed like a battery of humiliating tests and checks (but which really only lasted a couple more minutes). Still, I felt like I'd been pulled over for drunk driving on the Las Vegas strip and a crowd had gathered to watch me stumble to walk a straight line while touching my nose with alternating forefingers, singing Shakira's latest Spanish-language release. I kept looking around at the other passengers for some sympathy. Surely someone else would think this was all ridiculous. But that's the thing about airports. At airports, people only think about themselves.

When they were finished with me, the lawyer side of me came out and I asked for everyone's name and position and filed a formal complaint with the TSA. I'm sure doing so just put me higher up on their list. We almost missed our flight. We never received an explanation for why we were treated like this. We can only figure Ahmad Chalabi probably told Judith Miller who told Karl Rove who told Dick Cheney that Al Qaida was planning to use infants to take over 737s. It's the only possibility that makes sense.

Ever since then, when we get up to the grouchy little Filipino woman who checks your boarding pass and ID at SFO, my stomach fills with dread. The other day, we approached the same security checkpoint, the same guards, but it all went down without a hitch.

*note* These were not TSA agents that wanded & frisked our two-month old daughter. SFO is one of five airports nationwide that maintained private screeners and security personnel (like before 9/11) that are overseen by the TSA (the screeners are federally trained). The private contractor at SFO is Covenant Aviation Security. The government is debating the effectiveness of using private contractors to conduct airport screening, and current reports indicate that more airports will be using federally-trained private contractors. Republicans love the application of free market theory to airline security just like they do to prisons. Covenant Airport Security has repeatedly been the focus of several high profile investigations, most recently when it cheated to pass "decoy" screenings and when male security agents were using cameras to focus on women's asses and breasts while they waited in the security lines. I am all for aggressively combating potential threats to aviation safety, but I am against putting the keystone kops in charge of that fight. Using a metal detector wand and then frisking a two-month old infant, I think, is just another example of their complete ineptitude.