We left San Francisco when our daughter was one-and-a-half, but that was plenty of time to get a good sense of the playground culture prevalent among the city's doucheoisie parents (among whom I was certainly a member by default). Papa Wallet Chain or Middle-aged Fauxhawk Dad would tail his toddler named after a Russian novelist or minor Zoroastrian prophet (I know, I know: pot, kettle) around the playground, giving him maybe seven inches of freedom to prevent any fall to the lawyer-vetted recycled-rubber surface two feet below. There was always plenty of parental compunction over one child's unwillingness to share whatever gewgaw had attracted the attention of another (or anxiety over the second child's expressed desire to possess what wasn't his). Conversations ranged from the annoying ("Oh, our Lola just loves kimchi!") to the nauseating ("I'm pretty sure all the Burmese words little Friedrich is learning from the nanny will be a real advantage when he applies to graduate school.") It seemed that every child born to parents of such refined taste was destined for greatness, for here they were: far from the meatloaves and casseroles of the provinces, bilingual, already totally digging good music and cool clothes. . . They were living proof that their parents weren't quite. . .parents.

If you wanted to cause a commotion you could casually mention you weren't that stressed about the 2011 public school lottery. And if you wanted to cause a riot, you could light a cigarette upwind of the NPSI-certified teeter-totter.

When we moved to Detroit, I immediately noticed a curious difference in playground culture among fellow parents. In Detroit, most people didn't even bother getting out of their cars. They just pulled in, turned up the WJLB and let the kids go feral on the climbing structures and swings. I liked this because it meant I never had to engage anyone in small talk, and if I did it certainly wasn't going to be about the advantages of Chinese nannies over their Latina counterparts. But it meant now I was the guy following his kid around making sure she didn't fall.

The other day I took the kids to the biggest playground in the city and let them loose. After a while I glanced up and noticed that all of the eight other parents on the playground were dads. This is not altogether strange in a city where nearly half the working-age population is unemployed or underemployed. I put my book down and sat there admiring these other fathers playing with their kids, indulging myself in a bit of imagined solidarity. I imagined conversations we might have, although I was pretty sure no one wanted to hear me complain about how hard it is for me to get my kids to eat kale & quinoa salad. Like me, some of these guys had two kids with them. It isn't easy doing this no matter who you are. You've got to deal with their crap all day and then deal with all the people who think you should be doing something more. You've got to keep them fed and keep them safe and keep them happy. Look at what good dads these were, bringing their kids to the playground on a Friday morning, what hard work this is, what a deep responsibility.

Then I smelled the weed.

A dad about twenty paces to my right had just lit up a blunt. Normally when you see people smoking weed they're all parsimonious about that shit, doling out tiny little servings in pipes or furtively passing around those wet, limp little joints until some guy who smells like reggae pulls out a clip to smoke the roach. Yeah, this man didn't give any indication that he considered marijuana to be a scarce resource or something that really ought to be enjoyed in private. He ashed his blunt against the stairs of a slide and took a long hit while my son ran right past him and his own daughter ran towards him yelling to watch her do something or other. Alright, Deanna, he breathed without a cough or sputter. It was kind of awesome, but totally burned a hole and burst my sober reverie.

Sure: tough job, this. So tough one of your colleagues sees fit to light up an enormous blunt at 10:30 in the morning. I mean, couldn't he at least have waited until after he made lunch?

At a wedding long ago I met my wife's second cousin and his wife, both former CIA agents. They weren't analysts or Langley office drones but straight-up field operatives who spoke every Asian language and had spent their thirties in the deep jungles of Indonesia trying to dredge up support for cooperative right-wing military juntas or something. That's what I assumed: they wouldn't say a word about what it was they actually did there. Wood's cousin wore pressed khakis and a bowtie that marked him as unquestionably Republican. His wife was a quiet woman without makeup who was self-effacing to the point of near-invisibility. This was a perfect cover, I thought, for the deadly assassin or provocateur she probably was, with a checkered history of black ops in leftist guerrilla camps or rooftop-fisticuffs with Bakin double agents. Every time one of them picked up a toothpick or looked at their wristwatches I half expected to spot the secret detonators or tranquilizer darts they were ready to wield at a moment's notice.

But these were not spies in the way I had always thought of spies, though they were probably a lot like most actual CIA assets: incredibly smart, unassuming people who know how to keep a secret. When I was a kid, I always thought I wanted to be a spy. I imagined a life spent with an attache full of dossiers and passports representing multiple identities that I could slip in and out of like differently-cut bespoke suits. I checked books out of the library like The Encyclopedia of Espionage and An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets. I read le Carré and Clancy. I was pretty sure I'd be great at reading microdots and intercepting defectors while in deep cover. I kept spy notebooks (in code) detailing neighborhood surveillance: license plate numbers of unrecognized cars; suspicious dogs. I would practice stealth at night by sneaking downstairs to spy on my parents while they watched television. Fortunately my interest in espionage waned before I spied anything too traumatizing.

Lately, though, I've been watching a lot of spy movies again. The new Bond movies are good entertainment, and my wife will watch them with me for the obligatory Daniel-Craig-in-a-swimsuit shots (same with those Matt Damon punching-bag-amnesiac movies). These movies would have you believe all spies are both dreamy and tough, and only spend time in the most tastefully-decorated locations in the beautiful places of the world. The spy is never a tourist. He always belongs wherever he is.

Perhaps because of this, sometimes during the day I find my mind wandering towards dreams of cinematic espionage: I might be at a red light with two whining kids in carseats behind me and I'll close my eyes and picture myself driving up to some beaux-arts hotel on the French Riviera, leaving a clean Aston Martin with the valet and subsisting for weeks on nothing but cocktail olives and the smell of expensive perfume. Do you remember that scene in Election, where Matthew Broderick's character imagines himself driving a convertible along an Italian clifftop?



That is what I see when I close my eyes to shut out the relentless whining from the two pint-sized slobs crammed into the back seat of our economy car. A sophisticated escape. I doubt that any stay-at-home parent hasn't wished, at least for a second, that he or she had a passport for a secret identity and an account number for a bank in Geneva.

When we checked out of the Westin Cincinnati the other day I had baby roadie duty, carrying the bag of clean diapers and the bag of unwashed shit-filled diapers and all the baby blankets, toys, and suitcases down to the car. When I got there, the fucking key BROKE IN THE LOCK and I couldn't open the trunk. I spent twenty minutes trying to remove the key and detach the kids' carseats so that I could crawl through the backseat to get to the trunk. The backseat smelled like week-old cantaloupe. The trunk somehow smelled worse. While messing with the lock, I closed my eyes and imagined myself under pressure to escape from the clutches of a double agent with a mind bent towards torture.

At some point in this struggle I stepped on the cheap Playskool keyboard that my mother-in-law bought Gram that plays instrumental versions of dimly familiar Steve Winwood and Huey Lewis songs from the eighties. The batteries were dying and the stupid toy starts playing a dirge-like version of Europe's "The Final Countdown."

This, I mourned, was the closest I would get to Europe anytime soon.

How is it you never see James Bond with so much as a garment bag, yet he always manages to have a Brioni tuxedo on hand? I closed my eyes again, and instead of descending the steps of the Vienna opera house with a beautiful redhead on one arm, I pictured myself holed up in a Jakarta slum during monsoon season with a mousy former National Merit Scholar eating rice balls and analyzing satellite data. Most true CIA assets, I told myself, spend most of their time in places where you only drink martinis because you can't drink the water.

Eventually I got the lock cleared and the luggage tetrised into the trunk. When I showed my wife the broken key that certainly wouldn't be starting any ignition, she gasped: "What will we do? Are we trapped here in Cincinnati with a bag of poopy diapers?" I lifted my chin and brandished the spare valet key that I always pack when we leave town, just in case something like this happens. "We'll make it," I said, and after snapping the kids into their carseats, I led the beautiful redhead on my arm over to the passenger side of our stinky economy car parked in an underground parking garage and opened the door for her.

In this car, with her and these two kids, and no job. Apparently this is where I belong.

1. His child's best friend fell on the way into preschool yesterday, cutting his little head open against the concrete, requiring him to be shuttled away to a doctor. Since then, if he even mentions the the words "injury" or "blood" around his daughter, she shrieks with an uncontrollable rage of terror. She sits on his lap and draws pictures of herself wondering where her friend is and "hoping he is okay."

2. Her father broke his toe yesterday. He feels stupid and doesn't even want to reveal how it happened, but goddamn it's ugly. If this were a war movie he'd gruffly order some private to sniff it and tell him if it smells like cheese. It hurts like hell whenever he wears shoes. But at least it's only a toe.

3. There are few things more pathetic than a stay-at-home dad with a freshly-broken toe trying to run errands with his kids all around town. You should see him: dragging one foot behind wherever they go with a squirmy 9-month-old under his arm while trying to keep the other one out of the path of fast-moving motorized wheelchairs and cars. Little old ladies open doors for him and offer their assistance. "Can I carry that for you?" they ask. "Yes, thank you." And here he thought this life hadn't left him with a shred of masculinity to lose.

3. He takes his kids into a store that advertises itself as the "Doll Hospital and Toy Soldier Shop" though it contains no recovery wards full of morose infants with third-degree vinyl burns nor enough recruits for a new legion to reinforce the troops reenacting the Second Battle of Capua on his living room floor. But it's still an incredible mom & pop toy store. His daughter is there to select a few things she'd like from the obese, red-clad Nunavutian sweatshop owner who terrifies her so much. He picks up a Santa puppet and uses a ho-ho-ho voice and she screams while clutching his legs as if he were talking about her bloody best friend. His nine-month-old son stares at rows and rows of baby dolls his own size, and then looks at his father with concern and confusion. Who are these silent, unmoving colleagues? Why are they in glass cages, boxes? You're not going to put me in there with them, are you?

5. He picks a crusty yellow booger from under the left nostril of his son and stares at it on his fingertip. What should he do with it? Flick or wipe? Where? It has only been a few years that he's had the good sense to do the right thing with his own boogers, and now he is responsible for the boogers from not just one but two constantly-leaking noses that aren't his own? Sometimes the awkward responsibilities of parenthood threaten to overwhelm him completely.

6. They figure as long as they're up in the tony suburbs, they should stop at the best French bakery in the area to buy some buttery treats. Afterwards, he hands his daughter a fresh croissant that silences her in the backseat. He sees gasoline selling for $1.55 and stops to fill up the tank for less than $20.00. While pumping, he watches his children in the backseat though they cannot see him. She is picking tiny, soft bits from inside the croissant and handing them over to her brother, who fumbles for each morsel in her outstretched hand while she patiently waits for him to get it. He watches their hands together, the baby boy smiling at this small generosity, and when the tank is full he opens his daughter's door just to kiss her on the cheek.

7. His favorite time during the day is when he gets to put his son down for a nap, sing to him and feed the boy his mother's milk from a bottle and watch him ebb from the inquisitive, mobile boy he's become back to the stillness of what he once was and so rarely still is: this baby, this sweet sleeping baby.

The boy fights it more this morning, laughing through the bottle with his hand outstretched, touching his father's mouth, grabbing and twisting the fat on his father's neck, his chin. Laughing. What is this Mummenschanz shit? Sleep baby. Please sleep. Your pops needs to write something for the internet.

[art work by our friend Xenos at Xenos Designs and Graphic Vectors]

One of the highlights of my week is scouring the newspaper's weekly calendar of local events for activities to break up the monotony. Estonian folk dancing at the public library! Burlesque costuming workshop at Studio 601! One of the Wayans brothers is coming to town! I circle events and file them away inside the Trapper Keeper full of appointments in my mind. We rarely do any of it, but at least I know we can go to a Tyler Perry film festival or a spaghetti dinner at St. Jude's if we get bored.

A few weeks ago, I read about one event that I knew we couldn't miss: The Detroit Nursery School Olympics: "Hosted for tomorrow's champions, events include Marshmallow Shot Put, Big Wheel Grand Prix, Paper Plate Discus, Diaper Derby, Toddler Trot and more!" Hot damn, I thought, that will burn at least an hour of daylight! My only regret was the lack of a crawling tot to participate in the diaper derby. It has always been my dream to sire a diaper derby champion. When the morning of the Detroit Nursery School Olympics arrived, the kid put on her wristbands, headband, and her striped tube socks. I gave her a pep talk, thinking of all those other parents out there training their kids for weeks in the Paper Plate Discus or the Big Wheel Grand Prix, and I told her that even if she didn't win a gold medal, I'd still love her. In the car, already late for the opening ceremonies, we found ourselves following a flatbed truck loaded with port-a-johns down Jefferson Avenue. "Look Juney," I said. "A truck full of potties!"

"A truck full of potties?" she screamed, "Where?"

"Right in front of us." Cue uproarious laughter from the back seat.

We followed that truck full of potties all the way to the site of the Detroit Nursery School Olympics, where it turned and lurched across the green lawn. "I think those potties are going to the Olympics, too," I said.

And there stood Detroit's Nursery School Olympic Village, awaiting a half dozen self-contained shit boxes. It was a gorgeous day. Tents had been erected to shelter the forty or so volunteers and three security guards from the sun. There were a dozen different sporting events set out, from a tiny basketball court to a bean bag toss to a mini golf course. There were gym mats for the diaper derby; cones positioned in a slalom for the Big Wheel Grand Prix. At each station two or three volunteers stood around ready to assist the pint-sized competitors. There were coolers full of dew-dripping Capri Suns and boxes of Goldfish crackers. There were medals and ribbons laid out, waiting to be awarded.

There just weren't any kids.

Yep: my daughter was the only kid at the 2008 Detroit Nursery School Olympics.

Remember that scene in John Huston's Annie where the titular urchin and Miss Farrell first enter the Warbucks mansion and hundreds of servants gather in the great entrance hall to greet them with a Busby Berkeley song-and-dance number, you know, with the leggy chambermaids and the gay gardener who pirouettes his way over to the trellis which he then climbs to deliver Annie a single rose? Well that's kind of what it was like to walk up to the empty Detroit Nursery School Olympics holding a 3-year-old by the hand. But unlike a plucky, attention-starved orphan, my child did not burst into song about how she thought she was going to like it there. As more than forty volunteers crowded around to welcome an actual living, breathing child, she screamed and hid behind my legs, burying her face in the back of my knee. A few of them did back handsprings and clapped while a few others scooted backwards doing jazz hands, and I said, "We'll just wait over here a few minutes for some more kids to show up." As we stood there, I looked over the flier they'd handed me when we'd arrived:

Welcome to the 2008 Detroit Nursery School Olympics!

10:30 Opening Ceremonies
10:45 Children Compete in events
11:45 Awards Presentation
12:00 Closing Ceremonies

It was nearly 11:00, and still no other kids. I'd told her there would be lots of other kids there, and she kept asking me where they all were. I signed in, guessing how many jelly beans were in the jar for a big prize and sliding the bent slip of paper containing my guess into an empty fishbowl. A woman who seemed to be in charge asked how old my kid was and then told me she had a daughter the same age. Where was this daughter? One kid was pathetic, but two would have made a competition with odds I could support. I offered to borrow one of their vans and go round up a few dozen rugrats on Belle Isle but they warned that would probably constitute kidnapping.

After a few more minutes we headed over to the first event. The woman whose own daughter was MIA enthusiastically escorted us, explaining each event in detail despite the presence of eager volunteers at each station. "After you throw a marshmallow," she said, "We'll let you eat another one. I think we have enough for that." She said all this as though she'd spent the previous evening practicing how to warn gaggles of feisty urban children not to eat the marshmallows. Unfortunately, my child is really bad at throwing things. I don't think any item she's ever thrown has gone in the direction she intended. The key was having her stand backwards and telling her to throw it as far in front of her as she could. The marshmallow landed a respectable distance behind her. So the Marshmallow Shot Put? Gold medal. Paper Plate Discus? Gold medal. Toddler Trot? Gold medal. By the time she'd completed all the events, she had so much gold around her neck you could have slapped on a feather earring and called her B.A. Baracus.

* * * * *

I'm the guy who purposefully dines in empty restaurants. I'm a glutton for this particular type of heartbreak. I figure I should spend my money where it's actually appreciated. But the surly waitress always looks like she wants me to leave so she can go hang out with her friends; how's one sawbuck left on the table going to solve any of her problems? What's the price of our whole meal against the owner's rising tide of obligations? I sit there in an empty restaurant and say to my wife, "What if we hadn't come in here tonight? Would some other fools have taken pity on this place?"

If you hold a Nursery School Olympics and no one comes, does it even count? What if one kid shows up: does it really make any difference? A week or so later, and I sit down to a hot cup of coffee and the Saturday morning newspaper. What's going on this week, kiddo? Urban Oasis Nature Walk. Free. I undo the velcro and pencil that one in, fully prepared for a private tour full of roused pheasants, fleeting foxes, and abandoned tires.

When we first moved to this terrible, beautiful city, we realized that among those willing to stick it out here, there were two major camps: the misanthropes who wallow in every bit of proof that the city is failing, and the optimists with a perpetually rosy outlook on its vast, largely-untapped potential. We quickly decided that the best course of action was to simply accept this city just as it is, and not to get our hopes up too much. Don't expect the police to show up when you call 911, and when they do, welcome them as heroes. When you hear news about new development, don't expect it to actually happen. Don't expect your municipal politicians to actually be smart liars. If you can learn to love it for what it is, and not get too wrapped up in hope for what it could be, you will find yourself much happier here.

This is the beginning of my third week at home taking care of two kids by myself. I have extended this theory of low expectations to my parenting, and so far that seems to be working out just fine. I have learned to accept that it's just going to be how it is, and I try not to get my hopes up. I don't expect to get anything done for myself over the course of any day. There is no time on the computer, no time during the day to write. If I can jot down a few thoughts in a notebook here and there, I'm lucky. I don't expect to keep the house up as much as I used to; any vacuuming or straightening up while the baby is in the sling becomes a real accomplishment. I tell myself not to feel bad at night, after the kids are finally asleep, when I suddenly have all the time in the world to get things done for myself, but all I want to do is curl up with my wife and fall asleep. I won't feel bad about hanging out in the shade all day. Or buying the older kid an ice cream cone once in awhile to keep her quiet.

I'll try not to stare at those parents with only one kid and remember all the time I used to be able to sneak in for myself. I'll try to forget about all the things I still want to get done for myself during the day. Because I think that's the only way I'm going to make it through this.

For the older kid's second birthday, I bought her a betta fish. His cheap plastic fishbowl sits on a shelf above the old bowling alley scoring table I use as a computer desk. Despite his constant lurking in my peripheral vision, for some reason I always let the water level in his bowl get so low he's barely underwater when I finally clean and refill it. Every day I tell myself, "Oh he'll be fine for today, I'll do it tomorrow." The next day I say the same thing. There always seems to be something more pressing worth doing, or some better way to waste time.

My wife goes back to work soon. And by work I mean the luxury of sitting in front of a computer and looking at the internet without a three-year old climbing on her lap and an infant who smells like month-old cottage cheese on one arm. I don't mean to suggest my wife's job is easy: she's far more diligent about actually working than I ever was. But even she had to institute a moratorium on visiting celebrity gossip blogs last year because they were getting in the way of completing her assignments.

But thank goodness almost every office worker in America has virtually untethered access to the internet. Imagine what would happen to our economy if employers started taking away internet privileges and people were forced to actually work. The sound of crickets would reign at fark, digg, and reddit. Projects would get done way earlier than they needed to be. Soon there wouldn't be enough work to go around. Bureaucracies would actually become efficient. Massive layoffs would follow. The entire American economy is balanced precariously on the fact that the average American white collar worker spends only about 20 percent of his or her time actually working.

How did the cubicle kids waste time before the internet? Daydreams? Productivity seminars? Interoffice romances? Midday martinis? Lawyers used to have to actually look things up in books. It was an arcane, tedious process that involved constantly updated digests that led to musty old tomes of case law that took up hundreds of feet of bookshelf in every office. Now those books are just for show: the cases are all online, accessible through extremely expensive google-type searches. It's a well-kept secret that lawyering in the internet age is little more than highly-specialized googling. And with all the time you save avoiding the law library, there's plenty of time to just dick around on the internet. And Lord, I do miss that.

Our baby boy is at a smiling age. He might cry while you brush your teeth, but pop back into his room and he'll give you a toothless smile so wide you collapse in front of him and just spend the next twenty minutes smiling yourself, making faces, and cooing like some joyful idiot. I remember the mornings before I'd go to work in San Francisco, when I'd let my wife sleep in and soak up time with a smiling baby, knowing I would need those minutes to carry me through the tedium of my day. I almost always missed my bus. And now my wife must prepare for those same kind of mornings, those same kind of paycheck-bearing unbearable easy days.

The hardest I've ever worked was at my first job, washing dishes in a busy restaurant. The dishes didn't stop coming until the last customer was well out the door. By eleven at night I'd smell like wet lettuce but I'd be free: I'd step into my 1986 Pontiac Grand Prix with the different-colored fender and turn on the subwoofers I bought with my first paycheck and cruise from red light to red light through Kalamazoo. It took a week to earn what I'd earn in an hour ten years later. I think, in a week or two from now, I will be reminiscing about how easy those dishwashing days actually were. Or dreaming about working on one of those Alaskan salmon boats.

Most of the time, staying home to take care of Juniper was pure fun. But now, with two of them, this is going to be more like work. Taking care of kids must be some of the hardest work you can do, the kind of work we usually save for immigrants or teenagers. And the pay sucks. Having my wife at home with me for the first two months of my son's life has been such a blessing. I will remember these days forever. But now the time has come to show my stay-at-home-dad mettle, to prove that I can be as badass as the thousands of women who've struggled with the tedium and the just-plain-hard work of maintaining a household and caring for more than one kid while their husbands dicked around on the internet in dockers.

Wood has already left me alone with both kids a few times, but each time has been filled with chaos and foreboding. Every day that passes gets me closer to every day looking like that. Wood knows that every day that passes is one day closer to when she has to start leaving them for ten hours a day, locked in her office with a machine extracting milk from her breasts instead of a smiling baby boy. We both feel like we're running out of air. Or, more precisely, I feel like I'm about to drown. And my wife fears that surely she will die of thirst.

Every morning that I sleep past seven seems like the last, a gift, so it's cherished. I'm like a convicted white-collar felon embracing freedom for his last few days before showing up at the penitentiary door; I have a list of things that I want to do one last time, knowing it will be eons before I get to do them again. At the top of this list is sleeping. A lot.

When dropping the wife off for her last day of work yesterday, I realized, too, that I would no longer be able to just put the kid in the car and take her on the long, rambling drives we love around the city or out into the country, just the two of us. Instead of heading home that morning, we took Michigan Avenue west, the old pre-interstate Chicago road. Along the way I asked her again what she thought we should name her baby brother.

"Yagi-Yogi," she said without hesitation. This is her top choice among her five personal favorites, which also include Munja, Li-Li, Ace and Biddy-Bada-Boo.

"How 'bout Kwame?" I ask.

"No."

"I like Ace," I said.

"Why?"

"I don't know. He could be a quarterback."

She lets me stop to take pictures of old neon motel signs, those former beacons to weary travelers who'd park their DeSotos or Studebakers outside tidy little rooms, now dreary homes with low weekly rates for entire families who've been evicted or faced foreclosure, chainsmoking prostitutes, and other down-on-their-luck types. We pass trailer parks. Strip clubs advertising one-dollar chilidogs. Poverty that's the same as in Detroit, really, just a different color.

Our destination is the world's greatest thrift store, and it doesn't disappoint. I've hardly bought any clothes for little Yagi-Yogi yet, so the kid patiently follows me through rack after rack of tiny sleepers and onesies and teensy-weensie button-down shirts, taking seriously her role in helping me find clothes for her baby brother. I seem to always hit the motherload of early-eighties primary-color faded-label polyester goodness at this thrift store. Two hours and $76.42 later we leave with 45 outfits, five pairs of shoes, 15 sleepers, a bunch of toys, and three plastic bags full of books, including several lost bellbottom-age children's lit masterpieces such as Jennifer Jean, The Cross-Eyed Queen and About Handicaps:

I'm telling you, when I get done organizing the kid's library, we're going to have dewey-decimal subdivisions for hairlip-sensitivity fiction and illustrated polio memoirs.

After the thrift store, we take the dog for a long walk in a nature preserve I used to hike in all the time during law school. I check that off my list. We walk around Ann Arbor, stopping at Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger for a late lunch. She's no Blimpy novice: she takes a single patty with an egg, pickles, and mayo. She snuggles up next to me in the booth, shares her deep-fried broccoli. On the way home, she needs to pee. To prevent her whining about it, I tell her we need to be a team and look out the window for a good place to stop. "What's a team?" she asks.

"It's two people who work together to help each other out."

"Are we a team, Dada?" she asks.

"We are." I say. We were, I think, a really good team. We meander back down Michigan Avenue, stopping whenever we see something interesting, until we see the Detroit skyline in the distance. When it's five o'clock we pick up her mother at the old road's terminus, or its beginning, depending on how you look at it. She waddles out of her building and into the car. "Done with work," she sighs. "Now let's have this baby already."

This pregnancy is, of course, different from the first and I don't just mean the unexpected shock of increased flatulence. Physically, it seems like there are many differences, and I hope Wood is able to write about them soon (maybe even this afternoon? tomorrow?). I am hoping to drag her out of hiatus by mentioning the flatulence. Did I mention the epic flatulence?

To make any sense of this, I need to take you back to the halcyon days of 2004, when two married 26-year-olds were childless and loving childless life in San Francisco. All was well until the girl was informed by a rogue obstetrician that she had a wonky uterus and it would take her many months, maybe even years to get pregnant. I believe his exact words were, "You're a lawyer so you think you can control everything. But you can't control this and you need to get it out of your head that you can just do this when it fits into your career." This set off a frenzy of reproductive activities in the coming weeks, and soon the boy who was once sure he didn't want to be a father until he was 36 found himself a decade earlier surrounded by urine-spattered positive pregnancy tests stacked like cordwood around his grungy apartment. One evening after he got home from his law firm job he sat in the closet and plotted an attack on that obstetrician, lifting him by the collar of his lab coat and saying, "What about the wonky uterus, huh?" Slap him around a bit maybe. Knee him in the groin. Then, coming to his senses, the boy wondered if he could sue him instead. Causes of action danced in his head.

The truth is I was terrified. I didn't know any fathers. The only men I knew in San Francisco with kids wore Façonnable shirts and listened to the Kronos Quartet. Although I knew I loved kids, I wasn't so sure about babies. I'd never held a baby. The only babies I'd ever even been around were at weddings or other events with enough post-menopausal women to ensure that no male my age would ever get close to one. Now my wife was pregnant, and at such events babies were suddenly thrust into my arms and all the post-menopausal women gathered around to stare at me like a Roman mob waiting for an emperor's thumb, like a royal court watching a taste-tester who'd just bitten into the king's crème brûlée. Was he fatherhood material? Will he be ready? Would he drop it?

Several friends of ours have had their first babies in recent weeks. Visiting them, I remembered the advice I'd given them six or seven months earlier: "Don't listen to anybody, especially me. Pregnancy takes a long time partly so you have plenty of time to ruminate on all this shit for yourselves." Standing on their thresholds, removing shoes, seeing them bleary-eyed in the afternoon, still in pajamas, everything stained by breastmilk, I realized I haven't been thinking near enough about how my own life was going to change again. The entirety of my wife's first pregnancy was characterized by my extreme anxiety. This one, I'd say, has been characterized by the absence of it.

Over the last few days, we have taken advantage of the warm days by spending the afternoons hiking on Belle Isle. With the kid and the dog running together up ahead, I had plenty of time to myself to think. I knew that part of my fear with the initial pregnancy was the loss of my self. I had lived so many years bent inward, thinking only of what I could accomplish, defining myself by my career and my aspirations. That's what I was taught to do anyway, wrap my identity so tightly around what I was accomplishing and where it would lead that I somehow came to believe all that stuff was actually who I really was, or that such concerns would lead to eventual happiness. I could never have anticipated that this would be what I would be doing one day, chasing a little blond gingerbread man through the woods on a warm workday afternoon. I never could have imagined being seduced by parenthood as I have been, by the selfish joy abandoning that old self brings.

This change didn't sweep across me suddenly at any point during the first pregnancy; it didn't fill me like some mighty, pentecostal wind on the day she was born. When Wood first got pregnant and I was so frightened, I think it was partly because I was sure I didn't want to feel like this about a kid. I was so entrenched in that old identity I couldn't believe I could ever undrape from it and escape. I knew things would have to change, and that's always scary. I still have anxieties, concerns that I am ruining any chance at a career. But I can only hope that there will be enough years to try to recapture what I've lost by leaving the working world, and trust in the fact that there will never be any way to recapture any of this.

It was sixty-some degrees in January. The air was filled with the smell of the false hope of spring. I pictured myself with my son in a sling, my 3-year old chasing the dog, me yelling at her not to follow him into the cattails. It was summer.

And now the only thing that I am really scared of is somehow losing this.

A few years ago I saw a painting above a grand staircase at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue that drew my mind completely away from where it had been. I was in the library looking for a place to piss in Manhattan that didn't require me buying something, and seeing this painting I was stunned enough to forget the search for a few minutes to enjoy it. It was called "Blind Milton dictating 'Paradise Lost' to his daughters." It showed the old poet in his Puritan's blouse, sullen and grumpy, slouched in an armchair, his whole face bent inward, his daughters at a table, hunched in anticipation of the next word to leave his lips. Most people know that Milton went blind, but not that he used his three daughters as amanuenses, forcing them to do all his reading and writing for him. I have read that Milton's daughters hated him for it, forcing them to read Latin and Greek and Hebrew aloud without being allowed to understand what any of it meant. Paradise Lost was written down entirely by surly teenage girls. I imagine them making faces at him through all his Hebrew and Latin. Why did he use his own greekless daughters for such a monumental task, rather than some Cambridge-bred republican lackey? Perhaps because he could completely control them. Or maybe it's even simpler than that: they were always there. After he died, one of Milton's daughters recounted that when they woke in the morning, he would be downstairs, pacing "like a cow waiting to be milked." He could hardly wait for them to gather their papers or dip their quills in the ink, he was so pregnant with poetry.

Greg's recent post made me think about my own experiences with the kid and museums. I have been taking the kid to art museums and galleries ever since she was old enough to sit forward in a bjorn. For the most part I think it's a load of horseshit to say she really got anything out of it during the first year of her life, but for the past year we both have enjoyed these trips, each in our own way. Since the Detroit Institute of Arts closed for renovations, and Cranbrook is so far away, we have spent a lot of time at MOCAD, Detroit's museum of contemporary art. Their opening exhibition last year included Roxy Paine's computer-driven sculpture machine that extruded huge piles of a crimson wax-like polymer (in Juniper-speak, "the red goo machine"), Jon Pylypchuk's little shanty-town full of morose and drunken stuffed creatures pissing in alleys and fishing for carp (J-s: "babies peepeeing!"), and a giant Nari Ward sculpture that involved hundreds of ceiling panels and tea pots with used styrofoam cups placed amid the piece by previous museum goers ("the cups.") Juney enjoyed these exhibits so much that we spent quite a few dull winter afternoons just sitting there, leaving me as familiar with each work as a security guard at MOMA must get watching that same room full of Rothkos all day.

That exhibition is long over, so every time we go now she gets upset that the goo machine and the pissing babies are no longer there, but inevitably there's another piece of pretentious conceptual art that she learns to love in a way that would certainly make the artist cringe. Right now it's Jennifer West's two films projected on the museum's northwest corner walls. The kid could really care less about the content (rapid sequences of scratched negatives); what she's really into is standing in front of the floor-mounted projectors watching her shadow dance and jump on the wall. This could go on for hours. Usually we are the only people in the museum, so it's not a big deal. I spend some time walking around looking at the other exhibits while she entertains herself, holding her hand as she points at a picture of a bunny while I try to consume the deeper meanings of the art around me.

This is, I think, a defining aspect of my experience as a father who doesn't "work" but spends all day with his daughter. Every morning we select a mutually-agreeable destination, and I try to find something to do there that will interest her on one level and still engage me on another. It is as though all day I am of two minds, one on par with hers, aware of what she understands and enjoys and appreciates, and another ready to capitalize on every distraction, every second of silence, a second mind ready to wrestle with ideas and thoughts that may have nothing to do with my daughter but do engage my own curiosity. I usually don't like calling myself a stay-at-home dad (that connotes a sort of militancy I don't have the energy for). Instead I have become something of a professional daydreamer.

In doing this, I am never all that distant. But let's be honest: it doesn't take that much to keep a constantly-babbling 2-year old engaged. It's pretty much the same amount of engagement my law school professors expected (eye contact, head nods, and the occasional astute follow-up question). And toddlers, like law professors, are easily fooled. Sometimes you can just phone in this whole parenting thing, and man, they don't even know. I can have a full-on conversation about fairies or owls or fairies riding on owls, and at the same time I am trying to imagine what life is like for the fucked-up-looking guy we just passed walking down the street, or what that street looked like in 1926, or what an artist is trying to say with a particular work in front of me. And Juniper still believes I'm like this total expert on owls and fairies and shit. In her mind, I have a PhDs in Ornithology and Folklore Studies, specializing in Wee Folk/Owl relations.

At MOCAD, after you see the exhibits, you end up in a room with all these Eames chairs and tables set out with art supplies, openly inviting visitors to create their own art before they leave. Juniper loves this, and the other day she sat there drawing with me for over an hour. When a friend came through and we started talking, the kid looked at me and said, "Dada, I want you all to myself. Can the lady please go away?" I apologized for this polite discourtesy, but still loved how much fun she was having. We were just sitting there together, talking about who we were drawing. I've done a lot of drawing this past year, not just people pooping. I used to have so much fun drawing and painting things as a kid, and now, I do again. I sing a lot more since the kid came around, too. I never drew anything in my mid-twenties except a paycheck. I didn't even sing in the shower. Becoming a parent is kind of like getting a permission slip to again do all the things that seem too silly for a grown man to do.

I will admit that hanging out with a kid all day does make it hard to "get things done" in the old "office" sense, but the truth is I never really got anything done in an office where I had unlimited internet access. I "work" much harder now that I don't just sit there open-mouthed in front of a monitor all day. But I still find the time I spend with Juniper to be valuable beyond seeing her so much and listening to all the crazy junk she says: I have all this time during the day to just gather my thoughts, plot out daydreams, and still pursue interests and projects that have nothing to do with being a parent or taking care of a kid.

These days, I may not be cracking $300 million cases or composing iambs about the fall of man, but by the time nap time arrives or the wife gets home from work, I usually have a torrent of backlogged thoughts I want to get down on paper or some project I've been plotting all day to get underway in the basement. I love the idea of Milton in the morning, his brain a burdened udder. What benefit did his blank verse get from all that midnight plotting, from the bulwark of sleeping daughters?

I know a lot of people would be (or are) unhappy staying home with a kid, but as I've said before, it suits me. I feel unleashed. I feel free. When I was a lawyer, I sometimes had my best thoughts about a case and even some breakthroughs while riding the bus or staring at a lunch menu. Now I have some of my best thoughts pushing a swing.

Sometimes when the wife gets home and takes over the parenting reigns I go down into the basement and watch an old movie and work on my art crap. I'll put on something with Cary Grant or Gary Cooper or Steve McQueen just so I can remember what it looks like to be a man. Such a manly act itself, I know, hiding in the basement from a child, holding a paintbrush. Distracted from what I am trying to make or do by all the celluloid masculinity, I just slip further and further into self loathing over what I've let myself become. I recently read a biography of Robert Capa, all the time not feeling swarthy enough, or drunk enough to call myself a real man. It takes a real man to treat Ingrid Bergman like shit, I figure, and not just Bogie-with-a-broken-heart shit, but actual real-life shit. What a man, that Robert Capa. Stormed the beaches at Normandy with nothing to fire but a Leica. The other day I was sitting on the floor playing with my daughter and my niece, singing some made-up song about pigs and I heard my mother sarcastically say across the room: "Yep, that's my son. I'm so proud." Then I heard my grandfather ask, "Is he even doing any legal work at all?"

When we picked up the dog after he was neutered, his nutsack looked like a deflated balloon you find under the couch a week after you let it shoot its way across the room. That's how it felt to hear my family talk of me that way. Balloon-sack boy. Watching the dog walk away from me then, I understood the appeal of neuticals. As far as I know they make no testicular implants for stay-at-home dads, those men suffering from too many months of ring around the rosy duets and dinner checks snatched away by paycheck-wielding wives. Occasionally after work I'll put in a DVD with Gene Kelly, because sometimes the only cure for feeling like less of a man is to watch another man dance. I understand why woman fall for men who dance, even those without the Baryshnicrotch. To dance is to fully embrace one's vulnerability. In the same way, I understand why my wife might have fallen for a man capable of the breathtaking displays of sentimentality I cough up here on a regular basis. As sappy as this man can be, and as much as he finds himself outmaneuvered day in and day out by someone under 36 inches tall (to the point where he feels more nervous about her going to school in the morning than he ever did about an upcoming performance in federal court), damn it at least he can say he's never sang a song while tap dancing and wearing a straw hat. But if anyone were to tell you he's painstakingly taught his daughter the entire choreography to Feist's 1,2,3,4 video, tell that lying motherfucker to stop peeking in my goddamn windows.

My mom saves clippings from the Announcements section of the local paper to tell me what the people I went to high school with are doing with their lives when they announce their engagements. So-and-so is an architect in Manhattan. He went to Yale. That kid you used to make fun of all the time is a vascular surgeon in Boston. She never saves the ones of the guys who work at the paint store. I know she's just being a parent, trying to get under my skin, insinuating that none of them are stay-at-home dads, that they're all doing something with their lives, and, in turn, that I'm not. This bothers me less than she thinks. These guys are just getting married now. In a few years, their wives will get knocked up, and they themselves will get kneecapped by this whole parenting thing. That is, if they're lucky.

Yesterday morning she walked right into her preschool class without a tear. All afternoon, after school, she sang new songs I've never heard. "Teach that song to me," I said, and we sang together. I thought about Gary Cooper. Steve McQueen. Robert Capa.

Fucking pussies.

In San Francisco I occasionally heard a suspicious piece of conventional wisdom that because of the weather, it is particularly difficult for people who move there to remember when things happened to them. Someone said the brain associates events with the weather in which they take place, with the season. Changes in the weather and seasons in San Francisco are so nuanced: brown grass in the suburbs indicates summer; it may rain more in the spring; the fall, they say, is when it will finally be hot enough to leave your house without a coat. To minds accustomed to stark seasonal contrast, days blend into one another and you cannot remember what month something happened.

In that way, years are said to pass like weeks. Everything happens in the fog of a perpetual spring. One day you are 23 and single and poor and drunk most of the time and the next day you are 33 and single and a bit richer but still drunk most of the time. I have my doubts, but I heard this discussed by enough provincial refugees trying to figure out where the last five or ten years of their lives had gone that there must be something to it.

It is understandable why parenthood is so feared by those who've grown accustomed to partying and generally behaving like 23-year olds well into their thirties. There are plenty of reasons your childless friends will dislike your baby, but one is that your baby will be a goddamn touchstone that even an endless summer cannot obscure. There is no way to hide from the creaking of your own bones when there's a baby around to remind you of how long it's been since it was born. For two years its life will be measured in months, months that slip past you as they always have, and the baby serves as a perpetual reminder of just how quickly they've gone.

San Francisco is a city where, besides money, the preservation of youth is everything. Despite the marginal presence of old gays with their moisturizers, the aging, bitter hipsters, and those ancient Chinese on the buses, it is a city of young people, with new batches of them arriving all the time from universities on the east coast or the Midwest, many of them overpaid and willing to spend obscene amounts of money on food and drink. At 24, we'd read newspaper articles there about the city's continual loss of families, and say, "bah, who needs families?"At 26 we found out were were going to become one. It was one of the loneliest times of our lives, not knowing anyone who had already tread that path. For a city that treasured youth above all else, San Francisco seemed to have a Herod-like fear of diapered usurpers.

This is why we started writing here. For all its bizarre current manifestation as dull domestic performance art, "Sweet Juniper!" started out as a way to communicate and commiserate what we were going through with others who were similarly isolated. We actually met other parents in San Francisco through the site, and the loneliness ebbed. But not enough to keep us there.

I have never really written about why we left San Francisco for downtown Detroit, although I am asked why we did it almost every day. I have different answers. It is complicated. I have not written about it because I have so much to say it would be boring. The bottom line is that it was the right decision for our family, that San Francisco was a wonderful place to spend our twenties, and we loved it.

And yet I have not missed it once.

When we moved into our current home one year ago, hundreds of monarch butterflies converged on our neighborhood as they migrated to California and Mexico. This morning, exactly one year later, Juniper and I counted nearly three dozen in the tree outside our house. Strange, I considered, how they know to head out on the same days every year. Such a befuddling ritual, to go all that way for constancy in temperature, only to come back again in spring. On one of our first nights in this house, we spotted a mama opossum carrying all her babies across our backyard. The other day we saw one of her babies, now nearly fully grown, sniffing around our mature tomato plants at night.

This hasn't been just another year for me. Beyond where we now live, this year has been all about how we live. I haven't logged into Lexis Nexis for thirteen months. I've spent my days picking apples, tramping through snow, watching buds form on freshly-unfrozen branches, and burying my feet in the sands of Lake Michigan. More importantly, I've spent every day exploring the world with my little girl. I will remember this year always. Those friends we left in San Francisco might see her now and gasp at how much she's grown, how much she's changed in the past year. But there is no shock in it for me. I've been watching her grow, all day, every day of the best year of my life.

Saturday, August 18, 12:30 a.m.

I am thinking of the first time I had a pint of draft beer. Scruffy Murphy's pub, I think: a pint of Guinness. This was my roommates' local, wedged between a nunnery and a pensioners' apartment building in an alley across from our apartment on Lower Mount Street. I had my third and fourth pint later that night, along with my first glass of Irish whiskey, at a nightclub down the block you entered through the howling mouth of a giant fiberglass wolf. We were the only people there under the age of thirty-five, though as I recall, that did not prevent us from dancing with sloppy-drunk old ladies who smelled of smoke while whispering horrifying things in our ears.

Tonight I am walking the dog up and down Pittsburgh's Southside admiring the crappy little taverns on every corner, half wishing I still had a local where I could get a cold pint. I peer into the glass-bricked facade of Karwoski's gritty pub and then feel grateful for the dog, knowing that if I had no excuse not to go in I might actually do it, order a cold glass of Yuengling and try to make some account of myself to strangers. I keep walking. People who live in these brick rowhouses had fathers who worked in the steel mills, that is, if they're not old enough to have worked there themselves. This is where Wood's father lives, in an old steelworker's house up on the slopes with a million-dollar view of the city that revealed itself only after the mills closed and the smoke clouds drifted away, leaving views in the place of jobs for those who might enjoy them.

I look for a liquor store, but Pennsylvania has some byzantine regulations about selling alcohol that I don't understand; it is damn near impossible to buy a six pack here. I consider that these neighborhoods were built back when the only place to escape the smell of cooling slag and the whining of your seven kids was behind the glass-bricked facade of the corner tavern. And to this day, nearly every corner still has one.

Sunday, August 19, 12:30 a.m.

My stomach contents are a vile slumgullion of grape leaves, McDonalds french fries, ouzo, and wedding-reception flounder. I have returned to the hotel room with Juniper from her first Greek Orthodox Wedding in a small steel town along the Allegheny River. Wood is still off circle dancing. I have been looking forward to this wedding for months, hoping it would be more like The Deer Hunter (before all the Russian roulette) than that other movie about Hellenic nuptials my grandma loved so much. A priest with wacky facial hair shook some smoking bells; crowns were held above the heads of the betrothed like Roman generals in a triumph, everything was spoken in Greek. Instead of reading the Bible, the priest sang it, though it lacked both rhyme and melody. I imagined him ordering Chinese food that way.

It is such a challenge to have something you wish you could change about your kid. You tolerate the late-night feedings and the early mornings and the nap-time tantrums and even the bottled beer because those things only affect you; but it can be so much more trying when the kid makes a public spectacle of her poorer points. Greek Orthodox weddings, perhaps, were not designed with a 2-year old's attention span in mind. The ceiling in the church's balcony was about five and a half feet, so we stooped rather than stood during the entire ceremony. One time I bonked Juniper's head against the ceiling and she started wailing. The priest stopped singing. Everyone turned to look as I rushed her out of the sanctuary. Juniper's stranger anxiety has gotten progressively worse with the diversity of options now available to express her displeasure at being stared at by three-hundred Greeks or stroked by some second cousin or interrogated by a grand aunt. To be honest, I didn't care about the screaming in the church or the rude things that came out of her mouth when someone else's blue-haired yia-yia pinched her cheek. It's the face-burying shyness at her own Pittsburgh grandparents that made us so embarrassed and enraged that we probably deserved the faces from all the onlookers that said, "sheesh, what bad parents."

Upstairs at the reception, all the kids under 13 were locked away under the supervision of a few busty Greek college girls. There was a room full of candy and crayons, bags of french fries and warm bottles of Sunny Delight, and, not surprisingly, dozens of children bouncing off the walls. One kid told me this was "the yelling room" and that he had to go there because he had "the smoke coming out." I brought Juniper to "the quiet room," and we spent some time drawing pictures of Archbishop Demetrios before I tried to return to the company of adults. When I attempted to slink downstairs, I swear she looked up at me and laughed with incredulity before going into hysterics.

Monday, August 20, 12:30 a.m.

Torrential rain, white knuckles, five hours in a car with a wet dog and a crabby 2-year-old. I swear, if there had been a Wal-Mart visible from the Ohio Turnpike, we would now be the proud owners of a portable DVD-player and a Dora-the-Explorer Box Set.

Now we're home, and I've never dreaded a week of stay-at-home fatherhood like this. I used to have Sunday-night nightmares about work: assignments I hadn't completed, angry reproaches from the partners, a meeting with human resources about my internet usage. Tonight I will dream of Aeron chairs and air conditioning, research assignments and bay views from 27 floors above the ground where two-year olds stalk the land.

Juniper can spend hours looking at pictures of herself from when she was a baby, and this inevitably launches her into a series of regressive behaviors that result in me taking care of a six-month-old again, swaddled and googooing and gagaing in her old boppy. The other day she asked me to take her to the dollar store next to the wig shop so she could buy a pacifier with the quarters and nickels she'd scrounged from beneath the couch cushions. A resourceful one, this child. I took her over there, but only because I've been meaning to buy her one of those toddler-sized doo rags they sell at the wig shop. She asked to ride in the bjorn, but I just ignored her. I do have some limits, you see.

Juniper never took a liking to the pacifier back when it would have been really useful to cork all that hollering, but after we walked out of that dollar store with a 3-pack of pacifiers, I didn't have to listen to her asking me if kangaroos have shadows or why the dead squirrel had no eyes for at least twenty minutes. It made me wish I'd followed through with those fantasies of duct taping a nuk in her mouth back when she was a baby. Eventually she took her new pacifier out and said, "Swaddle me, dada."

Back in her early days, I was always the designated swaddler. I was good at it, like those ladies with the hair nets in the taquerias who roll burritos so tight that when you stick your fork in them black bean juice squirts in your eye. Still, it's no easy task to swaddle a 30-month old wearing shoes. The other day we went for a jog and she refused to sit in the jogging stroller unless swaddled. After the swaddle, I couldn't get the restraining straps over her shoulders, so I just used the chest strap to keep her in nice and tight. It must have looked like I was taking the world's smallest psychotic cannibal out for fresh air in her little chariot. A couple days later she wouldn't leave the house unless swaddled, but I had to play fetch with the dog, so I swaddled her up and brought her over to the park and just sort of propped her up against a tree. I put the pacifier in her mouth and occasionally asked if the little baby was doing okay [she'd nod] and she was perfectly content. It strikes me as somewhat disingenuous that her fantasy of infancy is this pantomime of quiet, reflective observation, whereas the reality of her infancy was anything but.

All of this comes with a balance of big-girlhood, of course: two inches of height in the last two months, several consecutive diaper-free months, underdogs on the big girl swings, and the ability to tear my heart to shreds with a few icy words. "I don't like you anymore, dada," she said to me the other day. Then, later: "Dada, stop singing. You are not a good singer."

And of course, there is also whining. Sometimes it seems like one of us must have dropped her at around 28 months and she just got stuck in the whining position. I also don't understand why everything has to be said at the same level of heightened volume, as if I'm not submitting to her will because I'm some foreign tourist who doesn't understand her, so everything needs to be shouted for clarity's sake.

There are things I love about her growing older, like the conversations we have and how she can reveal all the trippy shit going on inside her head. Oh, and how she can walk by herself now. That rules. But when we sit there with her old photo albums I do sometimes find myself wallowing in maudlin thought, seeing a photo of her as she looks in my memories of those days I would drop her off at daycare in the morning and couldn't even make it to the bathroom upstairs before I started sobbing. Wouldn't it be nice, I think, to go back and spend more time with her when she was that age? Then I slap myself across the cheek. Perhaps she gets her baseless fantasies of a quiet, reflective infancy from me. Those days weren't fun. They were loud as hell, and we were hardly sleeping.

Someday I'll probably look wistfully back upon these days, too, when Juniper the big girl always pretended to be Juniper the baby. I may be capitulating too much to her regressive demands, but when it comes down to it sometimes I'd rather deal with a 2.5-year old quietly acting like an imaginary infant than a 2.5-year old acting like a real 2.5-year old.

I don't know what possessed me to drive sixty miles to take Juniper to the blueberry patch the other day. Of course she had said she wanted to go. She is at the age where if you ask her if she wants to go scrape up pieces of putrid goat fat sitting on the sidewalk outside the Halal slaughterhouse up the street she yells "yeah!" and then ten seconds later you say "Let's start a high-end dog food company!" and she yells "yeah!" but then half an hour later she's crying like a fucking baby when you hand her the kid-sized trowel and there are only like six flies buzzing around a perfectly good pile of hardly-rotten goat meat. Of course she had said she wanted to go pick blueberries. They are her #1 favorite food. We read Blueberries for Sal every other day. I thought I was doing her a favor. I dressed her up in overalls like Lil' Sal and gave her a berry pail and we drove for what seemed like forever out on godforsaken washboard dirt roads until we came to a blueberry farm. But when I parked the car and went to lift her out of the seat she started wailing like a Romanian widow, screaming, "I don't want to pick blueberries." I instantly spun around sixty times and in a puff of smoke transfigurated into my own father for like twenty seconds and was all, "You're picking blueberries whether you like it or not, bub."

And goddamn it if there weren't hundreds and hundreds of white people already out there picking blueberries. After eleven months in Detroit, I am more and more shocked to venture out of the city and see how many goddamn white people there are in this world. You always hear racists saying stupid shit about how black people and Mexicans breed "like rabbits," but I've got to really hand it to white people when it comes to reproducing a whole lot. We are everywhere! As an added bonus, the other day was apparently fundamentalist-home-school day at the blueberry patch. Now I have nothing against home schooling in principle, but in practice it always seems to be performed by women who dress like Little Critter's Mom, you know, like they just stepped off the polygamist compound. Why do fundamentalist women have such bad hair? Seven or eight of these women stood there barking orders while several platoons of towheaded matryoshki children filled bucket after bucket of blueberries. It was like the rowing scene in Ben Hur except with blueberries. And here I thought only underage Mexican kids worked that hard picking fruit in America.

Like the strumpet mother in Blueberries for Sal, there was an urgency with which these neo-frontier women forced their children to work that seemed to belie the modern era of flash freezing. "We will take our berries home and can them," the mothers seemed to say, "Then we will have food for the winter." I wanted to intervene, "Ladies, ladies, let me tell you about this magical place called the grocery store. You can get blueberries there whenever you want." But then I realized today's lesson might have been about preparing for the End Times. Either that or what had attracted these families to this particular farm was almost certainly what had attracted my apostate-fundamentalist Dutch ass to this particular blueberry farm: the plump, delicious blueberries were only $1.15 a pound.

As a kid every summer I would get dragged to the blueberry farm, where I was given a piece of very practical advice: "You can eat as many blueberries as you want while you're here and you don't have to pay for them, so eat as many as you can before we're done." I remember eating hundreds---no thousands. I grabbed them by the handful and let them roll from my fingers into my fist and then popped them into my mouth, swallowing even the bitter ones that had not ripened yet and the mushy fat ones that had grown too ripe already. I would arrive at the blueberry patch dreaming of blueberry crumb pie and blueberry pancakes, blueberry jam and banana-blueberry muffins and blueberry cobbler, but I would leave looking like a post-juicing Violet Beauregarde with a severe case of diarrhea.

Juniper picked maybe three berries the entire time we were there. You could only make a legitimate case for calling one of them blue. She spent the rest of the time eating the berries that I had picked, just like that annoying little scamp in the book she loves so much. When she wasn't eating my blueberries, she was standing by the edge of the forest at the end of the rows yelling into the trees: "Bears! Where are you bears? Come out bears!" After spending a few minutes trying to explain the difference between fiction and reality, I gave up and just reminded her that Lil' Sal did pick some berries herself, and I pranced up and down the rows of bushes saying shit like, "Now Juniper, you pick your own berries," and, "Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk." The home school kids were whispering amongst themselves, "Gosh, what a loser."

At some point I made the mistake of telling her that on the way home we would be stopping by the hospital to see her Nana and Grandpa. They were in Ann Arbor to begin the process of a bone marrow transplant. I was hoping Juniper would want to pick some berries for her Nana. When I suggested she do so, she just picked a bunch of berries from my bucket and put them into her pail, saying, "Look dada, look at all the berries I picked! Let's go." Who would rather spend a few hours in a cancer ward than pick blueberries? My daughter, that's who. Unfortunately for her, I am a man of principle. When blueberries are $1.15 a pound and they are your kid's favorite food, no amount of whining is going to prevent you from going home with any less than twenty pounds of blueberries. "Just a few berries more," I kept saying to her, over and over. When it came time to leave, we ended up in line behind an entire regiment of home schoolers. It was part of their lesson to have each of them weigh their berries and pay separately. It took nearly an hour for these D-list Duggars to complete their transactions and pile into their 15-passenger vans. While waiting, Juniper's stranger anxiety kicked in and every time someone tried to talk to her she howled and swung her pail, tossing blueberries all over the ground. "He doesn't like strangers, does he?" an old man said while I picked up her berries and put them back in the pail along with a considerable amount of dirt and straw. In the car, Juniper asked me to tell her a story about the old man who tried to talk to her. I looked at the clock and realized we would be getting to the hospital just as Wood's stepdad emerged from his spinal tap.

Juniper is terrible in blueberry fields, but wonderful in hospitals. Over the last six months, we have visited Wood's step dad in various stages of chemotherapy, and whenever she enters his room, it brightens and the sense of infinite sorrow is lifted from the air. She knows nothing of cancer, or death. She only knows that she loves him and wants him to read her books. She had skipped her nap when we walked into the University of Michigan's imposing cancer center, but the lack of sleep came with none of its usual crabbiness. The news was bad. The blasts were back in his blood and there would be no transplant until after another round of chemotherapy. Juniper sat on their laps and ate cookies, ignorant of the gravity. At one point, she picked up her pail and said, "Look Nana, I picked these blueberries just for you." Her Nana looked into the pail, at the dusty, straw-covered berries, reached in and grabbed a handful that she dutifully popped into her mouth. "Did you have fun picking blueberries?"

"There were kids there. And an old guy was there too. He tried to talk to Juney and she went Ahhhhh! And there were owls there. And bears, too."

There is a school that Juniper and I walk past almost every day. "Where are the big kids?" she asks every time. Sometimes we see them inside their classrooms, sometimes some of them even come to the window to see us, a tangle of smiles and waving hands pressed up against the glass. "Someday, Juney will go to school," she says. "Someday she will be a big kid." I nod.

"Someday," I say.

After we see our neighbor's new baby, she always asks me to hold her like I did when she was that little. I cradle and rock her against my chest, and she pretends to cry but bursts out in giggles instead. She tells me that she is not a baby. She is a big girl. She shows me this by riding her tricycle in the park: "Juney is a big girl now," she says, "She has her own bike." She puts her size-five shoes against the pedals and pushes so hard I can't believe the trike doesn't go flying out from under her from the force of her sheer determination. The trike doesn't move at all, of course, but then it does, and she screams with surprise and glee. She doesn't notice me bent down, my forefinger pushing ever so slightly on the seat behind her. All she sees is the sidewalk ahead.

"J-U-N-E-Y, that's Juney!" she shouts as her trike runs over the words we wrote the previous day in chalk on the sidewalk. "M-A-M-A, that's Mama!" and: "M-A-M-A, that's Dada!" Then we sit in the grass and she tells me about an owl named Luther who comes to her window at night.

"No Dada, I can do it all by myself," is her new refrain. She usually can't, but I like to let her think she can. We look at photo albums filled with pictures I took of her when she was first born. "What's Juney doing there?" she asks. I tell her she didn't do much then, not like she does now. Still, she asks me for stories about when she was a baby. I tell her about how much she cried, about how we would hold her and dance with her and bounce on the ball until she fell asleep so warm against us. I tell her that her first word was ball. I tell her she used to see the moon in the sky and call it ball. This fascinates her. "What's the moon's name?" she asks, and I tell her the moon's name is Luna. "What was my second word?" she asks, but I am so confused about where she learned to use the word second properly that I cannot remember that her second word was light. She still weighs less than 25 pounds; I still have never used a stroller with her. She still sits in the crook of my arm whenever we walk. I have never had biceps like this in my life. They make Wood purr. But that is just a fringe benefit. I walk with Juniper like that so we can talk.

When it's almost time for her to nap, we dance. First we dance to fast songs and she shakes her head side-to-side and runs wildly in place and in circles. Then we listen to soft songs and she puts her sweaty forehead against my shoulder, and laughs when I dip her. She pretends to read me books before I put her under the covers and sing to her. One of the best parts about staying home is there's no one around to make fun of how I dance and sing. I make up songs about Juney turning into an owl and flying away with the other owls but she looks down and sees her Mama and her Dada and she flies back down to stay with them a while longer but someday she will fly away. When she wakes up from her nap she wants to be held quietly for awhile.

My time home with Juniper recently eclipsed the amount of time Wood spent at home before we left San Francisco. For me there is no imminent move, no endgame, no job prospects or any real interest in returning to the world of work. Some days I might be out in the mid-morning sunshine, in some park or the zoo or maybe inside a museum if it's raining, and I think, Wow, this is my job. Juniper and I just spent two-and-a-half hours the other day building a sandcastle so big she could hide inside it, and the same thought occurred to me. I am so damn lucky.

Here I am, freshly-30-years old, a parent of a two-year old. I should be burdened by the heft of parental responsibility. I should be losing my hair and starting college-savings plans. I should be working hard in some office somewhere, not sitting around playing all day. That's not just my own father's voice talking, but some deeply-ingrained cultural imperative. Men work. They provide. They put meat on the table. They lose their hair from all the stress. Men have ambition. They seek power. They don't consider a 4-mile jog and an enormous sandcastle to be acceptable accomplishments for a weekday. Obviously, I've learned not to be seduced by this way of thinking. But the guilt that I feel for living like this does accomplish one thing: most of the time it prevents me from complaining. Some men don't just feel like they should be providing; they actually need to be. They have no alternative. That makes me feel very lucky, even when my greatest accomplishment on any given day is nothing more than successfully cleaning crayon off a wall. Even when my child is on her third temper tantrum of the morning I feel fortunate to get to do what I do. It is a privilege that I wish every dad in the world could have if he wants it.

Professional photographers were in our house for over eight hours today, standing under curtains behind giant architectural cameras taking long exposure shots inside our home. Juniper kept asking, "Who's that guy?" about men carrying heavy suitcases full of strobe lights and umbrella lamps and camera equipment that cost more than our house.

After those pictures of our house were featured on Design*Sponge a few weeks ago, we were contacted by the editors of a home magazine that wanted to do a spread on our neighborhood, including the interior of our house. This is a very fancy magazine that has annual design awards for "Best Bathroom Over $100,000" and "Best Bathroom Under $100,000." When they initially asked us, I said, "We wouldn't even win 'Best Bathroom Purchased Entirely with a $200 IKEA Gift Card'" and expressed concern that the art director would find our DIY paint jobs and marker-stained carpets appalling. Still, they said they were interested.

The thing is, the photos that led them here showed only four rooms of our house, and only six or seven walls of those four rooms. And I have a confession to make: behind the camera in every one of those shots was a pile of dirty clothes and other crap, and walls covered in wallpaper. Middle-aged-cat-lady wallpaper. There were entire rooms left out because they were hideous, like the bathroom with blood-red painted wallpaper that made you feel like you were peeing inside a giant, beating human heart. Because we didn't know what the magazine people wanted to take pictures of, we took it upon ourselves to get everything done before they got here, including stripping all the wallpaper and re-plastering the walls in the evil blood-red bathroom.

Taking down middle-aged-cat-lady wallpaper, while certainly frustrating, is also strangely fulfilling, as though exorcising from your home an evil demon who wears sensible shoes and lots of makeup and listens way too intently to gardening shows on NPR. In a way, it was nice to have the photo shoot looming, because it made us work hard and now the house feels done and we are happy with it and we no longer have to deal with a malignant spirit constantly trying to put extra-warm clothes on Juniper and switch the TV channel to Lifetime. "The mystery of the cross commands you!" we shouted. "The blood of the martyrs commands you! This house is ours now! Begone!"

Still, getting shit done these past couple weeks would have been a whole lot easier without a kid who has all these goddamn "needs" during the day, and a dog underfoot making everything even more difficult. One thing that drives me nuts about this dog is how he is always dumping some toy in my lap that he wants me to throw to him. We spend hours playing fetch in the park, but he has a one-track mind and constantly stands in front of me with a toy at my feet while he points and wags his tail and looks at me with eyes that are almost impossible to resist. He doesn't care if you only toss it a few feet, so long as you continue to do so for hours and hours and hours. I have been training him to stop. The only other shitty thing about the dog is that with the onset of 80 plus degree weather, he has started shedding. Everywhere.

Needless to say, I have been doing a lot of vacuuming. Luckily, we have a Dyson. I know it emasculates me to admit this, but I love it. Vacuuming with a Dyson is kind of like being a streetwalker with a heart of gold who gets picked up by Richard Gere in a silver Lotus Esprit. Sure, it's still work. But it could be a whole lot worse.

When we brought home the Dyson, the dog and the kid were terrified of it. They would both shriek and the kid would hop on the dog's back and together they would hightail it off to furthest corner to cover their ears and do breathing exercises until I was done. Juniper is still unable to appreciate the majesty of this vacuum, but the dog has outgrown his fear. He now follows me around the house, dropping his toy directly in the path of the vacuum cleaner, knowing it will get knocked away. He rushes a few feet away to retrieve it, then drops it right back in the Dyson's path.

While the dog did this as I vacuumed before the arrival of the photographers, it suddenly dawned on me that my wife wasn't the only one using James Dyson's masterpiece of root cyclone upright vacuum technology to make me her little bitch.

The hardest part of our transition from San Francisco to Detroit has been how much driving we have to do here. My 2000 Volkswagen twice sat in our San Francisco garage over four months, and the battery died both times. I had to go down and ask the weird Chinese guys who lived beneath our stairs if they could help me jump start it. I loved walking everywhere. I loved buses. I hate parking. And traffic. And yet we moved to a metro area so dependent on the car that people here speak of pedestrians or public transportation the way one might speak of unicorns or the chupacabra. Metro Detroiters literally do not see pedestrians, perhaps because as part of their undying love for the automobile, they've shoved their heads so far up their own asses that they've simply mistaken the color of their intestinal tract for the burgundy interior of a Mercury Grand Marquis. With a child in my arms, I have had to learn to practice "defensive walking." Still, the other day a guy jumped out of his Navigator and told me he "ought to bitch slap" me for having the audacity to give him a dirty look after he almost hit me turning into the crosswalk where I was legally crossing the street. Wood frequently gets home to describe close calls of almost being hit on her walk home from work. I am less scared of thugs with semiautomatic handguns than I am of some girl from the suburbs text messaging while she turns onto the I-75 North on-ramp without realizing there is a human being there crossing the street.

I will admit I am a bit of fuddy-duddy when it comes to shit like texting. Back when cell phones were just starting to become widespread, I would sit on my porch in Ann Arbor and listen to sorority girls walking past having the most inane one-sided conversations I had ever heard. "Why do they think they are so important that they have to talk to someone while they are walking?" I would ask Wood. See, I do not like talking on the telephone and I would prefer no one ever called me. E-mail is okay, but I would prefer to communicate with owls, or telegrams delivered by plucky street urchins on bikes. Until recently, I would flip off every shitbird I saw texting while they drive on the highway. They certainly wouldn't see it, and it made me feel better. The thing is, I have been seeing so many people texting while driving that I don't even bother anymore. Wood has a co-worker who has been pulled over three times for swerving into other highway lanes. Presuming her drunk, the police let her go when they determined her sober. She has confessed to Wood, however, that each time she was texting. I don't get why anyone would want to write a text message while they drive. Can't they just call? Can't it wait? Are they that eager to prove Darwin right? Sometimes when I look over at a rusted-out mid-80s Plymouth Duster being driven by the kind of woman who gets discovered with six dozen cats in her house passing me on the right at 95 MPH while texting and I think, "Jesus Christ, every day I'm putting my life and the life of my child into the hands of someone like that?"

And then I don't drive for three days.

But there is also the whole other matter of the state of our car's interior. I drove down to Adrian to see my grandfather the other day, but when we went to lunch I made him drive separately because I was too embarrassed to let him sit in our car. Now that the warm weather is back, Juniper's pruno distillery is working overtime, and after a long Michigan winter that shit is going to be some cold-filtered genuine draft. This morning as we drove around the suburbs looking for something to buy Wood for mother's day, Juniper threw a fit in her car seat and I did the only thing I know how to do in that situation: throw her food and pray she shuts the hell up. But this time there was no food. I stopped at Donutville, USA and got her a glazed cake which quieted her down for about four seconds before I looked in the rearview to see her doing that pre-meltdown intake of breath with an exploded doughnut on her lap. It looked like someone had stuck the tiniest stick of dynamite in there. How does a doughnut explode?

I called Wood to complain, and while dialing came within inches of hitting a teenage girl jaywalking across the road.

Yesterday I took Juniper to the Henry Ford Museum, and made the mistake of walking her through the 600-ton steam engines before we made it to the exhibit that I was there to see, the 50th-anniversary celebration of the Eames Lounge Chair, a vintage example of which we just revealed sits in our living room. I hadn't been to the Henry Ford since I was a kid, and I fell in love with it again. A Smithsonian for the upper Midwest, it has the Rosa Parks bus parked a few feet from the bloody rocking chair in which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, itself not far from the car JFK was riding in when he got shot. Beyond these common objects grafted into history by the events that occurred within them, there are thousands of other common objects, long rows of automobiles and airplanes and bicycles built for ten and motorized roller skates, steam trains that dwarf every man, steam engines that propelled the first Ford assembly lines, airstream trailers and a R. Buckminster Fuller dymaxion house, all of it together such a wonderful celebration of American ingenuity and industry.

But I was there to see an exhibit about a chair I already owned. As Juniper sat in my arms and I read the placards under early Eames prototypes and molded-plywood splints, she began to whine, "Dada, can we see trains again? Dada, airplanes?" I was there for the minutia of the Eames exhibition, the letters Ray wrote to Charles on construction paper and the charcoal sketches of morphing shapes that would form the basis of so many famous chairs, but Juniper couldn't grasp why we would be looking at pictures of chairs when there were trains and dollhouses and airplanes to see. When we got to the star of the exhibit, the 1956 lounge chair owned by Herman Miller president D.J. Dupree, set under soft light on a spinning pedestal, Juniper looked at it and said, "That our chair. Juney go round and round?" I often spin her on the one in our living room.

Before I took her out of the exhibit to squeal at the most magnificent thing she had ever seen, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile ("Dada, buy it? Juney drive it!"), I was struck by this 1959 ad showing a pajama-clad father sleeping with his infant child on his lap. The text reads, "Even if you don't have a two o'clock feeding at your house, we think you will appreciate the deep comfort of this rosewood and leather lounge chair designed by Charles Eames for Herman Miller":

I was sitting in the children's book department when it finally happened: I officially became a fucking woman. The transformation is now complete. The possibility has reared its head before, once when I uttered the sentence, "I think I prefer sea foam to lagoon for that wall," and another time when I squealed like a ten-year-old girl as one of Wood's friends threw a dead alewife at me, striking me square across the face on the shore of Lake Michigan. That was long ago, but stay-at-home dads must be particularly vigilant, even when it comes to developing a preference for one household cleaner over another. And that is especially true for stay-at-home dads who have been keeping an online record about how goddamn sentimental they are. When I found myself reupholstering a chair the other day, to counter some of the affection I felt for the new fabric, I got out my power drill and gutted a 1950s television set and used it to build a sweet cabinet for my turntable and LPs. After realizing the only two times I'd sat in a theater these last twelve months were to see Sesame Street Live and a children's ballet, Wood let me sneak away to catch a showing of 300, after which it felt as though I had been infused with a year's worth of much-needed testosterone. I had been getting a little too much pleasure doing my daughter's hair every morning, I realized as I climbed aboard the People Mover after the show. No more of that: I'll still do it, but I'm putting an end to the smug sense of satisfaction I get from perfect pigtails. And maybe I'll get a big tattoo on my forearm.

Still, whatever patina of virility I received from watching 300 stalwart Spartans die with honor was gone within a couple of days, and I was sitting on the floor of the downtown Detroit Borders reading books to Juniper, trying to figure out if any of the books published in the last few years weren't total crap. She was sitting on my lap while I read her the book Someday by Alison McGhee and by the end I was sitting there crying. I'm not just saying that: I was bawling my fucking eyes out. I had to bury my face in the back of her head to hide it. I think even she was ashamed of me. "Juney no like that!" she said about my dripping nose in the nape of her neck. The book is a mother's sentimental list of a bunch of things her little girl will do someday: "Someday I will stand on this porch and watch your arms waving to me until I no longer see you."; "Someday I will watch you brushing your child's hair"; Someday you're going to be old and I'm going to be dead and you'll remember me and then ah, fuck it all to hell even right now my eyes feel like crumbling, porous concrete holding back a flood for chrissake. I don't know what it is about those words. Juniper has lately been telling me about all the things she's going to do someday ("Someday, Juney will buy a boat! Someday, Juney will go to the big red barn, see the animals! Someday, Juney will buy a house!"). That could be it. Or maybe it's that I just don't like to think about dying. Either way, curse you Alsion McGhee! You can hear her read the book here.

I cried when translating the end of the sixth book of The Iliad when I was in college because it was so beautiful. I cried when I finished Ulysses (although that may have been because I had grown mad with frustration and exhaustion). I am not ashamed that I have been moved to tears by certain lines in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. I have cried over a lot of books, but none of them were goddamn children's books. And I never cried while reading them on the floor of a big box bookstore surrounded by the prying, judgmental eyes of Sam I Am and Maisy and Thomas the Tank Engine. "Why is that man crying?" Dora the Explorer asked all the dimwitted children from the front of her book. "Yes, that's right," she said after a twelve-second pause, twirling her finger around her ear: "He must be loco!"

Afterwards, I called Wood to tell her what happened: "What day is it?" I asked.

"Why?"

"Because Jesus Christ, I think I'm about to get my period."