It's pretty pathetic that the only post between street urchins this week was one measly Christmas roundup that I conjured from the bowels of uninspired desperation. Snooping through my urchin collection this morning I came across these guys, and had to post them. I love the dreamy look on the guy on the left's face, and the way he and his friend frame the cozy fellows behind them.

Wood has had half days all week like a kindergartner, so that cut into her prime writing time. On Wednesday night I rattled off all the funny things she could have written about her family over the holidays, like the time her mom ripped a loud one and Juniper totally called her out on it ("Grandma fah-ted!") but Wood looked at me with disgust and said, "Christmas is so last week." I had already written about the time we celebrated New Year's in a Chinese brothel. Plus last night Wood's mom was in town so we called up Melissa and Logan and we all went out to the bars, thus destroying any chance I had to cross my own threshold last night without stumbling like a vaudeville drunk, let alone get anything written.

It must seem, for those who read a parent's blog for enough time, that one can almost watch that blogger's child grow up. In our case, any readers who've stayed with us have seen Juniper go from an adorable little squirming shitbag on whom we projected all kinds of behavior to a talking, whiny toddler that we like to think is potty trained until she pisses on something important. I assume also, that any of you who read this site and Suburban Bliss have watched while a real friendship has grown out of the weird circumstances of the internets. We really love those guys in real life. They are so much fun, and only awkward when Logan drinks Irish whiskey and creates suggestive Venn diagrams on cocktail napkins. Even though we are different from those two (suburban/urban; metrosexual/hairy), we get along great. Last night Logan was going off on one of his diatribes, this time about how much he loves jazz. I had to tell him the truth: I fucking hate jazz. Wood concurred. He looked so wounded, and I said to him, "It's okay Logan, I like hanging out with people who have totally different tastes from me. In fact, I prefer it. I hate hanging out with people with the exact same taste as me." Logan looked at me and said, "Yeah, well, I hate hanging out with people who have the exact same taste as you, too."

So on that note, later today Wood and I will be posting our favorite albums of 2006, with representative MP3s from each album.

From: Wood
To: Dutch
Date: 12/21/2006
Time: 9:20 a.m.
Subject: pee pee potty?

that baby is probably going to need to pee real soon, if she hasn't done it already. she had a lot of juice at breakfast. FYI.

From: Dutch
To: Wood
Date: 12/21/2006
Time: 9:24 a.m.
Subject: Re: pee pee potty?

just went!

From: Wood
To: Dutch
Date: 12/21/2006
Time: 9:28 a.m.
Subject: Re: pee pee potty?

really? did she go on the floor first, or straight into the pot? big or little? did you ask her if she needed to, or did she come up with it on her own?

From: Wood
To: Dutch
Date: 12/21/2006
Time: 10:17 a.m.
Subject: pee pee potty?

yo, write me back.

10: 45a.m., Wood calls Dutch's cell phone:

Dutch: Hi.

Wood: Hey, what are you guys doing? I just wanted to hear your voice.

Dutch: Here it is.

Wood: Sooooo? Did she pee in the potty on her own?

Dutch: She did, into her little one. I told her she did a good job and then asked if she wanted to wear big girl pants. She said she did, so I put them on her.

Wood: Wow! That's awesome! I'm totally going to owe you $100 if you have this kid potty trained by the new year.

Dutch: An hour later she peed all over the couch. There was a lot of pee. A lot.

Wood: Oh. Sometimes they forget when they're wearing the big girl pants. At least it wasn't your fancy chair.

Dutch: I've gotta go. I've got the couch cushion cover stripped off and it's all wet and I'm using your new hair dryer to dry the foam inside. She's watching Elmo's world while I clean it up. I think I only have a few minutes before it's over.

Wood: You're letting her watch what?

Dutch: I think this Mr. Noodle dude is totally high. Look at him, he's on the pot!

The other day Wood told me that an abandoned building on her way to work was being torn down. "Which one?" I asked, because she walks past probably a dozen abandoned skyscrapers on her way to work. "I don't know," she said. "A white one."

I once spent several hours standing in a forest, watching a mighty tree crack and slowly fall after an ice storm. I was not going to miss this demolition. Juniper and I went with Wood yesterday morning and walked around and around the Detroit Commerce Building in palliative appreciation of its gentle arches and modest ornamentation: this was a building in its final days, thirteen stories that had stood since 1925, sealed off since 1997, now just standing in the way of a parking garage planned for the soon-to-be-restored Book-Cadillac hotel next door. We watched a wrecking ball slam into what had once been one of the largest department stores in a city where everyone once had good jobs and where the city was the place to shop. This building also held dozens of offices and law firms over the years. Those who've been inside it recently say many of the old files and furniture are still in there. That is not unusual. When they demolished a building that once held Motown Records' downtown offices to "beautify" the city before last year's Superbowl, they did not even save Marvin Gaye's desk---some guy exploring the building before it went down found some of Gaye's signed receipts and even a letter to his wife in the desk drawers. Juniper and I spent yesterday morning watching another building and its contents go on its way to nothing more than piles of brick and concrete and a twisted mess of rebar and wiring.

I've been doing this stay-at-home dad thing for about four or five months now, and I have to say it really agrees with me. I have intentionally not written much about it, because I have really been waiting for a day when I could complain about how boring and miserable it is. See, back when I was spending all day away from my kid and sitting in my office gasping for air as all the the sentimentality gushing out of me threatened to drown my be-khakied ass, I figured once I was at home getting a taste of how miserable stay-at-home parenthood actually is I would finally be able to write nasty things about how much being around my kid all day sucks. You know, so I wouldn't sound like such a sappy sonofabitch all the time.

But this lifestyle suits me. I am basically living the life of Riley here, folks. First of all, I don't do a lot of housework. I know that's a real disservice to all the other SAHDs out there slugging it out for equality in the homeplace, but I just don't make "doing dishes" or "picking up" a huge priority every day. Second of all, as far as childcare goes, there's only one of them around here. We play for most of the day; we go to the zoo or museums. She is my buddy. Even without television, she is so easy to distract with all the gewgaws and gimcracks that lie strewn about our house when I have to get something done. Plus, because I am so much bigger and stronger than her, she basically has to go wherever I want her to. I can just scoop her up and carry her around and there's little she can do to stop me. That is the third and most important thing: I love being able to go and do whatever I want. Lately that has meant taking advantage of the warm weather and walking around Detroit's central business district, which pleases us both. She jabbers on and on about the holiday decorations while I think and learn more every day about the city where we've chosen to live. I can't help myself: sometimes I find myself staring at her in my arms, after she's made a funny, smiling face on one adventure of ours or another, and think, Dear God this is exactly what I want to be doing with my life right now. Gag, I know. But bear with me.

When I was growing up, my own father worked from home. He ran his own auto body shop and restored antique automobiles in a building he built in our backyard. He had dozens of his own cars out there, too; most of them arrived in cardboard boxes and left fitted with shiny brass lights and 'uh-ooga' horns, sold to wealthier men who sputtered out of our driveway in the cars my father lovingly restored. I spent my childhood not going on vacations, but going to antique car shows and swap meets around the Midwest, sometimes driving 30 mph for many hours down blue highways in a 1927 Franklin or perhaps a bit faster in a 1931 Buick Phaeton. My dad worked on Packards from the 1920s and Ferraris from the 1960s, but he also repaired dented fenders on Cutless Supremes and Ford Tauri in the eighties when customers asked him to. His favorite era of the automobile was the 1910s through the 1930s, and as far as his personal tastes were concerned there wasn't a car manufactured after 1937 that mattered much. He raised me to respect the curve on a Duesenberg the way some fathers teach their sons about sports, or women. My father taught me that an Auburn automobile is a work of art, and he showed me that he himself was an artist who could turn a heap of rust into a gleaming canvas of steel.

But more than that, one important lesson I think I learned from my dad was to uncompromisingly pursue a life doing exactly what makes me happy. He never said that in so many words, but he showed me by doing what he did, quitting a job he hated to strike out on his own, creating beauty in unexpected ways and always being there when his son and daughter came home from school. I hope that as she grows, Juniper will learn that same lesson from my own life, and from the things we do together.

I have been driving with Juniper past the ruins of old automobile plants, most notably the sprawling Packard campus not far from our house. All around this city there are vacant lots and vacant buildings where other great factories once stood, places where cars were built with names that mean nothing to anyone except people like my dad: Hudson, Lozier, Rickenbacker, Hupp, Reliance, Graham-Paige, and so many others. I sometimes think about those cars when I look up at the empty buildings downtown Detroit; I think about the lives those factories sustained that kept those buildings full of working men and women. But I have been training myself when looking at ruins not to think about the past but to think about the beauty of the ruin itself. This is the city we inherited. What lessons might we learn from these stones?

I like to think they remind us that we are alive.

I never would have been cool or sexy enough to write for Nerve, but just by virtue of having impregnated my wife thirty months ago I am now apparently good enough to write for Nerve's new website, Babble, alongside my friends Metrodad, Dad Gone Mad, CityMama, Girls Gone Child, Jay Allen, Alisyn Cobb, Patti Nichols, and two people I've never heard of.

Today my first post is up at Babble's Strollerderby blog. It probably singlehandedly reveals that I am not cool enough to write for that site:

I must have also enjoyed screaming in people's ears and nodding in feigned comprehension at their screamed responses, because I sure spent a lot of evenings doing that, too. And I must have freakin' loved screaming at bartenders and then shelling out fifteen bucks for my wife's well martini and a pint of Anchor Steam four times every weekend night, because that's where a substantial portion of my take-home pay went during the years we spent under the tyranny of obligatory nightlife.

When Wood was staying home with Juniper, I would usually arrive home from work in time for her dinner. At that time, dinner involved a strenuous effort to convince Juniper to open her mouth for the various hashes and succotashes we prepared for her with tofu, eggs, kale, peas, cheese, black beans, garbanzos, hot dogs, ketchup and other ingredients in combinations that under ordinary circumstances no adult human would ever consume. But after going through the effort to cook it on the stove (we didn't have a microwave in San Francisco) Wood inevitably felt compelled to eat some of the scorned leftovers on Juniper's high-chair tray. I always found this absolutely disgusting, and never failed to let my wife know it.

Two days ago I was walking around with Juniper on my back in one of those emasculating backpack carriers and I stopped at an Indian restaurant downtown to grab some takeout from their lunch buffet, and while I was filling the to-go container to maximum capacity, Juniper dropped a chunk of the brownie that she had been gnawing on for at least ten minutes. It bounced off my shoulder right into a steaming vat of mutter paneer. By reflex I snatched it up with the tongs and dropped it in my palm. There was no trash nearby, and the proprietor's back was turned, so I popped the drooly and gnawed-up brownie chunk covered in dripping pea-and-cheese curry sauce right into my mouth.

I didn't think much about it until we went to bed last night and I told Wood what happened. She laughed and said, "What the fuck's wrong with you? That's absolutely disgusting." I nodded, but was thinking to myself that it didn't actually taste that bad.