What is it about guys and scars? For me, a scar is a cool thing. It’s a badge of honor, even if the scar-producing activity was less than honorable.

“Hey, wow, that’s a cool scar - how did you get it?”

“Someone dared me to jump my bike over a moving car.”

“Excellent!”

Another reason I like my scars is that each one is a link to a memory from my childhood. There’s the one on my forehead that I got from a radiator while learning to walk. There’s the one on my left shin from chicken pox. There’s the one on my right bicep from when my Grandpa’s German Shepherd bit me because I landed on his tail jumping out of a pickup truck. There’s the one in, um, an unmentionable place, obtained when getting ready to go on a Father-Son canoe trip (always be careful if you’re wearing zipper shorts or pants with no underwear!). And there’s the one on my right hand, which I got from a rusty pickup truck while on a Boy Scouts campout. On that same campout, I got a small stick lodged in my nose near my eye (while playing Capture the Flag), but alas, no scar from that one. Rats.

So when Junior has his first major injury, I’m certain that one of my first thoughts will be, “I wonder what kind of scar he’ll get.” Maybe I’ll keep a Scar Journal, cataloging Junior’s every scar, and present it to him when he turns 18 years old.

For girls, it’s different. Our kids had to get BCG immunizations here, just like I did in 1969. The immunization leaves a decent little scar (which, in adulthood, can be as big as a quarter). Junior got his on his left upper arm (as I did), but we chose to have little Joy get hers on her butt. Girls need to stay smooth and scar-free in our society. But guys? Let ‘em be all mangled and gashed.

Girls have diaries to remember their childhood; boys have scars.

Wee, here we are in Utah.  It’s been almost a month and we are settling in nicely.  Our neighbors have been very nice and we are just about unpacked and living normally again.

The first things we did when we got here were to enroll Elijah in the local kindergarten and to join the synagogue.  Our first Sunday here, Elijah went to Sunday school at the synagogue and he’s been going to kindergarten every day as well.  It’s different in the public schools here!  Every day last week, Elijah arrived home with a backpack full of Easter-related activity sheets.  Coloring pages, stories, egg coloring information, etc.  There must have been 15 different Easter-themed items last week.  Back in Jersey, it was Passover stuff every day.  Different. So, Elijah tells me he likes Sunday school better because they “talk about my holiday there”.

The whole ‘being Jewish in Utah’ thing, while kind of overblown, is so interesting at times.  A neighbor of ours came over with her 4 year old son to introduce themselves.  When she saw the mezuzah on our door, she asked if we were Jewish.  When we said we were, she replied, “I’ve never met a Jewish person before!” It’s truly fascinating!

So now we are thinking of enrolling Elijah in private school for 1st grade.  We hear it’s a better education and the school we are looking at is based on ‘traditional Jewish values’ although only around 50% of the students are Jewish.  The idea is great on paper but the costs....it’s like sending him back to daycare again!  So we need to think about that…

My parents have not seen my children now for a month and, although that is kind of sad, we have been communicating via video conference online. We bought PC cameras for our parents before we left and, this way, they get to see us while we chat.  It’s extremely cool and extremely FREE even though it is across the country.  My Mom is sad, though, because she feels my youngest (5 months) won’t know her as well as the other two.  Hey, when you spend 8 years living down the block from your parents and you pick up and move 2200 miles down the street....it makes your heart hurt sometimes.  We just look at it as part of the master plan and we intend on living it up here in Utah and making it a time worth remembering....and also giving chicken soup and matzoh balls out to my neighbors at Hanukkah!

Romance changes once kids come along.  That’s the bottom line.  I find that in a post all-alone-with-my-wife world, it takes so much more effort and attention for me to be thoughtful, creative, and inclined toward being romantic.  I find that it is easy to do well for a while, but then I get busy and then wonder why I have not written cards or bought a gift or lit candles….  I just get out of the habit of doing romantic things, and then when I see a friend do something, I remember to get my butt in gear.  Can you relate?

Lately I have been doing something called ‘The Questions Game’ though, and since my wife and I have had such wonderful conversations, I wanted to share this simple idea with you.

What I do for ‘The Question Game’ is type out 10-15 questions I come up with (usually during work), print them, and then place them all in an envelope, so that we can have conversation over dinner or on a drive (or at a restaurant).  The questions vary significantly in their range and I like to have fun with them.  How it works is for one person to pick a question out of the envelope, read it aloud, and then answer it.  We usually reserve the option to both respond to each question if we want to.  The goal is connecting rather than finishing all of the questions in the envelope.  And sometimes we spend quite a while on just one of the questions and it spurs on other directions in conversation.  The questions can be topical, totally random, and as deep or shallow as you’d like.

Here are some example questions to give you an idea of what I do.  And feel free to cut and paste these if you’d like.

Example Questions:

1. If you could star in a movie, what type of movie would you be in?
2. If you could relive any memory from childhood, what would it be?
3. What does being romanced look like for you these days?
4. If a book were written about your life, what would three of the chapters be?
5. If you were able to give Dubya just one suggestion in a 5 minute meeting, what would you say to him?
6. What is one way you have seen your spouse grow as of late?
7. If you could be at any historical event in the past 100 years, what would it be?
8. If you could make a commercial to air during the Super Bowl, what would it be?
9. What is a scripture that has been speaking to your heart lately?
10. If you HAD to karaoke on national television, what song would you sing?
11. If your sex life was something in the refrigerator, what would it be?
12. If you could tour with any 80s rock band, what band would you tour with, and why?
13. If you were forced to get a tattoo in 30 minutes from now, what would you get, and where would it be?

It’s been over seven months since Metcha Day (a.k.a. Gotcha Day), and both Karen and I have already done a host of things we swore we never would in our pre-parenthood days.

- “We won’t listen to Barney in our house!” Are you kidding?  As I now say, I would dress up as friggin’ Barney if it would keep Gwen from screaming and crying for hours on end.

- “We’ll keep the house clean like we did before kids.” This holds true only if the adoption social worker is visiting, and even then I would not want her to open certain doors for fear of severe head trauma from falling toys and other debris.  There is not a room in the house that doesn’t have some sort of squeaky and/or battery-operated toy in one’s path.

And our personal favorite…

“Gwen will eat healthy.  Parents who feed their kids junk food are just lazy.” Obviously, we had no idea what we were talking about there.  Gwen’s diet generally consists of mac ‘n’ cheese and chocolate milk.  Vegetables?  No chance.  I’m sure we’d funnel in Pixie Stix and Mountain Dew if made meal time go any quicker.  I’m sure the McNugget years are just around the corner.

In hindsight, I now realize why experienced parents always laughed whenever we made comments like those above…

The church I belong to has a nursery, which looks after kids from 18 months to three years while their parents attend two hours of classes. Since our daughter has recently reached 18 months—and since the nursery’s designated caregivers are always short-staffed—I’ve spent the first hour helping the wee ones (about six to ten of them) play nicely, eat their lunches and learn how to sing and pray.

As I run a Matchbox car up a giggling boy’s chubby little forearm and finally succeed in getting the princess picky eater to finish her sandwich, I find myself thinking, wouldn’t it be great to do this for a living? Wouldn’t it be meaningful to be a strong, nurturing male to the very kids for whom it will do the most good?

But the truth, I eventually have to admit to myself, is that this idealism itself best explains why I wouldn’t be good at such a job for more than fifteen minutes at a time: after about that long my mind wanders away from the concrete events around me, even when I’m with my own kids.

Nevertheless, out of curiosity I’ve recently searched online for men working in child care. I’m encouraged to see that there is apparently a slightly larger male presence overall than in the few day-care centers I frequently pass by. I’ve actually never seen a guy working in one.

The websites dedicated to promoting men’s place in child care typically agree that the greatest deterrents are the lack of prestige and the male-abuser stigma. I can understand the fears associated with both—of being treated condescendingly for one and suspiciously for the other—and I wonder how these stereotypes will change.

In the last century, the most influential people to study kids and work out theories of how they think and behave were mostly male—Piaget, Vygotsky, Skinner, Erikson, to name some. But if a guy wants to work with young children just for the sake of the good that comes from the interaction itself—i.e., without publishing his own aptitude for critical observation—our culture isn’t prepared to accept it without an extraordinary reason (the most common of which is, unfortunately, pedophilia). In our culture, one parameter of low-status work is that which does not entertain or improve human understanding or capability. In this view, child-care is as insignificant as any other repetitive labor. The huge difference, of course, is what that labor can mean to a child. Let me finish with the poem of a child honoring the menial tasks of a caregiver—in this case, the poet’s father:

Those Winter Sundays
--Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?