Advice To New Parents

 

This week's big news is Tim Andrews, the man of a thousand voices, has become a father at the age of fifty.

Tim is a radio guy for those of you that don’t know, providing spot-on impressions of just about everybody on WSB's "The Von Haessler Doctrine"  He’s very talented, and I can’t tell how many times he’s caused me to spew my coffee.  When Tim’s on the radio, I become a regular Redd Foxx drinking ripple.

Fifty is long of tooth to become a Dad for this first time. Oh sure, I know of guys who have traded in Wife Number One for a Newer Model only to have the Newer Model pop out a couple of kids.

But in the Old Dad-New Family paradigm, this old Dad has some experience raising a rug rat.  

Having a kid is one of the most rewarding experiences a person can have.  It is also the most exhausting.

My son was born in 1991. I was thirty-one years old. I’m not sure what happened in the years 1991, 1992, or 1993.  It was all one big blur. 

I know The Braves went from Worst to First, and the country hired someone from Arkansas to be the most powerful person on earth. Something called "Garth Brooks" became famous. That''s about it.

My first bit of advice for a new parent is to sleep as much as possible.

My son, for various reasons, didn’t sleep through the night until he turned one.

We had a friend whose baby slept through the night from day one. My advice:  find a baby like this.

The second bit of advice. Do not compare other kids to your kid.  Girls are generally more advanced than boys, and by more advanced I mean, more human. 

They learn to do potty stuff way sooner than boys. A lot of boys are still pooping in their pants at 15.  (Not true, but it sure seems that way.)

Girls learn how to write and speak very early, while boys mainly communicate using underarm fart noises.

Now, it is not all bad with boys.  Boys generally have better toys than girls, and at least you won’t have to watch many DVDs of girls becoming empowered to be President of The Solar System.

One thing Tim will have to deal with is being The Oldest Dad At Little League.

Back when we were doing rec league baseball, we would run into these Dads who could have been my Dad. I remember one Dad in particular who I thought resembled Grandpa Walton before discovering he was the boy’s father. 

My favorite old dad moment was when the kid ask his old dad for a Powerade. If you do anything semi-athletic with boys under the age of ten, they have to have a gallon of sports drinks close by on the off-chance the boys might dehydrate and die.  The Old Dad's response to the request:  "I'll power your ade."

Finally, my final bit of advice to any new parent is to take a breath and try to do your best.

It takes a village to raise a child, and unfortunately, the village is wrong a lot of the time.

One of my brothers had dyslexia.  When he was in the second grade, my mother went to the principal of our elementary school. She said, “I’ve had Donald (she never referred to him as that unless she was mad at him or it was in a formal setting) tested, and he has dyslexia.”  The principal said, “There’s a lot of that going around,” and proceeded to say that there was something wrong with the way she was parenting.

By the way, before he died, he earned a Master’s Degree.

People will always, happily, give you advice on how to raise YOUR child but for some reason do not want to hear anything you might say about the subject.

This is because their child is the greatest, and yours just happens to be there.  My mother always said, “Every crow thinks theirs is the blackest".

That’s why you never comment on how another child is being raised.  If the parents want to raise him as Amish and teach him his life’s work is building a barn, that’s no skin off your nose.  Let those people raise their kid, and you raise your own.

I think my wife and I have done a pretty good job with our son.  He has a job, a wife, and a house. He calls his momma at least twice and week.

And he gave me this really cool “Buckee” t-shirt I’m wearing right now.

 

Plenty Of Fish

 

The saga of Liz Cheney, the Congresswoman from Wyoming, was a major news story this week if you don't count:

 1) A cyberattack on an oil company that caused long lines at the gas pumps with a sudden jump in prices.  It also caused a jump in the number of memes shared on Facebook showing people hoarding gas, including a new way by putting it in clear plastic bags.

2) The CDC finally granting us poor peasants the privilege of walking around naked-faced if we've had our vaccines.

3) Chick-fil-A limiting the number of dipping sauces they will hand out per meal. I reacted to this news like your grandparents responded to Pearl Harbor.

The saga was an inside baseball Washington story about another mean old Cheney and how she didn't do her job as the number three person in the Republican House leadership.   I'm not sure exactly what that job entails except keeping her lips firmly pressed up against former President Donald J. Trump's tuckus.

It all has to do with Dumb Donald and how he reacted to the attack on The Capital.  

The former President’s reaction to January 6th has been, “What?  Something happened on January 6th?”  He has dismissed it as no big deal as if every losing side has tried to disrupt the official certification of The Electoral College.

I thought after Trump left The White House, he would slowly and surely fade away.  Wrong.

Trump has been squirreled away in Mar-a-Logo, appearing at the occasional wedding reception and reminding the happy couple of how the election was stolen from him because there’s nothing a wedding reception needs more than a lecture about the Dominion voting machines.

Speaker of squirrels, the House of Representatives led by the primary nut, Nancy Pelosi, decided to impeach Trump one week before he left office. 

Liz Cheney was one of the Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump.

All across the land, my fellow Republicans jumped to their feet to applaud one of their own, voting her convictions and standing up for the rule of law.   

Um, this did not happen. Instead, old Liz became number one of the Hit Parade and not in a good way.

President Reagan created “The Eleventh Commandment,” which said, “Thou shalt not criticize another Republican.”  As we all know, President Trump took that commandment and stomped that sucker flat. It all began in 2015, even before the 2016 campaign, Trump pooh-poohed John McCain’s stint in a North Vietnam prison camp during The Vietnam War.  Trump spent The Vietnam War traipsing around New York with his four foot deferments, trying to avoid catching the clap. (His words, not mine.)

You can say what you want about McCain. But you can’t sneeze at his service as a Prisoner of War.

The new Eleventh Commandment appears to be “Thou Shalt Not Criticize President Trump” because your life will be miserable if you do.

It is still early, but there appear to be many people who think this 74-year-old man is the party's future.  He’s not.

 
At least, I hope he’s not.

The GOP has a pretty deep bench, and there’s a lot of good candidates for 2024 out there.

Ron Desantis, the governor of Florida, is almost like Trump except he is smart, articulate, and actually wins arguments with the smarty-pants press when they get stuck in their "Republican Are Evil" mode.
 
Speaking of smart, Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas, was a student of Elizabeth Warren’s at Harvard.  He's not Dan Quayle trying to diagram a sentence.

Senator Tim Scott proved the other day that he deserves to be on the national stage.

There are others, but you get the point.  The House GOP Members are still goo-goo-eyed/scared poop-less over Trump.  They are like some boy who is still pining after a girl after she dumped him at the drive-in. Give it up. Trump is old news. He caused the GOP to lose the House, Senate, and The White House. 

There's plenty of fish in the sea. Leaders of a political party are like a bus, and there will be a new one to come along. Get over Trump and move on.

Besides, I haven’t heard one word from Mar-a-Largo about the Chick-fil-A dipping sauce crisis. Whoever can solve that has my vote.

 

 

 

To Cap It Off

 

 

 One of the things about being an old fogey is that you tend to “wax nostalgic,” whatever that means.

Things were so much better in the old days. Let me tell you, sometimes things were not so good.

My parents would tell me stories about having to quit school to get a job to help make ends meet around the house.  I know this is a golden oldie, but my dad told me that when he was 13 years old (this would be around 1930), he walked to Maryland from East Tennessee to look for a job.

I talked to an old-timer one time about the “old days,” and I asked him if he missed them. He said, “NO!  I don’t miss getting up in the middle of the night to go out and sit in an outhouse”.

So I appreciate people when they cut through the misty water colored memories of the past and let you know that some things are better now.

What got me thinking about this was this:

 

I read a lot of articles about baseball caps. I know, I party all the time.

 

I just like baseball caps, and I collect baseball caps. I have favorites.

I like the Boston Red Sox cap. It is simple and elegant. If it was good enough for Ted Williams, Yaz, and Mayday Malone, it is good enough for me. 

 

 

 

I like the blue New York Mets cap over the black ones they wore for a while. The cap is a homage to the Brooklyn Dodgers and The New York Giant-the hat is blue (Dodgers), and the emblem is orange (Giants).

 

 

 

I must say the world went back on its axis when the Milwaukee Brewers went back to their old “glove” hat. The glove is an M and B mushed together.

 

 

I love the Minnesota Twins TC (Twin Cities) cap. When I was a kid, The Twins were on TV a lot. They had Rod Carew, Tony Olivia, and Harmon Killibrew. There is only one thing a man named Harmon Killebrew could do: hit home runs.

 

 

 

 

 

My wife got me a Montreal Expos hat for Father’s Day last year. It always looked like a hat that was designed in Paris. I think the emblem stands for Montreal Expos Baseball, or it could be a dirty word written in French.

 

 

 

I read an article that said the 1973 Atlanta Braves hat, which features a small “a,”  is the best looking hat in Atlanta Braves history. 

It wasn’t.

The reasons had something to do with the 70s, which I lived through.  It wasn’t like walking to Maryland, but it was no day in the park.

As James Lileks points out, the 70s were sandwiched between landing on the Moon and the Space Shuttle. The only thing going on overhead was Skylab, which was also being worked on like a car parked in the backyard.

The country was in a “malaise” back then.  Our President, Jimmy Carter, said so.

We had disco, but, as you might have heard, disco sucks.  There were gas lines, but it wasn’t too bad around here in Georgia.  People got naked a lot. They ran through the streets without any clothes on.

 

It was called "Streaking" and even some members of my saintly class of 1977 went streaking.  I could name names, if I could remember them.  I just hope Ethel didn't look.

It had its good points. “Saturday Night Live” was funny. People didn’t go into a conniption if you told a joke. As far as I remember, nobody was ever canceled

Traffic in Atlanta still stunk, but Atlanta seemed smaller and, in some ways, nicer back in the 70s. 

I’m sure that’s my age showing.

The Braves teams stunk to high heavens back when they were wearing those hats. The only good thing that happened was when Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run in it.

You can keep that cap. I like the one the Braves wore when they won the World Series.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meditations At The End Of The Emergency

 

 Since nobody else is going to say it, I will.

It is over, guys.  The Covid Emergency in the United States is over.

We were assigned the task of flattening the curve. Well, we took that curve and stomped that sucker flat.

 
We are going to have to shout that the pandemic is over because Lord knows nobody else will.

Just this past week, The CDC graciously lifted the guidelines of wearing masks outside.  President Sominex held a special event on the White House grounds to announce that we could go naked face if we were outside.

Of course, he walked to the podium wearing a mask. This after being vaccinated and being in no danger of giving or getting Covid.  Last week, he met with the Prime Minister of Japan, and he wore a double mask. Everybody in the room was vaccinated.

The double mask was the last of Fauci’s greatest hits.  He told us that wearing two masks would give us more protection than wearing one.  Why not three? Wouldn’t that be better than two?

Like The Edsel and New Coke, double masks didn’t catch on, mainly because it was stupid no matter how well-intentioned.

Unlike some folks in my tribe, I do not doubt that Fauci was sincere during the pandemic.  I don’t think he created Covid so he could inject people with a tracking device that would let the Anti-Christ know where they are at.

 
(However, I will say that if you think the vaccine will plant a tracking device in you, you should probably not get the vaccine. You have other pressing issues to take care of.)

While I’m talking about vaccines, can we just give one high five to the former President?

I am the first to admit that President Orange is a world-class (word that rhymes with “gas pole”) and spent way too much of his time trying to prove how tough he was.   However, he did push and fast track the vaccines.

Kyle Wilson of The National Review said, “Last March 5, nine and a half months before FDA approval of the first shot, Trump asked his experts whether we might see a vaccine “within a few months,” and Anthony Fauci instantly corrected him: “A year to a year and a half.” When Trump said in August that he was hopeful we’d see a vaccine by November — it would be November 20 that Pfizer submitted its data to the FDA to request emergency approval — CNN got so far over its skis that it actually ran a bizarre Fact Check of the Future upbraiding the President, pointing out that the obviously irrefutable and always-correct super-duper expert Fauci was still insisting the vaccine “would likely not be available widely until ‘several months’ into 2021.” Say it with me in Trump voice, friends: WRONG.”

The administration has been all over the place when it has come to the vaccine.  They have urged everybody to get one, which is good. But then the President, Press Secretary Red, and Fauci trot out and tell us that we still have to wear our masks and social distance and wash our hands while singing “In A Gadda Da Vida" because there may be a variant out there so life isn't going to go back to 2019 until we give the all clear.

Then they look around and wonder why there is vaccination hesitancy.

Things are beginning to open up. Next week, the Braves will allow full capacity at their games. Concerts are slowly coming back. People are still wearing their masks in Target, but you can tell it is not a sincere. Plus, a lot of people never got the memo that the mask is supposed to go over your nose.

The President needs to go on TV, and instead of urging patience, he should declare victory.  Maybe he could propose we spend another Trillion dollars on a new project like light rails which always fills a Democrat's heart full of joy.