Last March, my wife and I discovered that we were going to have a baby. Despite being recently laid off, the crap economy, and the general insanity that comes with a child I was rather excited.
For you see as all parents do I saw this as a two stage adventure in which to mold someone into a perfect being.
The first stage is what I'll call "The Minion Stage". Essentially having a little tiny henchman who does as their told and will make Manhattans for you. I've even started buying the smaller bottles of Canadian Club so he can lift it sooner. But, during this stage you do more than boss him around, you also prepare him for stage two...
"The Coolest Person on the Planet Stage". This is the butterfly to the minion's pupa. You see while they've been your henchmen you've been taking them to see "the right movies" while shunning musicals about High School that I'm sure he won't want to see anyways. Pokemon? Yu-Gi-oh? Whatever is popular now? Pshh. Ignore that! You've been showing him original seasons of G1 Transformers, GI Joe, MASK, and Thundercats on DVD, his taste is too refined for modern cartoons (save a handful of good ones). And of course he's never even heard of The Wiggles because for him he hears cartoons and bands and he thinks of Dethklok. He'll know the complete songbook of Dean Martin before he hears "Baby Beluga" for the first time! And on his 10th birthday you and him will sit down with a big bucket of Popcorn and throw the classic of the Horror/Action/Sci-Fi genre "Predator" into the wall screen (I figure we'll have wall screens in 10 years) and bond like no father and son ever did before. Then, when he is ready to enter High School, he will such a cultured, educated and all around awesome lady-killer they'll have thought James Bond himself had enrolled.
Then we found out we were having a girl.
Hrm. If I was wrong about the sex of the child, could I have been wrong about any of my other plans for her? Possibly.
In our birthing class (more on that down the road) they had an exercise for us where we took 14 different two sided cards and we laid out our "ideal" birth scenario. IV/No IV, Drugs/No Drugs, etc.. We slowly whittled it down until everyone in the class (should have) had Healthy Baby as the only card remaining. The point of the exercise is that while you may have a vision of the perfect birth, only one thing is truly important and very little of it you actually control.
So the news that I was having a girl made me rethink my whole plan. To be fair it was a bit of a relief. In my mind I was going to have the coolest son on earth, but there was a part of me that thought, "Am I just making the biggest dork in his school district?". As a nerd/collector/movie buff/artist/designer I have a lot of interests. So if I were to lay out my cards I'd have many ideal scenarios for the next 18 years of what I need to do with my daughter but as I whittle them down only one really important question remained...
When should she see Die Hard?
So please visit here often to see how I'm doing with my newest full time job, and help me figure out the answer to that, and other questions.
-GD
