This whole having-a-second-kid nonsense is getting frighteningly official. Yesterday my bride came home with an Ergo baby carrier! Oh dear. Soon enough we'll have someone to stuff inside it. Imagine. The first time around we rocked the Baby Bjorn. Walking around Brooklyn with my first born strapped to my chest for a year was a lovely prolonged bonding experience. It also had the minor side effect of making me feel about as sexy as a eunuch wearing a diaper. In a bunny costume.

So what, I wondered, was this Ergo carrier all about. As you know, ergo is latin for "therefore," as in "I breed, ergo I apparently now wear things that are in the fanny pack family." These contraptions are very popular with all the crunchy Brooklyn moms. I peeked at the box:


"The best support for your Baby ... and your LifeStyle." Indeed.

I'm not sure why Baby is capitalized -- maybe they want to emphasize how very important your child is, you know, in case you forgot. Maybe they're German. Maybe it's a message from the 18th century when ergonomically-correct infant-shaped knapsacks were all the rage. More perplexing, however, is "LifeStyle" -- no space, both words capitalized. I mean, presumably if you need an ergo carrier, it's a bit late to start thinking about condoms .

Whatever. I wondered exactly what LifeStyle of mine this baby carrier is the "best support" for. Fortunately the box offered some helpful hints, such as Chillaxing By The Beach With Your NewBorn Because That's What You Do When You Have NewBorns:

 
If that's not quite the LifeStyle for you, they also have the Abu Ghraib Hood Accessory To Bind and Gag Your Squalling Child to Your Back, Freeing Your Handsome Self Up To Admire the Palm Trees:

 
This last LifeStyle isn't on the box, but maybe it should be. It certainly IS plastered on phone booths (remember those?) and bus stops around Brooklyn. It's my personal favorite: I Love My Boo, Which I Do While Wearing LifeStyles -- or Trojans or Magnums or Whatever's Handy in the Heat of Our Moment -- And I Also Get Regularly Tested ... But, Honestly, Having A Baby Doesn't Really Fit Into My Immediate Agenda:

The New York Post, that paragon of American journalism--the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh columns all rolled into one --has a groundbreaking report today: One-third of moms have cheated! What?! At Scrabble, right?

Oh noes! The same amount--just 36 percent --say they're still attracted to their husbands. The rest would apparently rather bone George Clooney (well, who wouldn't?) or, um, Barack Obama.

Least reassuring quote: "The desire to have desire [for their husbands] is there."

AN UPDATE: Ladies, please stop reading now.

Seriously, gals. Go away.

They gone? Good.

OK, gents. So I sent that story to my friend Dan. His response? "They harangue you to get married and then...they cheat!"

I am never going to get any love again, am I?

We don't go to too many baseball games in this household. I rarely pack up the family and head to Madison Square Garden, either, to take in a friendly game of basketball ... or one of them rock and roll concert shows that the kids like so much these days.

Also, we don't drink too many things out of a bottle around here that aren't scotch, wine, beer, seltzer or milk. Roughly in that order of importance.

So it's a good thing that I read this cautionary tale about a poor clueless Ann Arbor dad who took his 7-year old to a Tigers game and bought him a Mike's Hard Lemonade—which apparently contains delicious alcohol—who knew?! You see where this is going: dude finds himself face to face with the cops ... while his son is rushed to the hospital! And then foster care!! Oy. Note to self: remember to read labels on bottles real careful—like when my kid is old enough to attend the Hannah Montana comeback tour.

And here I thought we were only supposed to treat our tourists this way ...

We go in for our little check-up with the midwife today. I love our midwife. We wanted to do a homebirth this time around, especially since the birthing center at Long Island College Hospital (which, logically, is in Brooklyn Heights) closed down, meaning my bride will have to birth in the delivery room (heaven forefend!). But our midwife isn't covered for home births. And we love her. So delivery room (and all the necessary evils that come with it), it is.

At the check-up today, the midwife measured the belly. My wife is a thin woman, narrow. She's well proportioned. And she's a gorgeous pregnant knockout--skinny all over and one big bump. Weirdly, people have been asking her for the past month if she's either A) due any day now or B) having twins. People are idiots. If her belly were any smaller, people would be asking her whether the baby was OK. Or if she was eating enough. Like I said, people are idiots.

So we grease up the belly, and listen to the thwack-thwack heartbeat. Bless. Aama gets weighed and measured. Like a steer. I ask the midwife if there's any way to tell how big the kid is. She says she guesses five, five-and-a-quarter pounds. Totally normal for 32 weeks. Good.

Then she tells us to come back every two weeks and adds, offhand, that the baby will probably increase in weight by a half-pound a week from here on out. We nod as we put on our coats. Then pause. We do the math.

That's four pounds in eight weeks.

That adds up to a nine pound baby. At least.

Remember how I mentioned that the wife is a narrow little lady? First Born clocked in at 6 pounds, 11 ounces. That's south of seven pounds ... of blazing crotchfire agony and bloody torn crotchflesh. Three more pounds will split the poor woman open.

Which made us pause again. This frickin' baby. She's going to come early, isn't she? Eep.

A word to the wise, moms of the world in quaint cash-strapped villages: home-made erotic calendars don't always sell as well as they do in the movies.

Key, heartbreaking quote: "The sad part for us is figuring out what to do with them because it is not something you can recycle." Oh dear. The calendar, it's like a docket of despair, ticking off months of pain in daily doses of rejection.

Cause if you don't, you're going to want it after watching this:

Praise the Lord that someone is out there funneling millions of advertising dollars into something that's not actually killing our kids. Or getting them doped up on the Internets. Even if it is making them hit the puberty by, like, second grade.

We've mentioned 'round these parts before: the bride, she is all gestational once again. As usually happens when the womenfolk start makin' babies, the conversation has been known to turn toward the topic of names. As in: What in Tarnation are We Gonna Call the Unborn? Now, more or less, we have come to an agreement (thank goodness we aren't having a boy because there was No Agreeing on the topic of appellations for the phallically endowed). We have chosen a name. I should amend that: my babymama has strongly recommended that I accept her preferred choice of name. As she reminded me, with serrated blades shooting from her fiery eyeballs, the child will be getting my last name, after all. Indeed. And so, we have chosen a name. It is a good name. 

I am not going to tell you what it is. But I have it on good authority that in some regional Tlingit dialects it translates roughly to "Daughter of the Great One. And His Wife."

For those of you in the position of having to come up with a name, let me please be of assistance. I live to help. I am here for you, body and soul, but mostly body. This site is waaay better than the baby name voyager in that it trolls the 1990 census. It randomly selects first names and pairs them with randomly selected last names. Just keep hitting refresh. I found some girls' names that I really liked, and I e-mailed them to my lady:

Want to stir up a little ridiculous controversy that serves only to underscore your central point (that parents today be cra-zay)? New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy has the recipe for you.

Step 1. Let your 9-year-old son ride the subway all by himself under the theory that parents today are waaaay to overprotective. ("I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.")
Step 2.  Write an excellent, thoughtful column about it. "Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them."
Step 3. Let simmer on the interblogs.
Step 4. Serve hot-headed.

Skenazy is totally on to something here. The over-propensity among parents (usually Of a Certain Means) to hover and helicopter over their kiddies' every move is a serious bugaboo of mine (awful stroller pun intended, sadly). But more importantly it does the kids a disservice. The real world is not a baby-proofed, rounded-corner, anti-bacterial rubber room. Thank God. So why raise kids as if it were? They'll be sorely disappointed. (As it is they're going to have to grapple with the fact that they're not the Specialest Little People on Earth they've been told their entire childhoods, but that's another source of irritation for another time).

Now Skenazy has now bequeathed the Internets with a special gift: Free Range Kids (LOVE the name). A snip of her blog's mission statement: "At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less."

The blog's first post was April 1 and there's only been one more since, which does not inspire great confidence that this brilliant idea will yield an especially robust site. But we'll reserve judgment for now.

 
Chris Collins / Corbis

What do you do with an almost-three-year-old who fights with you? And when I say "fights with you" I mean "goes all Mike Tyson and bites an ear off your head" kind of fighting. 'Cause I've got a serious fighter on my hands here. She is not, let's be clear, a hitter or a scratcher or anything violent like that. But when she adopts a cause, she digs in. Like a steamshovel. Relentless. Unwavering. Much like when, say, Mother Teresa set up shop in Calcutta and never once considered buckling under the oppressive weight of her deeply-felt mission to bring succour to the impoverished ... once my child decides she wants a lollipop, it's all over until she gets her lollipop. Or at the very least she digs in until someone's daddy dies in a steaming puddle of his own urine. Whichever needs to come first.

Take this morning, for example. And when I say "take this morning," I mean "remove it from my prefrontal cortex so I need never remember it again." Ma Breeder went into the office bright and early, leaving me in my still-slumbering state of blissful non-awakehood. Of course, my schizophrenic brain was only capable of half-delighting in the luxurious decadence of a big empty bed. The other half was anxiety-struck in anticipation of the yelling that was guaranteed to emerge from the Chamber of the Spawn. And then it came: MOOOOMMMMMYYYYY!!!

Me, stumbling in: Hi baby. Gooooodmorning!
Her: I said "MOMMY!"
Me: I know, banana. But Mommy's at work.
Her: I want Mommy.
Me: She's at work.
Her: But I want Mommy. Because I need my Mommy.
Me: I know, babyducks. But she's at work.
Her: I want Mommy.
Me: She's at work. Let's have breakfast!
Her: NO I CAN'T HAVE BREAKFAST BECAUSE I want Mommy.
Me: OK, well she's not here and I am. Or should I leave?
Her, whining in a frequency that has been known to paralyze elephants: Nooooooooo. Don't leave me!
Me: OK then! Let's change that diaper!
Her: I want mommy.
Me: I swear to you, if I could give you mommy right now, I would. I'd give you eight mommies. On steroids and estrogen. But she's at work.
Her: I want Mommy.
Me: FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND JUST AND GOOD WHY DON'T YOU BELIEVE ME?!!! She's at work.
Her: I want some gum.
Me: She's at wo-- oh. Gum? You can't have gum until you have breakfast. [This is how rules get made up: on the fly. -- ed.]
Her: GIVE ME SOME GUM. Where's Mommy?

It's hard to know how to react here. It's very easy to escalate and start yelling, like for real.

As founder of the Tinkering School, Gever Tulley fully admits to the fact that he puts "power tools in the hands of second graders." He also delivered an excellent talk at the TED conference last year: 5 dangerous things you should let your kid do. What, pray tell, are these five things? I'm so glad you asked:

1. Play with fire
2. Own a pocket knife
3. Throw a spear
4. Deconstruct appliances
4.5 Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
5. Drive a car

"trust me, they're going to learn things that you can't get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys." Watch and learn.