. . . and then there was pickle.

It is amazing the things that we, as civilized creatures, will do (and touch) in order to perform our parental duties of ‘warm, safe, and dry.’

The reason I point this out is that we fulfill these obligations - being well aware that our little angels will eventually be teenagers, and that they will swear that they hate us - and wish that they had never been born. We all know that this will happen. We did it ourselves, and have heard the warnings of all parents that have trudged onward on the path before.

We, in this first generation of blogging parents, have a unique opportunity to completely catalogue and submerge our children in the overwhelming amount of information and proof that we did in fact do our best, and despite how screwed up our kids may end up being – maybe it wasn’t our fault.

With that being said, I would now like to record several things that have happened between my daughter and I which I hope to utilize later on in her life when she is just way too cool to be seen in public with her parents, or just too grown up to listen to what we have to say.

My father was a genius at this, and I have perhaps the best ever being put in your place story that has ever been told.

When I was a junior in college I was home visiting and was getting ready to go out clubbing with some friends from high school. I hung out in a fairly intense electro-goth circle of friends, which meant that there was more leather and hair resembling palm trees meandering about the kitchen as we were headed out the door than one could readily imagine.

So we were headed out the door, me and all my punk rock friends. Now I swear it just happened to strike me at that moment how short my father is (5’5”), and it was really the first time I noticed that I was taller than him.

I said, “wow dad, you’re getting pretty short.” And then in front of all of my friends he looks at me and says, “yeah, you’re gettin’ pretty big for comin’ out the end of my dick. . . ”

That folks, is what you call a show-stopper.

I don’t think I have ever fully recovered from that moment.

The key is, no matter how much you grow up in life there are certain unquestionable trump cards every parent has, and we as bloggers have the ultimate opportunity to not let those slide.

For me, aside from some diapers that have made me question whether my daughter is digesting food or just holding it for some strange fermentation process, I have one moment which will always illuminate just how far you’ll go to take care of your child.

The first week The Pickle was alive The Wife was bedridden, and it was my job to facilitate the care of baby and mom (shuttling baby to and from mom and food to and from mom)– as well as changing all diapers.

The first day or so, as all parents will attest wasn’t so bad. The poop was a sticky tar-like substance that was pretty easy to manage. The weird thing that happened was that the nurse said that there would also be a slime-like substance that was in her vagina that needed to work its way out before she could really urinate.

So this was my first parental job. When I went to wipe my daughter on the second day of her life I discovered a vile substance that can only be compared to the slime from ‘You Cant Do That On Television” or what you’d get in the little plastic eggs at the grocery store. What really made it bad was that it seemed to be spot-welded to her skin, and the more I collected the more started to appear until I am bear handedly pulling slime out of my daughter like a booger on a rubber band. When you get a booger like that you expect there to be a red tip on it from the spot it was attached to your lung, but I was terrified that if I saw a red tip it would be the start of her first period.

‘This is fatherhood’ was my first realization. I was sleep deprived, and traumatized from the worst labor ever.

This is what I plan to bring up when she tells me I never put her needs ahead of mine – because folks, I really needed to not do that.

Yet someday - she will not believe I have her best interests in mind when I tell her she cant ride on a motorcycle, or shoot heroin into her eye, or god forbid join the cheerleading squad. I need to make sure that I have enough guilt creating fodder to ensure that she will never . . . Wait a second this is starting to sound all too familiar.

Maybe that’s not the way to prove that I love her. Maybe its just by loving her despite how much of a psychotic teenager she becomes.

Not that I’m going to give up keeping track of all of the fowl shit that I have to do – but maybe I’ll just use it to show her how responsible you have to be, to be a parent . . . and that will keep her off motorcycles.

Pickle’s Papa