There are many things that they don’t tell you when you have a child.
Here is a short list

- they have hair on their back
- they are super ugly (more about that in another blog)
- that “baby smell” that everyone loves so much is made up of one part mothers milk 2 parts mother’s arm pit.
- they can’t read
- they never quite catch up to their color at the tips of their ears
- the first words you whisper into your child’s ear should not be “you owe me”
- a infant can squirt pee up to 40 feet in a straight line before it starts to arc
- when they start to laugh they will be your best audience because at the end of the day if you have nothing else you can just jingle your keys.

here is a stand up routine for babies that you can use.
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“iPad” by pierre bennu
photo taken by my wife’s iPhone

(click ‘read more’ for bigger picture) [Read more]

I believe that embracing fear produces courage.

After my brother died in an accident, my mother was inconsolable. I was only 4 years old at the time, but I still understood the seismic shift in my mom’s attitude toward safety. Suddenly, everything around us was potentially dangerous. Overnight, the world had gone from a playground to a hazardous zone. [Read more]

DON’T!
Don’t you ever touch someone’s baby!
Unless given specific permission, don’t do it.
Let me be more specific.
DON’T TOUCH MY BABY!

Look, I don’t know where your hands have been. You might have just come out of a public restroom and god forbid your finger broke through the thin public restroom toilet tissue when you cleaned yourself. Assuming you do that. Then when other people are in there with you, you pretend to wash your hands but it doesn’t matter cause you touched that dirty door knob on the way out. This is the stuff that runs though my mind when your smiling face approaches wanting to touch my child.

Exception: Old women CAN touch my baby. I love when old women touch my baby. The things they say are so beautiful and wise. However …old men. YOU CAN NOT TOUCH MY BABY. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. This old man tried to touch my baby at the farmers market… I saw him coming a mile away with my newly parental super powers. It wasn’t so much that he was old but he was nasty. Like he had that old man skin disease, scaly, scabby undefined old MJ thriller S#!@ all over his forearms and he tried to smile as he was reaching in. I abruptly stared into his eyes and burned his soul then I turned the baby in the other direction. His potential grope tuned into a congratulations to which I responded with a giddy school girl “thank you.”

A friend of mine told me a horror story about when her child was small, random folks would try to kiss her. I asked, what did you do? She said she told them that the baby was sick. That seemed to work. I think I’ll just go that extra mile and tell them he has baby herpes or really bad breath.

Here is some sound advice from Jay Smooth. His blog is always thoughtful and informative check him out on youtube or at his site. ENJOY.

p.s. to whom it my concern, we need to talk

They made me cut the cord. Let me be clear they didn’t “make me” but when a room full of women who are medical professionals hold surgical scissors in your direction and say “who wants to cut the cord” then they all look at you, you can’t NOT do that. I know its sounds weird to some people but I didn’t want to cut the chord. I’m glad I did but I really like to leave the professional work to the professionals, even the easy stuff.

If you go to a deli for a sandwich if they take the time to fry the meat up, put on the lettuce, tomatoes, onions, bread ketchup, and pickles, oils, pepper, salt and even wrap it in that deli paper and slice it for you I figure they can be the one who puts the toothpick in it.

I decided to write down my experiences really more as therapy though this transition. I know therapy and transition usually have negative connotations but I wanted to dedicate something to beauty. [Read more]

Ok so couple of months ago I became a father.
And I saw it. You know IT !
Birth!
Like a person come out of a person.
As you read this you I can feel you’re not amazed by this. Somewhere in you there is something saying “this happens all the time around the world” or “ I can see a birth on one of these medical shows on cable.”
But maybe you should say the phrase slowly 3 times and really think about it
“A  FULLY FORMED PERSON WAS PUSHED OUT OF ANOTHER PERSON”
I was not bought to tears of joy nor was I terrified it was just AWE. Like watching Cirque de Soleil rehearse. Puzzled… maybe that’s the word I’m looking for? How is this possible? Either way I mention this all to say something to all artists out there.

You are no longer allowed to say that you are  “pregnant with an idea” or that you “gave birth to something ” EVER! [Read more]

I remember the first time I saw George Carlin. I was maybe eight years old, and was flipping though channels at my father’s house. I came across this bearded man speaking to a large crowd of young people. In my mind he was a professor and those were his students… my father being a professor at Hunter College at the time was my only point of reference for that dynamic. He seemed almost too smart to be a comic. I remember watching him & being fascinated by the way he used words and thinking what school is this? Clearly he is teaching but what is the subject? And how fun it must be to be one of his students.

He will be remembered.

He left so much good stuff to for us to marvel at.

I would’ve loved to have been able to tell him to his face how much what he had to say and how he said it meant to me.

He is one of the greats.

A good friend and amazing photographer/artist has started a blog that we will feature here from time to time. His name is shawn peters and the blog is called “Life, Love and Self”
Check out this last post called WONDERFUL for a great story about music and life.

What if I told you that i saw a game that involved a character that had dark skin with big red lips and was wearing only a grass skirt? What if I told that he also had a bone through his nose and the goal of the game was to out run a rhino? What year would you think these images from? Perhaps the turn of the century, perhaps early 40’s or 50’s.

Well folks you’d be wrong those images where from the year 2007 and the place those images were seen was on a banner ad on MYSPACE!

There’s more than one - in another, a similar character stands opposite a gorilla, with the goal of the game to push a coconut out of a tree.

If the ad were on a smaller site perhaps I could manage to be less concerned. But this site has captured the imagination of millions of people around the world and whether consciously or not they influence the perception of those people depicted. I know that these are concerns of myspace as indicated by their very detailed process of screening and the ability to report if some one is lewd, crass, offensive or otherwise insensitive. So imagine my shock when I didn’t get so much as a “we’ll look into it’ and got pretty much the same reaction when I sent the complaint to other sites whom I thought could help make my point.

The silence was deafening. Was I crazy?

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