Spocked Up

Spock says what?!?!

When my son – early irony alert! – was about three months old, he undertook a new bedtime routine that went something like this: nurse, fall asleep in my wife’s arms, get placed in crib, scream like someone just killed his puppy, and then vomit all over himself.

It was, as routines go, rather unsettling for all involved.

As first time parents, we weren’t thrilled with this routine, and so we immediately called the doctor’s office and spoke with the nurse on duty. We were told this happens with some infants, and not to worry. We asked about letting him scream in his crib – and mind you, the screaming was short-lived, maybe two or three minutes before he’d erupt - and we were told the same thing countless new parents are told: sometimes, you’ve just get to let him scream.

So we let him scream the next night, and wouldn’t you know, he vomited. Again. But since we were now veterans of this excitement, we - OK fine, my wife – got down to business. She changed him into new pajamas, placed him back down in his crib, and off to sleepy dreamtime he went.

Apparently, upchucking causes drowsiness, which is a good thing. At least he was sleeping.

But then it happened again. And again. And again.

And it was still unsettling. Something needed to be done. So we consulted the only place where baby information was plentiful and, sometimes, even correct: the Internet.

We found all sorts of tips and tricks, none of which worked. And some of the advice was just downright horrifying. One parenting Web site even advocated the following: After your tiny, helpless, beautiful bundle of joy yaks all over himself in his crib, you should let him lie in the mess until he falls asleep, and then, if the mood strikes, change him.

Who would do this? What parent could let the kid marinate in his own puke? Sounds like something out of a Nazi torture movie. I mean really – that’s the advice? Let him sit in throw up all night? The kid was three months old. Was it really time for “lessons?”

In short, nothing we found on the Internet was much help. Our pediatrician, who was quickly placed on my T-Mobile’s “five faves” list, kept saying the same thing: it will stop, soon.

After almost two weeks, we were at the breaking point. If I had a gangplank handy, I would’ve blindfolded myself, had a smoke, and jumped.

So I went to the last resort.

“Hi mom,” I said to my mom, who more or less thinks she knows everything about raising a kid, “Your grandson is still puking every night. Any advice?”

Incredibly, she didn’t have any. I really thought she would tell me something incredibly inane, like “He should always be wearing socks,” but she didn’t. She didn’t have an answer.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Check out the Spock book. See if he says anything.”

“Oh, I never had one of those books. I was going to buy one, but Dr. Scheffrin told me not to and…”

This was a lie! I know my mother had the Spock book. I remember seeing it, all the time, on top of her dresser. I remember her consulting it when my little brother came along. I remember that book. She had it. And I told her so.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Well maybe I had it. I don’t remember. But I never used it.”

“You did so!” I said. “Why are you lying to me about this?”

“I don’t think I had it,” she said. “But if I had it, I don’t have it anymore.”

“Well, do me a favor. Look for it. See if you have it. I just want to see what it says.”

Weird conversation. My mother is not, to the best of knowledge, a liar. I told my wife about the conversation, and we had a good laugh about it. I mean, why? Why would my mother lie to me about consulting the wisdom of Dr. Benjamin Spock when she was a young mother? After all, she was hardly alone. By 1972, the year after I was born, over 24 million copies of “Baby and Child Care” had been sold. A whole nation of parents was raising their children the Spock way.

Maybe, my wife wondered aloud, Spock was… a quack?

I scoffed. I was a Spock baby, despite what my mother said, and I turned out all right, right?

My loving, patient looked at me, a mixture of love and pity.

Twenty minutes later, and for $3.65 plus shipping, I ordered the same edition of the Spock book that was etched in my childhood memory. I wanted to read it, see what he had to say about child-rearing, see if we should be doing anything different with our son, see if some of my many, shall we say, idiosyncrasies could be traced back to a kindly-looking old man.

…

Three weeks later, our son had grown out of his nurse-sleep-cry-puke-sleep thing and settled into a much more pleasant nurse-sleep-sleep routine.

I had also completely forgot about the Spock book. So much for selecting the cheap-o shipping method.

But one Saturday after we returned from morning outing, the book arrived. I left it, untouched, with the rest of the mail and went upstairs to check on my Fantasy football squad.

Minutes later, my wife came into my office, book open, huge smile on her face, shaking her head.

“Listen to this,” she said. “Number 303. ‘The spoiled baby who vomits. Some babies vomit easily when enraged …’ wait, here it is … here it is. Listen to this: ‘I think it is essential that a mother harden her heart to the vomiting if her baby is using it to bully her. If she is trying to get him over a refusal to go to bed, she should stick to her program and not go in. She can clean him up later after he has gone to sleep.’”

One, and only one, thought popped into my head: I sure hope I didn’t vomit much when I was a baby.

In honor of 9/02/10 (get it? the date?)

Spock said: Inability to urinate away from home … It sometimes happens that a child around 2 has become so well trained to his own potty chair he can’t perform anywhere else.

I can’t wait for my kid to be potty trained. Right now, as I type this, he’s 16 months old, and potty training seems about as likely as rubbing two sticks together and getting fire. (What? Oh yeah. Well, whatever. I can’t get fire that way, so the simile holds. Or is a metaphor? Shit.) Anyway … as with most things I’ve encountered with Baby Boy Edelstein thus far, one day he’ll just be all bingo-bango-boingo about it and I’ll find him pissing into the toilet. Quick study and all.

And once he gets that down, I’m going to start taking him to every rest area, bar and bathhouse in a 30-mile radius to pee. You know why? Because what Spock said up there is … true.

Well, maybe true. I really don’t remember what I was doing, pee-wise, at age 2, but I do remember what I was doing pee-wise in grade school, junior high, high school and most every public place during those years: I was holding it in.

Holding it in because I could not let it rip in public. “Shy bladder” is the polite name for the affliction. “Loser dork” is the impolite, if more truthful, description.

I know you’re going to think I’m full of it, but I swear I never once went to the bathroom when I was in K-12. I simply waited until I got home.

Heaven knows what kind of permanent damage I could’ve done to my juvenile bladder.

Clearly, my parents did not do enough pee training with me as a child. Never once, for instance, did my father take me to the woods for an outdoor peeing lesson. (Oh yes. Spock recommended that too.)

Thankfully, as I got older, my loser dorkiness let up a bit, and I was virtually 100 percent successful peeing anywhere I wanted, so long as there was a door behind my ass. No door, no pee. Urinals, in general, were laughable. Urinals without those side privacy half-walls looked to me like something used to get terrorists to talk.

So the big question you’re all dying to know: What about now? Can I urinate in public areas?

I am proud to admit I can and I do, whenever the urge strikes. How did I do this? How did I break on through? No thanks to Spock or my parents. Simply put, I asked, “WWDMD?”

Yep. “What would Dylan McKay do?” The same Dylan McKay who took Brenda Walsh’s virginity. The same Dylan McKay who made out with Kelly Taylor in the pool of the Beverly Wilshire on a sultry summer evening. The same Dylan McKay who … well, anyway, I would ask myself if Dylan McKay would have a shy bladder. The answer – obviously – is no. Dylan McKay would never have a shy bladder. No chance. So armed with this knowledge, I’d sidle up to a urinal, unzip my fly … and think of Luke Perry.

After a while, I switched it to John Wayne. Seemed less … weird. It’s not really, though.

I love you mom. Not like that. Ewwww.

       Spock said: How a man gets his aspirations… at the same time he develops a strong romantic attachment to his mother and idolizes her as the feminine ideal. As such she will strongly influence his choice of a wife when he grows up.

Let me tell you exactly the moment my mother ceased to be – if she ever was – my feminine ideal.

She picked me up after school when I was in K-6. Fourth grade, I’m walking out of class, mindlessly thinking up ways to avoid Hebrew School that afternoon. I get to the Ford Country Squire faux-wood paneled station wagon (the cliché of that is too bountiful to even consider) and open the door.

I came face-to-face with a monster.

“Hi!” my mother said.

I started to cry. Not even kidding. I took one look at her, and I started to cry. She looked … horrible. Scary. Stuff of nightmares.

Why? Because she permed her hair. And not some relaxed, wavy-type situation. Nope. She took her normally-straight hair and wound it tighter than a stressed-out yo-yo.

“What did you do to your hair?” I asked, between sobs.

“You don’t like it?” she said.

“Waaa-aaaah,” I responded.

Now, it’s worth exploring why my mom’s perm affected me so. It seems to lend credence to the whole Freudian process. Was I “idealizing” my mother? Is that why it upset me so?

Honestly, I don’t think so. I’m a relatively shallow guy to begin with, and I think the reason I was so perturbed was because I was embarrassed by the way she looked. She looked decidedly un-pretty.

And I always liked the pretty girls. My first crush happened in kindergarten, and lasted all of my elementary school years. J.G. was slight, with long brown hair and brown eyes. I remember complimenting her on her legs during a date at Mr. Bruno’s pizzeria when we were 10.

My mother, on the other hand … well, she’s no J.G. Up until the perm, she had short “frosted” hair, blue eyes, and a figure that was slightly flattering in a one-piece solid-colored bathing suit.

I can say, with full candor, I was not idealizing my mother in any way. I was idealizing, in order: 1) J.G., 2) naked women in Playboy found in my neighbor’s garage, and 3) Mrs. Furia, who I did not have for second grade despite desperately wanting to have her for second grade.

My love for hot women, in other words, was apparently seeded in me long before I knew what to do with them.

(It is worth noting at this point I am not, nor have I ever been, mistaken for a “hot guy.” Never. Not once. I am, at best, “striking,” and at worst, “misshapen from nose to hips.” So my love for hot women was misguided for a long, long – long – time.)

All this seemingly disparate information leads to my wife. She is a green-eyed beauty who looks as Irish as her name.

My mother has blue eyes and looks Russian, for lack of a better comparison.

My wife does not speak in questions.

My mother does. (“I had a tuna sandwich for lunch today?” is the way my mother makes a statement.)

I did not, in any way, marry my mother. Nope. Not in one single way.

Except for a few small details.

My mom is the keeper of the extended family flame. She’s the one who brings all the cousins together for Passover, for instance. Family is of supreme importance to my mother.

My wife, who’s nuclear family is a scattershot mess, is also crazy about family. She’s the one who makes sure Thanksgiving is a huge affair, with distant relatives given the call to come over, if only for dessert.

My mom is big on helping people out. She’s got a big heart. She’s not one for faceless charity; when she donates clothes, for instance, she knocks on the door of the recipient. Class and status do not ring true to my mother.

My wife is a helper as well. I could list it all, but it’s just bragging. Let’s just say no one who needs goes without when my wife is around.

My mom has two ways of doing things, both annoying: her way and no way.

My wife has one way of doing things, also annoying: her way.

My mother is going to be slightly infuriated, but proud when she reads about this.

My wife is going to be enraged that I’m comparing her to her mother-in-law.

I’m treading dangerous water here.

Bottom line is while I did not, in any way, idealize my mother, there is a small part of me that probably – and unconsciously – sought out a woman who has some of my mother’s better qualities.

Let’s just leave it at that.

I think he used a copy of “Smokey and The Bandit”

Spock said: Sex education starts early whether you plan it or not.

I grew up in a “if it’s yellow let it mellow” household, which is fine, except for the fact I was petrified to piss in a toilet after my mother used it, because I was under the (presumably) false impression I would make a baby with my mother that way.

I was slightly confused as a child.

I suppose my parents, at one point, informed me of the basics of “where a baby comes from.” And when I say “basics,” I mean “good-natured, but impossibly wrong” information. I only wish I can remember the conversation that led me down the path to believe babies are formed by not flushing the commode.

Actually, it’s probably better I don’t know.

I do know, however, exactly how I found out the real way babies are made.

I was about 10 or 11, and had a pretty good idea, truth be told. I didn’t know the particulars, but I knew the general idea.

My father was under the false impression I knew nothing.

So one night, in what I can only imagine was a divine spark on father’s part, he called me into the den.

There were some uncomfortable moments, a few diversions, a handful of nervous silences.

In the end, and thanks to modern technology, I was now the proud owner of Birds and Bees, Inc.

He demonstrated the process by using a VCR tape player as the female and a VCR tape as the male.

“It fits exactly like that,” he told me. “And because it fits like that, it doesn’t hurt.”

Not one bit, as it turns out. More or less.

Today, thanks to TiVo, I’m going to have to come up with my own way to teach my son. Perhaps USB ports and memory sticks will serve as his touchstone.

Stuffing my underpants full of naked women and getting punished for it

Spock said: Is punishment necessary? The only sensible answer is that a great majority of good parents feel they have to punish once in a while.

Spock was pretty clear on this issue: punishments are not really necessary, but helpful in certain cases when no matter how firm you are, the child still doesn’t listen.

I did not listen as a child.

As such, here is a highlighted list of the most common, and best remembered, punishments doled out to me as a kid…

No more pretend electric saw: It was my favorite toy, a rubberized plastic saw that when you pulled the string and pressed the button, the saw part vibrated like a real electric saw. I loved this thing, and I suppose that’s why it was, to the best of my memory, the first punishment I received. I remember my dad took it from me and placed it high up in his closet. A week without the saw, he said.

I am 97 percent certain my lack of “handy” skills today stems directly from that punishment. Clearly, I’ve equated manual labor with bad behavior. Seems like a good excuse, anyway.

No television: This was the clear-cut go-to punishment for my parents. I did something wrong, I would not be allowed to watch TV for a prescribed amount of time, usually a week. As a result, there were months when I didn’t witness a single Bugs Bunny cartoon. Hell, I think I missed the entire 1978-79 television season.

No newspaper: With this punishment, it would seem my parents were just acting like paranoid Communist leaders. They didn’t want me to get the news, right? Didn’t want me to know what was going on in the outside world, where other children were enjoying freedoms I didn’t have, right?

Not quite.

The “no newspaper” punishment would usually come on the heels of the “no television” punishment, and would leave me without knowledge of what was happening in the sports world. Every morning from the time I was seven, I’d grab the sports section, plop down on the floor outside the kitchen, and read every story, every boxscore. I was nuts for it. I’d also watch the sports report every night on the local news.

So when TV was taken away, I’d have no way to find out what happened in sports besides the newspaper. And when the newspaper was taken away… well, the 30-second reports on the news radio were not satisfying my desires.

Of course, my father, a newspaper reader himself, wouldn’t simply throw out the morning paper after it arrived. Nope. He’d hide it, and read it later.

One day, I found the hiding spot. It was underneath a chair cushion in the living room, which led to the most creative punishment I ever received…

No living room: Yep. Banned from the living room, which was just flat-out mean as it always coincided with, and was part of, the “no newspaper” punishment. I’d see my father drop the paper on the chair, and there was nothing I could do about. I was persona non grata as far as the living room was concerned.

No radio: This happened once. I had no sports information for a week. Honestly, I can’t believe I survived.

No more going across the street: I used to hang out with the kid across the street. His parents were stereotypical swinging 70s parents. I remember ringing the doorbell once and his mom – who was not too shabby - answered with the shortest of towels wrapped around her nude body. (“Why couldn’t this have happened 10 years later?” I found myself wondering 10 – and 20, and 30 - years later.)

At any rate, me and the kid used to hang out, throw rocks at each other, look at each other penises, typical suburban hijinks.

One day – I was seven – we discovered a cache of his dad’s Playboys in the garage.

Again, I was seven, and while I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with this find, I was sure something should be done.

So we held a draft of sorts, going through the issues and “picking” pictures of naked women, taking turns.

And after we’d pick the picture, we’d carefully rip it out and place it in our pile.

Later that day, I went home with a underpants-filled collection of naked women. I knew I had to hide these from my parents, though I didn’t know exactly why.

Thinking quickly, I gently placed them all in my Superheroes Hall of Justice Play Set. 

Dig it – about 20 naked women (including one woman who stands out, still to this day, a blonde woman with straight, short-ish hair lying naked atop a white fur coat) now joined Superman, Batman, and the rest of the DC Comics world.

Everything was fine, I figured. No way my parents would play with my Hall of Justice and find my lovelies.

That is, until the day my two-year-old brother was introduced to the Hall of Justice.

And I was there. I saw the whole thing happen. I saw my mother go into the closet to get the play set. I panicked. The jig was up. And when she opened it up and was showered with naked lady parts, I felt… like I needed to deny everything.

That lasted for about a minute until I told her where I got them from, and, as a result, me and the kid across the street had to chuck rocks at each other from a much further distance for the rest of our childhoods.

And while this has got nothing to do with nothing, I’ve got to tell you: I’d love to come across my naked blonde fur lady today. Just to see if my tastes changed, you understand.

And oh yes - I plan on punishing the hell out of my kid should he ever do something stupid.

I can just imagine what would have happened to the Millennium Falcon

Spock said: A father should share in discipline… the boys pays the price of his misbehavior, learns that though it isn’t pleasant it isn’t fatal either, and the air is cleared.

It was the words I hated hearing the most as a kid: “Wait until your father gets home.”

Don’t ask me what I would do to deserve my mother threatening me like that – most of my bad behavior has been lost to time – but there were usually some regular, you-can-bet-mom-will-break-out-the-“wait until your father gets home” incidents.

Most of them usually surrounded things I would do to my younger (by five years) brother. Cutting his hair, for instance, when he was two, or maybe locking him in the house - with my mother and I outside - while he was asleep in his carriage. Those certainly qualified as Grade A1 offenses.

And when my mother, who rarely, if ever, did the punishing herself, would lay down the Daddy gauntlet, I would go into controlled, lawyerly tactics.

“Please don’t tell Daddy,” I would plead. “I promise I won’t (cut his hair, lock him in the house, dangle him like Blanket Jackson out the window) ever again. I’m sorry! Please don’t tell Daddy!”

She would not back down, though. In fact, she’d up the ante by repeating her plans to tell my father what a little shit I was.

At this point, I’d go into your basic, run of the mill hysterics, repeating over and over again, while sobbing and throwing myself on the floor, to “pleasedon’ttellDaddypleasedon’ttellDAAAAAAADY!”

It could not have been a pretty sight.

But she’d just repeat the threat again, and after a while, beaten, I’d sulk back to my room and wait for it.

I knew what would be coming, more or less. Most of the time, my father would get home, get the dossier on my misdeeds, and the punishments would come down (see some future post for details on the count). But invariably, they would be of the “taking away” variety of punishment. No more Bert and Ernie puppets for a week, for instance.

One time, however, I told my mother – and I’m paraphrasing here – that I wished she would die. I was six. And what, you ask, did my mother do to elicit such a demand from her son? Who knows. She probably didn’t cut my crusts off or something. From there, we went through the whole “wait until your father gets home” mambo, and after a few hours (and being that I was six years old) I more or less forgot about the whole sordid affair.

So when my father got home that evening, I was in my room, playing with my “Star Wars” action figures and the Death Star Space Station. For those who don’t remember, go run to eBay or something and look it up. The Death Star Space Station was, without question, the coolest bit of “Star Wars” toy ever created. Sure, some might argue the Millennium Falcon was cooler, but for my money, give me the Dark Side any day. I got the Death Star as a Chanukah gift that year, and I loved the thing. It had the trash compactor!

So there I was, with Darth and the gang, when my dad walked in.

Now understand this: my father had never laid a hand on me in his life. To me, my dad was a pretty great guy. Even when he would punish me – and when he walked in that night, I knew a punishment was coming – he did it with grace and equanimity. It seemed like the punishments he doled out weren’t some half-baked idea of discipline; they seemed to come down from the heavens, fully formed and ready to be laid down upon me like Biblical law. I was confident that when I did something “bad,” I would get the correct punishment. Like there was a handbook or something.

I was pretty much expecting the standard “no TV for a week” punishment.

What I got was something wholly unexpected.

He tore into me. Lashed out. Screamed at me like I never heard him scream before, and that’s mostly because I had never heard him scream before.

“What did you say to your mother?” he asked me, twice, standing over me as I sat with my action figures.

“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t.”

From that conversational bon mot, things went downhill quickly. He screamed at me for what I said to my mother, and I kept denying it. And I started to shimmy backwards. The guy was on top of me. Personal space was being violated. I found out I didn’t much care for the screaming, even less so when it was happening inches away from my face.

I was scared, in other words.

And then he did something I couldn’t believe. He proceeded to go all Luke Skywalker on the Death Star. He kicked it, stomped it, chased it down, and threw it against the wall. The Death Star was destroyed. And sitting there, I realized this was not some pre-ordained punishment. This was spur of the moment, total loss of cool, absolute shit-kicking.

If I was scared before, I was now petrified. This was like nothing I had ever experienced.

He stormed out of the room.

I don’t remember the rest of that evening, but I do know I never asked for a “Star Wars” toy set again. Some action figures here and there, but that was it. Never wanted to even revisit the idea again.

For what it’s worth, whenever I bring this story up to my dad, he cringes. He wishes he could take it back.

Does Target sell bedding for drawers?

Spock said: A place to sleep… a crib, a clothes or market basket, a box or bureau drawer will do.

It should be noted, right off the bat, that my father, Larry Edelstein, slept in a bureau drawer. At least that’s what he’s always told me.

“Is it really true?” I asked him. “Nana put you in a drawer?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I slept in a bottom drawer somewhere, for a short time.”

“Why?

“I have no idea.”

“Do you think it affected you as an adult?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Dad said. “It’s not like they closed the drawer or anything.”

You ask me, just the fact he came up with the “it’s not like they closed the drawer” statement means to me it did have some effect. A fear of confined spaces, perhaps. Dislike of non-cushioned walls? Who knows.

But despite my dad’s seemingly normal adult life, I can say, with full honestly, I never considered placing my newborn son in a drawer, nor a basket. Nope. This 21^st century guy insisted – insisted! – on a crib.

And I’m here to tell you the crib – along with the glider and the clearly marked “CLOTHES ONLY” set of drawers – are the most expensive pieces of furniture in our home. Everything else we own comes from Ikea. Everything.

But our baby boy’s set-up? Babies ‘R’ Us all the way. And it’s sweet, especially the crib. White. Gently curving lines. Nice round things. A real beaut.

The crib, I also noticed, is something that always gets discussed. You are certainly being judged when someone takes a gander at what piece of overpriced, factory-made sleep set-up you’ve bought for someone who will have approximately zero memory of it.

Maybe Spock wasn’t so far off. Box, bed, crib, whatever.

Can you imagine, though? Putting your kid in a box today? Youth and Family Services would be on you quicker than you can say, “But Dr. Spock says…”

Smashing my head against the floor, literally

Spock said: Keep him busy and polite (when sick)… If you are buying him new playthings, look for the ones that make him do all the work… toys that are merely beautiful possessions quickly pall and only whet his appetite for more presents.

Our son was barely two months old when he had his first ear infection. Of course, we had no way of knowing he had an ear infection, and the only reason we even brought him to the doctor is because he more or less stopped eating.

Makes sense, after the fact, that the sucking motion would aggravate the ear.

Anyway, we get him home, and I tell my wife I’m going out to get him a present. This was a reflexive move; when I was sick as a kid, my parents would get me presents.

“Why would you get him a present?” she asked.

“He’s sick,” I said, as if I was telling her the sky was blue.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why would we reward him for being sick? It’s not like he got good grades or something. He’s sick. You don’t ‘deserve’ a present when you’re sick. Besides, think of what that’s going to do.”

I didn’t get it.

“Every time he gets sick, he gets a present,” she explained. “OK fine. But don’t you think he’ll catch on after a while? Don’t you think he might pretend to be sick just to get a present?”

And that’s when I remembered the headaches I would give myself as a kid.

See, when I was sick, I not only got to stay home from school, but I would also get those presents. Baseball cards. “Star Wars” toys. Legos. Whatever I happened to be into at that moment, I would know that when my dad got home, he’d give me something he picked up during the day.

As it turns out, I was sick a lot as a kid. Didn’t take much to convince my mom I needed to stay home from school. In fact, for the most part, simply saying, “I don’t feel good” would do the trick.

But after a day, if I didn’t have a fever or any other obvious forms of illness, it was back to school.

How did I combat this gambit on my mother’s part? Simple: I’d give myself a fever. I had a foolproof plan, by the way, and I’ll share it with you now.

When no one was looking, I would get down on all fours and violently smash my head against the floor, thereby giving myself a nasty headache. And as everyone knows, if you have a headache, you have a fever. Ipso facto and all.

Obviously, this did not work, and the first time it failed, I merely surmised I failed to give myself enough of a headache.

The next time I tried it, I placed my “Sports Encyclopedia” on the floor where my head would meet it. A much harder surface than the carpet, thereby a much bigger headache, thereby a guaranteed fever.

After a few good bangs, I was good and headached up. I did such a good job, the bridge of nose was also killing me, and, in the effort, I also accidentally bit my lower lip. I got nervous, thinking I’d break the 105-degree barrier and my parents would have to take me to the hospital.

“Normal,” my mother said, looking at the thermometer. “Get dressed for school.”

I’d like to say I put two and two together at this point, but I didn’t. I tried out the head smashing method numerous other times before I was wise enough to realize I was an idiot.

That said, I loved being sick as a kid. Loved it. Sore throat? Bring it on. Sour stomach? Vomit away. Even a real live high fever did little to disrupt my joy. I’d stay in bed, eat chicken soup, watch game shows, and count the minutes until my daily present arrived.

And if I’m being honest, I’m the same way today. While I don’t purposely injure myself in hopes of getting sick and securing a pack of baseball cards, I still hope of securing a pack of baseball cards when I’m ill.

I mean, I’m sick! Can’t someone get me a present?

And all this brought me back to sonny boy and his ear infection. I didn’t want him to ever look forward to getting sick. That’s twisted. But I wasn’t swayed. I mean, the poor guy had an ear infection! At two months!

“Can’t I just get him something?” I asked my wife.

“No,” she said.

Next day, I happened to be in Target and I got him a grabby ball with a bell in it. Not because he was sick. Just because.

It’s just a little extra skin(!)

      245: Circumcision… I think circumcision is a good idea, especially if most of the boys in the neighborhood are circumcised – then a boy feels “regular.”

Back in my high school days, the quarterback of the football team was out of central casting. Handsome, athletic and dating a cheerleader. A very popular kid, in other words. And while I don’t know how much adolescent psychological scarring can occur when you’re at the top of the high school mountain, I do know this: the kid was born in Germany and was uncircumcised. (Why the “Germany” part of the equation was married to the “uncircumcised” part, I will never know. But it was. I guess we were under the impression Germans don’t go in for the circumcision.)

Anyway, he was teased just about every day in the locker room as a result.

Now something you need to know about myself and my lovely wife – the odds of our union yielding a high school quarterback are negligible. While I never embarrassed myself on the field of sport, I’d say I pretty much played up to my name, clichés be damned. “Jeff Edelstein” is a name that simply does not imply athletic greatness. And my wife is about as athletic as a tree sloth.

In other words, our son was getting circumcised.

You see the logic here, right? If the high school quarterback was getting the business for having a as-nature-created appendage, heaven knows what happens to the kid on the robot-building team.

Of course, I realize high school popularity concerns are just about the worst consideration when you’re deciding what to do with your days-old infant’s penis, but such is the world we live in.

So that was the major reason we decided in favor of modern look for males.

Another reason – and no clichés here – had to do with my last name. I am Jewish, though I am not a practicing Jew. Culturally, sure, I’m Jewish, and I identify as such. I’m a Jew like someone is an Italian. That said, I do stand up for my fellow members of the tribe, and do my best to, at the very least, become invisible during the high holy days. I’m a Sandy Koufax Jew; I don’t go to temple on the high holidays, but I observe in my own way, usually by catching up on my DVR.

I suppose you can say I retired after my Bar Mitzvah.

My wife? Well, her middle name is “Kristine.” Not Jewish, in other words. So circumcision was not something that “had” to be done, as far as she was concerned. She was thinking more along the lines of not wanting our son to be different.

All that said, in the days before our son’s birth, we talked about not circumcising him, mostly because we both found ourselves in the “it seems barbaric” camp. The reason we’re in that camp is because – news flash! – it’s barbaric. Hitting-your-mate-over-the-head-and-drag-back-to-the-cave barbaric. Some old desert religion says you’ve got do this horrible thing, and everyone shrugs their shoulders and goes along? I mean, you’ve got to figure nature – or God, what have you – knew what was what when the whole “creating” thing went down. If us men were supposed to be circumcised, we’d come barreling out of the womb that way, right?

But we relented. Didn’t want the kid to get teased. We bowed to social pressure. As it turns out, we bowed to Spock, without even knowing it.

And let me tell you – after witnessing the effects of a circumcision first-hand, it is barbaric. Without getting too graphic, it looks like… well, it looks like a large piece of skin was ripped off a very tender part of the body. It takes over a week to heal, and it’s not pretty. And it’s clearly painful. It’s just wrong. No two ways about it.

And the Jewish way of doing it? The covenant with God stuff? Eight days after birth? And with the whole family lingering about?

That’s even worse, I’d imagine.

See, while Kelly was down with the whole “snip it off” scene, she was not down with the idea of a traditional “bris.”

She was very clear on this point.

“There is no way your aunts are going to be eating whitefish in my living room while some guy cuts off my son’s foreskin,” was her exact words.

Hard to argue with that logic. Impossible, in fact. So I immediately relented on the idea of a bris.

This, however, was going to cause a problem. While I’m not a practicing Jew, my father is. As was his father, and his father, blah blah blah. And it’s safe to say that every Edelstein male, from Moses Edelstein on down, had it done the old-fashioned way. Invite a high-priced mohel into your home, schmear a little Manischewitz on the kid’s lips as an anesthetic, and break out the whitefish.

Explaining to my father that I was about to break with thousands of years of tradition was not going to be easy. Or so I thought.

But my dad, being the 21^st century guy he is, surprised me. He understood the position I was in and offered up a compromise that would make everyone happy.

“You have to do what you think you have to do,” he said. “But can you at least have a Jewish doctor do it?”

 So that’s what we did. My wife’s OB/GYN just happened to be Jewish – or at least that’s what I was told – and the day after Ben’s birth, he came into the hospital room, and with zero fanfare or whitefish, took Ben away for five minutes and then came back and told us it was done.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it,” he said.

My son, the quarterback.

Pump it up. Well, out. Pump it out.

Spock said: 148: Manual expression or breast pumps are used to obtain milk for the baby when he cannot or will not nurse at the breast…

It was 7 a.m., and we were pulling into airport parking for a vacation to Jamaica. (Quick aside: Traveling with a four-month old is a breeze. Not kidding. Highly recommended.) I get my ticket, proceed to the nearest parking space, and turn the ignition off.

“I forgot all the pieces to my breast pump,” my wife tells me.

She remembered to pack the actual mechanism, but forgot all the parts. An equivalent would be like owning a car, but being short an engine and a steering wheel.

“What are we going to do?” I asked, in a manner that could best be described as high agitation.

“We have to go back home and get it,” she said.

Our flight was at 10 a.m. We drove back home, it would be 8 a.m. Back to the airport, in rush hour traffic, it would be pushing 9:30 a.m. Not happening.

To the uninitiated, this may seem like a trifling problem. Worst-case scenario, our son nurses for a week, and if my wife’s breasts became too full, she could simply “manually express.” I’d even lend a hand. What was the big deal?

The big deal, apparently, was she was concerned her milk production would go down if she didn’t pump. Apparently, breasts are like 19^th century factory workers. Got to stay on top them and force them to work 18-hour days, lest they get lazy on you and start quoting Charles Dickens.

And while the above metaphor lacks a certain visceral quality, trust me on this: there was a lot of fear and uncertainty for a few moments at the old U-Park.

My wife thought quick, and got dialed up the nearest Wal-Mart. We sped over there, she ran in and bought herself a new breast pump, and the vacation is saved.

“This breast pump sucks,” she said, 12 hours later in our hotel room.

“Ha!” I said. “A pun!”

She was not amused. What took her 10 minutes or so with her high-end, fancy pants breast pump at home was taking a lot longer with her bargain-basement model.

And while our vacation was a rousing success, not a breast pump session passed without my wife thinking about the one she left at home. These were wistful moments, ladies and gentlemen.

A woman and her breast pump are not to be separated. It’s… unnatural.

Let’s just get this spinach thing out of the way

Spock said: Vegetables… spinach causes chapping of the lips and around the anus in some babies.

Perhaps this is why Popeye was always so irritable… imagine the “Suzy Chapstick” commercial opportunities… and this is why they stopped serving spinach salad at hardcore porn shoots… I can go on, but in the interest of propriety, I will cease.

Let it be said, however, that spinach is off the menu in the Edelstein household. Some things, I’m just going to take Spock at his word. Seems prudent in this case.

No LSD while breastfeeding, please

Spock said: The mother can lead a normal life… there is no evidence that it will harm the baby if the mother drinks coffee or tea, smokes, uses alcoholic beverages in moderation, or goes in for athletics.

Well, without having to run any double-blind experiments, I can tell you this: Today, if a woman was to sit on a park bench, suck down a Marlboro Light and breastfeed her child in the same motion, our nation may very well collapse into chaos. Things would go haywire. Nancy Grace would pop a vein.

I don’t know this from firsthand experience, as my wife does not smoke. She frowns upon it, so much so she gets somewhat violent when she smells the once-in-while ciggie wafting off of me.

That said, she will have a cup of coffee in the morning, and while the idea of “going in for athletics” conjures up images of firmness and fitness, all it does for her is conjure up images of 2^nd grade kickball, when she was teased for not being able to get the hang of meeting a bouncing red ball with her corrective shoed-feet. She’s not “going for athletics” anytime soon.

In other words, I had no worries about our kid when it comes to my wife’s nicotine, caffeine, or kickball habits. He could have as much breast milk as he wanted.

But I knew there would be a little issue with the booze, as my better half does enjoy a drink or three now and again.

I didn’t think she’d be guzzling Stoli while breastfeeding, mind you, but throughout her pregnancy – which she did without a sip of alcohol - she made a point to say things like, “I can’t wait to have a glass of wine” or “I’d really like to get wasted.”

What was funny/sad is that she didn’t think she’d miss drinking one bit. 

As it turns out, she missed it a great deal, specifically on the occasions when I would knock back a few pops, which seemed to occur with 24-hour, cycle-like regularity.

“You know, it would be nice if you didn’t drink so much,” she would say. “Solidarity and all.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I’d say, as it’s tough to speak with a throatful of Cabernet in your gullet.

So once our baby was born, my wife was somewhat eager to get back to our wine with dinner, and after dinner, and, “hey, why not, it’s 4 p.m., let’s have one before dinner” ways.

But as a breastfeeder, there were concerns. Our pediatrician, echoing Dr. Spock, said a glass or two is fine.

My wife, not wanting to accidentally endrunken our son, needed a larger security blanket than “it’s fine.”

And we found it, in the “trashy mom” aisle of Babies ‘R’ Us, The store sells something only a genius could concoct: Milkscreen Disposable Breastmilk Home Test Strips. Simply put, you if you drink alcohol and want to nurse, you squeeze out a dollop of milk on the test strip and await results. If it the results are in the “tan” family, it’s all right to offer the breast without fear. If, however, it turns a moldy black color, it’s best to hold off before you turn your child into a mini-Winston Churchill, both in visage and blood-alcohol content.

Interestingly enough, Spock did not stop with booze and smokes. Oh no. He went on to say that it’s just fine to nurse your baby while under the influence of “barbiturates, codeine, (or) morphine.” As it turns out, not so much on those counts. He did caution against taking ergot while breastfeeding. Ergot, for those not up on their fungi facts, contains ergotamine, which is used in the production of LSD.

So, to be clear: Spock says breastfeeding while tripping on acid is not to be done. Now that’s some rock-solid advice.