Driven to Drink Poetry

Nothing is safe.

The other day I found Arthur. He was hanging by his fingertips from the table. He had pulled himself up using a chair and from there it was just a short stretch to the table. The only trouble was, he couldn't figure out how to get down. So there he hung until I helped him.

The table incident gave me a new understanding. I understand why your parents want you to push chairs in when you're finished with them. I understand why parents pick up things off of the floor and vacuum a lot. And I think I understand how it is that the parents who achieve satori are able to make a sandwich and end the motion with a sponge swipe across the counter.

If they don't, they'll have some interesting explanations to make to the doctor (or at least some large bills).

Cat safety.

Something has happened to Muriel. First some background. Several years ago, Muriel developed a lump. We called her "Lumpina." Before we took her to the vet, Mark was examining the lump, which was on her back leg. He did something she didn't like because she reared up on her hind legs, batted at his hands with her claws, bit him, made eye contact, and bit him again.

When we took Lumpina to the vet, we heard strange noises in the back examining room, after which Dr. Ron rushed back into the waiting room and said, "Um, Muriel is giving us a little attitude about her lump, so we're going to sedate her."

So, some sort of miracle of personality has happened. Last night, Arthur decided it would be great fun to measure the mass of Muriel's tail by squeezing it in his little viselike fist and shaking it back and forth. Muriel turned to shred him to ribbons, saw who it was, and stopped. Anyone else would have been left with a bloody stump. I'm not making this up; there were witnesses.

She still insists on sleeping on our heads and using her powers of gravity control for Evil, though.

Where's Dad?

Arthur has a new game (OK, he's been playing this one for a couple of weeks). If you give him a blanket, point at him and say, "There's Arthur!" three out of five times he'll pull the blanket over his head and wait (sort of) for you to ask, "Where's Arthur?" If you put the blanket over your head and ask, "Where's Dad?" he'll pull the blanket off your face.

The down side of Arthur's object permanence is that he gets mad if you take something away from him (like a stick or dead leaf that someone tracked in on the newly vacuumed floor). He also gets made at the baby gate. Mark says he scowls (I'm waiting for the comparison).

But is it art?

OK. Although it goes against my resolutions of what kind of person I would become when I became a parent... apparently an earlier poem I wrote and shared was intensely popular. It wasn't a poem when I wrote it, exactly; it was more like a cry for help. Thankfully, Mark recognized it for what it was and came home after a visit to the liquor store. I give it to you here, with a new title.

Tribute to a Young Judith Viorst (Bring Tequila)

Arthur.
Clever fingers.
Undone diaper.
Loose fecal matter.
New rival for Mother of God on our rug.
Unwholesome snack.
Baby prison.
Call FEMA.
Bring tequila.

One critic even went so far as to suggest that my poetry was improving. Oh well; you take complements where ever you can.

Notes from the Revolution

We're ready for the revolution. We've just come back from a weekend staying with my folks in central Oregon and they had some toilet paper they didn't need. A lot. The collection of rolls is larger than a child. Of course it's in a plastic bag Arthur wants to play with.

While we were staying with them, I drank too much English Breakfast tea. As I lay quivering in my bed, I dreamt I time-travelled back to 1920 London where I found an old abandoned chapel that had been used by Black Magicians. It was surrounded by a marshy fen. The Magicians had thrown a lot of rings into the fen, and the folks I was with kept finding the rings in the swamp. Then there was the dream the next night later where Mark and I transformed ourselves into owls and were flying over the skies of Eugene. Thank goodness for home, where I returned to the usual dream of finding a secret star base in the Star Trek universe.

Arthur is still on the cusp of crawling. He does a lot of the zombie-crawl, but occasionally he'll go up on his hands and knees. Usually when he wants something, like a deadly wisteria pod, to put into his mouth.

My folks have a cable feed, so I got to watch more of the Discovery Channel. There, I learned you can start a fire with

• ice carved into a lens
• a highly polished soda can bottom
• a battery and steel wool

I also learned that you can make weapons out of a surprising range of everyday household items, and that if you're famous enough you can be filmed trying to capture your own farts underwater (if only I had been famous back in 1974). I suppose it's a good thing for Arthur that we don't have a TV at home.

Arthur visited his first wading pool. He really likes water. He can sort of swim, but he doesn't realize he needs to kick while he paddles his arms. I'm also not quite sure he knows all the differences between breathing water and air.

In writing news; I just got word that I made Quarter Finalist in Writers of the Future for a story about a werewolf and a nun. It means that the story made the top 10-15% of all the stories submitted, so I'm guessing that it was somewhere in the top 500 stories. My next Writers of the Future submission (due in four days) is about virginal alien bugs. I waiting to hear from Polyphony about the Colossus of Rhodes, a fantasy story set in an alternate history earth. If that gets rejected, then I'll need to evaluate how I'm going about my writing career -- I keep getting all these near misses, which means my writing isn't good enough or else my marketing isn't. Or both.

Ah well. Back to editing.

Safety is White

This morning, Mark saw Arthur crawl into the bathroom and pull himself up on the side of the bathtub.

So Mark went to Jerry's and now I am looking at a Safety 1st Cover Clamp Toilet Lock. It's sitting in its packaging on my desk. The picture shows a white man's hand locking down a white toilet set on a white toilet with a white plastic lock. We own a piece of plastic that will show up every speck of dirt and we're supposed to lock it on our toilet. Couldn't they have at least made the lock black?

The warning on the box says, "Never leave a child unattended in the bathroom. This product is only a deterrent. It is not a substitute for proper adult supervision. Discontinue use when child becomes old enough to defeat it." This warning sounds like something that should come with internet connections. Luckily, the toilet lock *doesn't* come with an internet connection.

Supposedly our new toilet lock is easy for adults to use. I'll bet the same people who designed childproof caps for medicine are the same people who designed the Toilet Lock. When I was a child, I used to open my folk's childproof medicine containers for them. Arthur sleeps through the night, and I don't want to have to wake him up at 4 in the morning just so I can pee. Maybe that internet connection wouldn't be such a bad thing after all. As long as it doesn't come with a web cam.

If I were designing a lock, I'd simply embed electromagnets into the bowl and lid. That way you could switch the lock on or off and nothing white would have to be cleaned. Hmmm. Electricity in the toilet bowl; probably a bad idea. Oh well. ("Oh, they make those," says Mark. "But they're more expensive.")

Mark also got a bunch of locks for the kitchen cabinets. And the 'fridge. We're supposed to leave one cabinet unlocked as the "fun cabinet." I guess we'll put all our plastic storage bins there so Arthur can have a tupperware party. All of our cabinets connect, so I'm not sure how we're supposed to have only one be the fun cabinet. Also, I'm pretty sure the cabinets contain secret passages to the insides of the kitchen walls. I know Jerry's makes stud finders, but I don't think there's such a thing as a baby finder. Maybe we can get a web cam for the insides of the walls.

On a completely different subject, when we went for a walk on the Willamette River this morning, we're pretty sure that we saw a juvenile bald eagle. It sat in a tree for a very long time. Mark thought it looked a little mechanical, and hypothesized that it was actually a spying device so the government could keep an eye on the antiwar protest happening in Eugene.

That's it; we can get a mechanical bald eagle to train a web cam on Arthur's every move. There must be a metaphor in there, somewhere.

Raising The Bar

Arthur wanted something this morning at scary reading hour. So he crawled. At first it didn't register that he had done it and I had to ask the other mothers present, "Did he just crawl?"

Later today we were sitting on the couch and Muriel jumped up on it and over to the table where we've put her food. Supposedly moving her food and water dishes up on the table behind the couch will keep Arthur from choking on cat food. As soon as he saw the cat, he entwined his fingers in the goatskin throw on the back of the couch and pulled himself to a stand. If he could have gotten a purchase with his feet, he would have been over the couch in an instant. I'm not sure which impulse would have won out -- to try to twist the cat's ear off or eat her food.

Still later, I was sitting on the step to our kitchen with Arthur. The permanent ladder up to the writing loft is there. Arthur's clever little hands grasped the lowest most rung and I could hear the wheels in his brain whirling. If he gets up into the loft, we'll have to find a new place for the sharp and pointy fish table which used to live next to the couch. Oh, yeah; and install a parachute Automatic Activation Device in all his clothes so when he falls out of the loft an emergency crash balloon inflates. It's either that or Mark will want to do something like take a chainsaw to the house and remove all the lofts...

And he can't even walk yet.

Arthur's First Nine Months

The weekend started with me making a request to a radio station. Friday night, there's a show called "Groove Cycles," they play disco and dance from the seventies and eighties. I asked for Donna Summer's cover of Knock on Wood. This song should have been Clue Number Three That I'm Gay, because I really liked it when it first came out and I wasn't sure why.

Anyway, so Arthur is happily crawling on floor, Mark comes home, the DJ's announce they're playing requested songs, and Knock on Wood starts playing.

"Ugh," says Mark. "I can't believe somebody requested this song."

I laugh. Mark then goes on to construct some imaginary dialog surrounding the type of person who might like the song. I finally inform him that it was me before he gets too far, and go back to grooving to Donna.

---

Saturday was Arthur's Nine Month Birthday.

Saturday was also Archeology Day. We (collectively) saw three movies on Archeology. Arthur mostly slept through "Voyages of the Vikings." The most interesting thing about that movie was the information that "Viking" boats flexed. Mark watched "Secrets of the Karakomb," which he said was well put together. I watched the tail end of a depressing film on forensic science, and a film on the Nabateans (the folks who carved the city of Petra (AKA the shrine where Indiana Jones found the Grail)). While I liked the cliff tomb carvings, I found the networked system of water trenches supplying the city cisterns really cool.

We decided that although the information was interesting, most archaeology movies are a bit dull.

---

Some time during the movies, I got a message on my cell phone. When I played it back, a high pitched, disembodied voice sang back to me. "A B C D E F G..."

I looked at the phone message log, found the number that had left the message, and hit the send button on the cell phone. After a few short rings, my Dad's voice answered. "Hello?

"Elmo knows where you live," I said.

My Dad simply giggled and said that he was going to leave a message for me every day.

I don't know why people don't understand my aversion to toys that speak. Have you ever been alone in a house at night and heard a disembodied child's voice, almost a ghost's voice, start to sing? It's creepy.

It's enough to make you ditch an electronic voice box underneath the cushions of your parents' sofa.

---

Sunday we went to the coast. We stopped at the Sea Lion Caves parking lot and watched (probably) gray whales spouting. I'm not sure what Arthur thought of the whales, as he was sort of watching the other people around us more.

Then we went to the Oregon Aquarium. I'm not sure if Arthur's favorite thing at the aquarium were the sea lions and harbor seals or the gift shop. He imitated some of the birds sharing the aviary with the puffins. He sort of couldn't see the otters, and he fell asleep in the Plexiglas shark tunnel.

---

Arthur visited the doctor today for his nine month checkup.
His head circumference is 18.5 inches
His height is 29.5 inches
His weight is 22 pounds (I could have sworn he was 25; he certainly feels that heavy).

The best thing about the doctor's visit is that Arthur's doing well. The coolest thing was that the doctor managed to pull out a long strand of ear wax out of Arthur's ear. Apparently, he has a minor ear infection, which you wouldn't know if you spent any time with him.

Probably the most scary thing is that we're cleared for "fork mashed" solid food. Sigh. I guess it's time to coat the house in plastic and get a dog.

Happy Belated Valentines

See. February wasn't all doom and gloom. We did have our annual Anti-Valentine's Day Party.

Here we go

OK. Here's one of the latest pictures of Arthur.

Arthur has four teeth. Judging by the amount of drool that sometimes comes out of his mouth, I'd say there's more on the way. If he starts to take very long naps I will become suspicious that a painful visit from the Tooth Fairy is around the corner.

He's developed object permanence, and the attendant squeal when we take something dangerous away from him. Like our shoes. Or electrical cords. Or the cat. For a while I thought Arthur might be able to say "cat" and sign it. Instead, he's figured out how to put his fingers to his lips and say B-b-b-b-b-b.

He might be able to say "Hi Dad," except that this seems to be a variation on his earlier avataristic utterances of Hebrew.

Mark has constructed a clever little screen to keep Arthur from crawling up to the baseboard heaters. It's a cardboard box with fabric glued to the front in a lovely little pastoral scene. It keeps the electrical cords for the computer and the baseboard out of site.

And the cat likes to hid behind it.

Houston? We have a signal...

Arthur isn't walking. Yet. He can pull himself up and sort of stand if he's next to the kitchen step. He is crawling, and he's fast. The cat is learning.

Has it really been Thanksgiving since the last post? A lot has happened since then. I've decided that between the WInter Holidays and the dreary months of January and February, I don't get much writing done. I guess I'll need to get a sun light or something for some light therapy.

Thanksgiving Blackmail

Thanksgiving morning, I woke up, stumbled out of the bedroom, and found Mark muttering to himself over a collection of baby diapers, baby food, baby toys, baby blankets, and three baby bags.

"There's too much food," he said. Arthur's recently started eating pureed winter squash. "I can't fit it all into the food bag," he said.

"Put all the food in the diaper bag, and put the diapers and clothes in the toy bag," I said.

"What about the toys?" he asked.

"We don't need that many. Put them in the food bag."

I don't know where this early morning wisdom came from. Normally I'm a stumbling wreck for about ninety minutes, my morning shower, or a Pepsi (whichever comes first). I must have been channeling some domestic goddess. (Reading this over my shoulder, Mark remembers a different version of the morning.)

Then we went off to Thanksgiving at my folks' house. I made up for my earlier lucidity by forgetting to bring the snack crackers for horderves.

I wasn't sure what to expect this Thanksgiving. I thought it might be extra weird or overly Anne Geddess. But it wasn't. No one was late, the turky didn't need an emergency thawing, no one read symptoms of food poisoning from a book, the oven didn't blow a fuse, we didn't have to cook the meal on a camp stove outside on the deck, the potatoes didn't burn, no one got slimed by a garbage disposal imitating a gyser, and we didn't get snowed in. All of these things have happened in the past, so I'm a little disappointed things weren't a little more exciting. In fact, the only thing that we've discovered is that a certain unnamed relative needs to clean up their language in front of the baby.

I was thinking that if this certain unnamed relative (you know who you are) were to pay me not to reveal their name on this blog, then I could turn around and ask my readership to make a counteroffer. I suppose that I have to wait until after the holiday season.

Besides, Mark and I have discovered that there's a lot of artistic material we have to lock up in the grown-up trunk. That and we like humor that's just plain wrong. So; good-bye Avenue Q, Company, Camelot, A Chorus Line, Once Upon a Matress, Hairspray, if not all of our original broadway musical soundtracks and a bunch of our Madonna CD's. I don't have a problem saying, "Arthur, it's OK to sing 'you can be as loud as the hell you want when you're making love' within a context of an artistic performance at home, but not everyone likes the same art you do." But Mark just doesn't want phone calls from a school principal.

I guess we'll have to get a replica of Michelangelo's David for our family room.

Saturday Mark went into work, so Arthur and I went to the local Holiday Market. It was fun. I like the Market, all though every year there's the same old same old. Arthur, however, went just about bonkers looking at all the lights, the sparkly crystals, the cat paintings, the dicrylic jewelry, the stain glass, the wooden toys, and everyone.

I walked around the place for about two hours while he looked at everything, squealed, and jumped around in the baby bjorn sling. He also started babbling more; he did the same thing after a September wedding. Mark thinks that our voices talking to him have become a kind of background noise, and other people talking to each other is new somehow.

The weird thing was that we made a lot of new best friends. Arthur was happy, so instead of talking about what they had to sell, the merchants launched into the Oh What a Beautiful Baby aria. I should be grateful that they don't scowl and throw things, but I still think it's odd when people try to touch his head. At least Arthur was too high up for children under ten to reach him. Arthur babbled all the way home, and then passed out for about three hours.

He had so much fun, I convinced Mark to come with us the next day. This time Mark wore Arthur as we went from stall to stall. After the first merchant performance of "Oh What A Beautiful Baby," Mark leaned into me and whispered, "You're right, people are strange around babies."

We didn't buy anything. Well. OK. One tie-dye sock for Arthur to hang from the mantle with care. And something secret that Mark says I'm not allowed to write about until after the holidays.

---

We've poisoned the cat, and now she's toxic. I hadn't realized how much she rubs herself all over everything and tries to make us pet her. OK. To dispel the image of a zombie cat lumbering all over the house muttering, "Pet me... brains..." we didn't exactly poison her; we put Advantage Flea Death on her to kill some fleas. Although, it is kind of horrible to have her trying to suck the oxygen out of the room all the time.

Muriel seems to know that she's toxic, and now waits until my hands are full feeding Arthur to jump up on the couch and try to sit on us both.

Pre-Thanksgiving Report

We just got back from a week in the Redmond, Oregon area.

We got to see lots of stars and watch the moon. It was great to be above the inversion that covered the Willamette Valley in rain and smog. The place we stayed had a wonderful eastern view, so in the morning we had the sunlight streaming through the windows at 7:30, and each dusk we watched as the moon progressed through fullness, moving thirteen degrees each night away from a ruby Mars. The eastern windows were a refreshing change because our house in Eugene has a nice southern exposure, and we tend to see the noon and midnight sky ( and trees block our views to the east and west).

Mark, Arthur and I hiked around the Descutes river, and also the Metolius.

Mark didn't stay the entire week, but when he was gone my folks came up and also some writer friends. The writers got a lot of writing done. My folks watched Arthur for large swaths of time, and my friends made sure he didn't roll into the fire or play with razor blades.

While away, I made some discoveries.

• The next house we live in has to have a dishwasher. Anyone who doesn't like dishwashers obviously doesn't value their time.
• I tend to discover my story plots intuitively; a strong visual image or interesting idea grabs me and I try to work it into a story. This way of writing works if I have large blocks of time. I need to develop plot outlines to maximize the creative process.
• The Discovery Channel will teach you that 1) a large rock from outer space could strike Earth and extinguish all life on the planet any time now; 2) a fault running off of the Pacific Northwest could trigger earthquakes and giant killer tsunamis that could destroy cities from Seattle to San Fransisco any time now; 3) weather patterns that govern the earth's climate could cascade into a new ice age that make your heating bills really large any time now; 4) electromagnetic energy from cell phone towers can amplify the psychic energy of a home so that untrained sensitives can create their own, very scary poltergeists out of their repressed, negative emotions.
• Although dating shows now feature (very young) gay men competing for a chance to date each other and earn cash prizes, it hasn't changed the fact that people on dating shows are really really mean.

Mark and I have come up with some new infants' books.

Shapes with Spot: "See Spot's triangle? Spot's triangle is pink. Spot's pool is oval. Spot's pool boy is a mesomorph."

Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You Hear?: "Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What do you hear? / Well, I hear that Mrs. Jones two houses over is having an affair with the postman. / Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones, What Do You Hear?"

---

Arthur discoveries.

Arthur has no teeth. This doesn't prevent me from asking him (too many times, according to Mark), "Are your teeth bothering you?" whenever I can't figure out why he's crying. Or drooling.

Arthur has object permanence and he knows what a fork and a french fry are. Arthur was fussing during dinner, so I put him on my lap as we ate. The look of betrayal as the french fry sailed over his head and into my mouth was so funny my dad nearly died laughing.

Arthur has discovered his toes. They are almost as fun as the teething ring.

Arthur can now bring both of his hands together to grab things.

Arthur's hair looks like it might be red. Then the sunlight will change and his hair looks blonde. His eyes are still blue.

Arthur prefers shaking a ring of plastic measuring spoons over shaking a knit hat; probably because the spoons make more noise. (Yes, he shook the spoons first, then the hat, then went back to the spoons.)

Arthur is beginning to grab things. This afternoon Mark was speaking with Lime Green Larry and Arthur took the phone from him. I don't know how a five and a half month infant can wrest a cell phone from a forty-something gay man because I was washing dishes in the next room. See; if we had a dishwasher, I wouldn't have missed this precious moment in Arthur's development.

New Tricks

Arthur has some new tricks.

The first trick is that he'll wake up about 10:30 PM and be very awake. Then he'll start babbling. He'll babble a lot. He's obviously telling us something, but we don't know what. We try to encourage him to fall asleep by laying him between us with the ceiling fan on. Mark breathes deeply and relaxes. The fan blades turn, and behind them the shadows of the blades turn on the white ceiling. But Arthur just looks at them and talks to himself while we try to fall asleep. It's like bedtime stories, only in reverse; the baby is telling the story and keeping us awake.

Arthur has been on semisolid food for about two weeks. We didn't have to teach him how to eat. By the third time Mark held up the spoon laden with rice formula, Arthur was imitating a baby bird.

Arthur's other tricks involve rolling around. So far he can only roll onto his stomach. He also scoots around in a way that I haven't figured out yet; I'm pretty sure that it's not teleportation, but I'm not sure.

Arthur really likes the cat. A lot. He wants to pet her. He's only grabbed her once. We're trying to teach him sign language for 'cat.' Muriel is pretty good natured about it all.

His final trick is bonking himself with his plastic, multicolored rattles. He'll grab the rattle and start waving it up and down, repeatedly bashing his forehead. Sometimes if he doesn't have a rattle, he'll use his hands. So far he has not bonked the cat.

---

Today I went to Sweet Life. I'm always trying to explain things to Arthur, and anyway, I was wearing him in the Baby Bjorn, so as long as I have to pass my wallet in front of his face as I grope around for the money inside, I figured I'd make it a learning experience.

"This is money," I said. "It's legal tender. It doesn't have any real value, but we all agree that it's worth the time daddy put in at work or for material goods. If we were in a barter system I'd have to give them you, but I'd get a lot more truffles."

The cashier wasn't sure if it was OK for her to be amused or not.

It Just Got Worse

OK. It's happened again. I might have to change the route I take to the library.

I was pushing Arthur in the pram along 10th street on my way to the library. I stopped on the corner of 10th and Charnelton, and there was this guy. He was sort of tall, he wore a brown corduroy suit, and his beard, which started about halfway down his neck, was bushy and gray. I stopped so as not to block Charnelton and waited for the pedestrian light to change.

He stopped short of me. Looked at me. His body language was like a deer about to bolt. I sort of smiled and adjusted the piles of blankets on Arthur.

The light changed.

As I started to cross the street, the man spoke.

"You hungry?" he asked.

"Uh," I said. "No. Oh, no." I continued walking. "Um, thanks for asking."

I looked at my reflection in the plate glass of the library as I walked to its entrance. Tall, salt-and-pepper beard, grey-green cloak, clean hair in a ponytail, clean shoes, clean pants; I look like a homeless person? I thought.

Later, in a cafe, I was having a friendly conversation with two guys. "Arthur's your son, right; not your grand..." I must have given him The Scowl "...son."

I hate this town.

Viorst Syndrome Sets In

The other day when Mark came home, he found a bunch of bibs, stuffed toys and baby bottles on the couch. "It looked like the remains of an infant drinking party," he said.

There are things hanging from our ceiling. Granted, we tied them to the rafters, but as I look around I realize how many of them are primary colors. There's the mobile of platonic and archimedian solids, of course; but there are also yellow and orange fish, blue birds, a sweater closet organizer filled with baby clothes, and a yellow sun thing with jangly bugs hanging from it. The soft-sculpture changing table mirror is sitting on a chair with a large Amazon Forest frog on top of it (I don't want to look too closely at what the frog is doing).

But I think the final straw was this morning. As Arthur dangled from the sling across my hips, I nearly dumped the cordless phone receiver into the filling washing machine. I don't know how the receive got into the baby's dirty clothes hamper.

Clearly, our house is suffering from Viorst Syndrome. So I think we need A), to have more adult company threaten to visit us so the house stays cleaner; B) Thom Falicia to help us find snappy little storage bins that double as benches; and C), a cleaning service.

Halloween Edition of The Fearful Parent

Another Halloween is fast approaching.

I'm working on this year's pumpkin. I'm carving out a medusa head based on some the cameos I saw at the MET. I think the snakes are going to be the hardest.

The only problem is that The Child has fallen asleep, so I can't use the power jigsaw. He seemed OK with it earlier, but I put it down for some sharp knives and while I was carving out the little feathers of the wings on the left side of medusa's head, he passed out.

Trick or treaters should be appearing at our house in about four hours...

While I was carving, I had all sorts of Fearful Parent articles going through my head. Arthur's on the floor so he can see what I'm doing. Naturally, when I first separated the top of the pumpkin's head a few seeds fell out onto the newspaper. I picked up the seeds. Later, Arthur started to try to eat the newspapers on the floor. The article came unbidden to my head


Pumpkins can be a festive treat for baby's first halloween, but they can be deadly, as Susan of Chicago, Illinois found out. "I'd given little Dakoda-Shanti her own little knife to carve with. We'd always carved jack-o-lanterns when we were kids. I turned my back for just a second, and Dakoda-Shanti was out the door, with the knife." Susan's voice quavers. "She got into a police standoff holding up a Fisher-Price Depot."

We spoke with Dr. Sheridan Johnson, of the Safe Holidays Institute. "We all remember the fun of holidays past. But holidays these days are a lot more dangerous. Take pumpkins. Baby sees the pumpkins and will try to eat them. Most parents use the "bigger than baby's fist rule" and don't realize that it doesn't apply to pumpkins. Sam and May of Minneapolis, Minnesota discovered Dr. Johnson's warning too late.

"We thought, '[the pumpkin is] bigger than Leonardo's fist,'" recalls Sam.

"But Leonardo was just starting to teeth," adds May. "We were both in the kitchen when we heard a noise."

Sam continues. "I thought it was some early trick-or-treaters, so I went to the front door. But..."

"It was Leonardo. He'd gotten his little mouth around the stem of the pumpkin and the whole top of the pumpkin was lodged in his windpipe."

They called 911 and EMT's managed to dislodge the pumpkin from the infant's throat just in time.

Experts warn not only of physical hazards, but also of the psychological damage of Halloween pumpkins.

"We see this sort of thing all the time," says child therapist and pediatric physiological expert, Dr. Margaret Castle-Jones. "We call it, 'Post-Pumpkin-Stress.' PPS all starts out innocently, and 94% of the parents of sufferers of PPS we interview are completely unaware of the early trauma they've unwittingly submitted their children to."

Dr. Castle-Jones leans in. "The young child is taken by her parents to a pumpkin patch. They choose a pumpkin. Then the child sees how the pumpkin is cut up. A face is carved on the pumpkin; it can be a smiling face, it can be a frowning face -- it doesn't matter, the pumpkin has no choice about its emotional expression. After one special night, the pumpkin disappears; maybe it ends up in the garbage or a compost heap. During this whole time, the child is internalizing the pumpkin process. She might worry that someone will come to take her away; or will have her emotional expressions limited or dictated. Birthdays or other special celebrations can trigger PPS related anxiety that the child will disappear the next day. If the parents have been calling her 'pumpkin' as a nickname it can compound the damage fivefold."

Dr. Castle-Jones points to a graph on her wall. "We're experiencing the legacy of PPS as a culture; teenagers today are reacting to infant PPS by piercing ears, noses, chins, brows, lips and even eyes in an attempt to regain some of that perceived control they lost in their early developmental years."

We asked Dr. Castle-Jones what parents can do. "I'd recommend avoiding pumpkins during halloween altogether. However, if your family tradition is strong, a fallback strategy would be to purchase a plastic pumpkin that already has a smiling face (see SideBar for Plastic Pumpkin comparisons).

....oops. Look's like Little Pumpkin The Child is waking up. Time to fire up the jigsaw.

Bzzzzt!

Today Arthur and I went out and bought some Halloween pumpkins.

Our new best friend was a small girl who rushed away from her Mother's side, shrieked, "A baby! A baby!" and attempted to touch Arthur's head. Without asking.

Now that I think about it, there must be something about large pumpkin patches in the Eugene area, because last week when we went through the corn maze, one little boy was about ready to take off with the baby distraction toy attached to Arthur's pram.

Anyway, this girl was determined to touch Arthur. She was fast, too. I'm not sure why her mom didn't intervene. Luckily, I was able to channel my inner Mark Dwyer instead of my inner Mamma Grizzly.

As a result of today's encounter, I think I have a product that could make me millions if I advertise it in The Fearful Parent Magazine. It's an electric fence you attach to your pram to keep small children and other wild animals from pawing your baby.

I can see it now. A small generator attaches to the pram's wheels and charges up a capacitor which hooks to a series of wires around the bumpers of baby's pram. I think I'll call it a "Don't Bug My Baby Zapper."

I suppose there's some law about bringing an electrical device like that into a public place. Pity. And don't even get Mark started on letting me attach a flame thrower to the pram.

I suppose I'll have to wear a Malificent costume and practice saying, "On your child's sixteenth birthday she will wear a black halter top and ride off with a motorcycle gang leader named 'Snake.' Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

No. Too much work: I'd be smashing the hat/horns into doorframes everywhere and I'll bet that on the days I really needed it, the outfit would be at the cleaners.

I guess I'll have to rely on judo-chops.