Sometimes the kiddie-Joycean monologue defies untangling. "Musaka musaka iko," he likes to say, or something that sounds like that. Followed by: "No! That's J____'s line!" J____ is one of his day-care classmates. I tried to reproduce his thought processes with Google and got eggplant recipes. None of the day-care teachers could figure out where it had come from.

"Fuck!" was not one of the mysterious ones. He had it perfect. We were heading out to the airport, the two of us, and we'd burned most of our margin of error getting him into his coat and shoes. I'd hurried him through the apartment garage, buckled him into his car seat, and thrown the luggage into the trunk. I jabbed the key into the ignition, letting my eyes fall on the dashboard clock, and just as the numbers lit up: "Fuck!"—like a cue called out from the wings.

It's not that I'd been about to blurt it out myself, right then. We weren't running that late, yet. But I'd slipped up enough times before—missing a Metro train, yes, definitely—and he'd picked up the whole rhythm and logic of it, the moment when Daddy's haste and frustration would crest. He could hear and echo the bad words even if I kept them inside my skull.

"Fuck!" he repeated, with rising merriment, as I put the car in reverse and looked over my shoulder. "Fuck!"

I tried not to meet his eyes. Take provocation in stride, the experts say. Deprive the child of any reaction, positive or negative, as if nothing interesting had happened. This is wonderful advice. If I had that much self-control, he would never have heard me cuss in the first place.

I don't want to have a salty, transgressive mini-adult around. The joke is not that great. My parents raised me with rules and standards, which I gradually learned to break over time. I can remember my mother remonstrating with me, probably in the middle-school years, for my overreliance on "holy crap." It was no doubt a relief to my father when I devolved into full foul-mouthed teenagerhood and he could go back to saying "dog-fucking son of a bitch" during Eagles games or whenever. But he didn't try to speed up the process.

So it was guilty and mortified laughter that I was stifling, ineffectively. No one will mimic you more cruelly and accurately than your own child. "Daddy made a mistake!" is his favorite gag line of all. Daddy made a mistake! It's not funny. It's funny. Fuck! I mean, drat.

A friend of mine, when his daughter was two years old, got called in for a parent-teacher conference. The little girl had been bouncing around on one of those big rubber balls, happily saying "Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!" in time with the bouncing. Yeah, he and his wife said, abashedly, she got that from us. The teacher was surprised. No parents had ever pleaded guilty before, she told them. They always said it must have been an uncle or something.

Or something. I do sincerely believe he picked up "It is SO fucking cold!" from somewhere else, for instance. And the "WEEE WILLL, WEEE WILLL…" of "We Will Rock You." Not my fault. Influences are everywhere. The parent has to set an example.

Not long after the ride to the airport, at the end of a party with people we'd only just met, the kid—who'd been quiet all evening—suddenly felt moved to holler. "Oh, MERCY!" he yelled. "Oh, MERCY!" Those words had come out of my mouth only once, maybe a week before, at the sight of some Dutch elm disease damage. The kid had been up on my shoulders at the time, seemingly engrossed in an electronic greeting card he'd discovered, making it play a snippet of "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" over and over in my ear.

But now he was stomping around these people's entrance hall. "Oh, MERCY! Oh, MERCY!"

The other people's children were scampering here and there. Who says "Oh, mercy"? someone asked.

I do, I said.

Tom Scocca is finishing up Beijing Welcomes You for Riverhead and is at war with the machines in his spare time.

It wasn't that scary for me; I did know where he was, more or less. But this was what I was leaving my wife with, on the other end of the phone:

[Child's screaming.]
Fuck! Shit. Uh, I gotta call you back—
[Screaming continues in background.]
[Call disconnects.]

I was standing by the elevator bank, all by myself. The screaming was coming from the other side of a closed elevator door.

We had been riding the elevators for amusement ever since Halloween. The kid hated wearing his costume, a velcro-fastened dragon-or-dinosaur jacket with spines on the sleeves and a little tail. He wouldn't wear the hood at all, and people guessed at first that he was a turtle. There were a fair number of young couples on the trick-or-treat apartment list, visibly proud to be answering the door together in their shared dwelling, rather than staggering around alone in the night among people dressed as Slutty Runaway Balloon Hoaxes or whatever was funny this year.

He was indifferent to the candy, but he was thrilled about riding up to the top floor, the 17th, and working his way down. That was what he had wanted as soon as he woke up on All Saints' Day—not the Laffy Taffy, but an elevator ride back to 17. So I obliged. Later that day, after a morning on the elevators, he flopped down with a miserable respiratory infection. It tested negative for swine flu, but it could have been swine flu anyway. The test wasn't very good, the pediatrician said.

Now we had made it to Saturday, at the tail end of Sick Week. Whatever the disease had been, it was contagious and it lingered. Day care was impossible. We stayed home, through all the low points: the day he made it till dinnertime consuming nothing but Motrin, Tamiflu, and M&Ms; the day I was sicker than he was; the day he happily ate two bowls of oatmeal and then threw it all up on the living-room carpet.

The elevator, when we could manage it, had been our main diversion. Up to 17, to look down at the empty swimming pool and out westward, over the darkening orange-gold treetops, toward the distant lump of downtown Bethesda. Down to 16, for an imperceptibly lower angle on the same thing. Then 15, then 14. Every floor after the top one had the same carpet, the same dark-wood console table, glass-topped, below a round mirror. Our building omits the 13th floor. Mature trees here, in my native mid-Atlantic landscape, top out around 10 or 11 stories. We live down on 3, on the other side of the building, facing a FedEx Office, a Rite-Aid, the metro platform, and the freight tracks. Around 8 or 9 the kid would at last get bored and ask to go to 2, where he would punch buttons on the candy machine to make letters and numbers come up. The big finish.

We were on our way for another ride, then maybe out to do some errands, when my phone rang. I stopped to dig it out of my pocket. It was my wife, calling to say she was coming home. Somewhere in there, while I wasn't looking, the elevator must have arrived. And the kid, focused on his new hobby, charged aboard. He didn't realize something was wrong till the doors closed without Daddy. I didn't realize it till he realized it and started yelling.

When the kid wanders out of view in the produce department or something, you get a quick pang of gut-clenching alarm: the child is unaccounted for. This was something else. He wasn't lost, exactly, nor in any immediate danger. But the problem was getting worse every second—I could hear the elevator going into motion now, and the screams getting fainter. Fainter upwards or fainter downwards? There were four elevators and 17 (no, 16) floors, and the complications were multiplying like some terrible logic puzzle.

I hit both buttons, up and down, hoping to pull his elevator back to the third floor. There are a lot of units in the building, and the elevators seem to be programmed for efficiency—there's always another one coming; you never have to wait. At the moment, this was the opposite of what I wanted. One elevator arrived. Not his. I leaned in, smacked the button for the lobby, and sent it on its way. Another came, also the wrong one, going up. Then another. I couldn't hear the yelling anymore, and I couldn't hit the call button till these two were gone. A man was getting off on 3, and a woman was getting on—she was trying to hold the door for me. No, please, I tried to explain, sending her on without me. My son is—and I need to—and—

Oh, said the man who had just arrived. That's your kid? He's down on the first floor. He looked relieved, a troubling mystery solved.

I got on a down elevator. The only damage, it seemed, would be emotional. We had taken a perfectly fun activity—yes, we, he was old enough to take a kids'-menu share of the blame here, charging off unaccompanied like that, even if Daddy was being wantonly careless—and we had turned it into something terrifying for him. Who knows, this young, what lessons they take away? Maybe he would swear off elevators for the next ten years. One can't even guess.

I found him in the inner lobby, in the arms of the female half of a youngish couple. I did a bad job of registering what they looked like. He was done screaming, but there were visible tear tracks down his face. I wrapped him up in my arms and told him I was sorry, and we sat down on a lobby couch while I called his poor mother back. She had been picturing carnage—a bookcase pulled over on him, or a boiling kettle. He was fine, I told her, we were fine, we'd just gotten him lost on the elevator. She took it well. We would go back upstairs and wait for her to get home. I rang off. Let's go upstairs, I told the kid. He looked at me, his dark eyes still glistening.

"Seventeen!" he said.

Previously: No H1N1 Vaccine for You, Kiddo

Tom Scocca writes here and there and maybe for where you work! Only one way to find out.

Apparently, many New Yorkers aren't going for the vaccine either. Though probably not because they've read Corgan's thoughts on the subject.

I would rather not keep calling. That was my third or fourth or fifth inquiry about the swine-flu vaccine, by phone or in person at the office while getting other shots for the kid. This is not because I am a hysterical parent, unable to bear the thought of my child going without medical intervention. I do not snap awake at three in the morning with flu panic, worrying that some filthy stranger may cough around my precious offspring before he has been properly immunized, cursing the government for not coming up with vaccine fast enough, scheming to intercept the life-saving product before it goes to someone else's child. (Let the other child die.)

Instead, I keep forgetting about the whole thing. Then, after a couple of days, I remember, and I make myself call the pediatrician's office, and the pediatrician's office puts me on hold. And when I get off hold, they say they don't have it. Or one time they did have a batch, but they were only giving it out to kids between 3 and 5, or to kids who had heart conditions requiring surgery. The kid is only 2, and as far as we know his heart is fine. Keep calling back.

It would be much less work if I really were crazy. I try to be reasonable about health care for the kid: get him the normal shots, give him medicine when the doctor says to, and don't go looking for other stuff to get worried about. Now, though, through the wonders of the United States public-health system, the sensible thing turns out to be impractical. I really should get him a swine-flu shot; I really can't get him a swine-flu shot.

Either I force myself to act like an obsessed person or I ignore the whole swine-flu threat. I would love to ignore it. My inclination is to ignore it. At least I think that's my inclination, but it's hard to be sure. The kid was born nine weeks early, and that kind of skews my perspective. Among the routine, non-serious complications that came with it was that in the first few weeks in the hospital, he would sometimes forget to breathe, till an intensive-care nurse would tickle him and he would start up again. Very normal. His last week in the hospital, we slept in a room with him while he was hooked up to a blood-oxygen monitor. Eventually, after maybe the 20th time the machinery had beeped us out of sleep with a false or dubious warning—the baby rosy and oxygenated all the while—our annoyance became stronger than our fear, and we were ready to take him home.

And he was fine, and that would have been that, except he also developed asthma. Big deal, a lot of kids get asthma. Then just as we were moving back to the United States, last winter, he got a bad cold. I had learned not to worry about colds. Children are pretty tough. We took him to the pediatrician to be safe, so she could maybe prescribe him something if he really needed it. She checked his vital signs, blasted his lungs with an emergency dose of albuterol, and called an ambulance: respiratory distress and pneumonia.

So it's also possible, in this over-anxious world, to worry too little. I'm not the only person I know who has overlooked toddler pneumonia. I missed an ear infection for three days, too. The kid is in day care, where disease does flourish. The asthma really would make a flu infection more hazardous. I accept that he needs the vaccine.

But where is the vaccine? Weren't there supposed to be jackbooted public-heath officials ordering everyone to line up for shots? I am all in favor of forcible vaccination; anti-vaccine activists are degenerate idiots who deserve to get polio and live out their days in iron lungs while Child Protective Services takes away their children to be properly raised. Or tetanus. Get lockjaw and shut up and die. What's the point of living in 21st-century America if not to avoid dying of stupid, easily preventable disease? You just like listening to Miley Cyrus?

When I try to be a responsible member of the immunological herd, I get nowhere. While I was writing this, it occurred to me that the kid still also needs to get a shot for the regular, non-swine, non-sensational influenza. That gave me an extra excuse—no, an extra reason—to be calling the doctor, again. The H1N1 was still unavailable, still with no known delivery date. The regular flu shot? Also out of stock. Call back in a week.

Previously: Stroller-Bullying on the Red Line

Tom Scocca prefers to write for money, should you have some. Ask him yourself!

Genuinely, genuinely sorry, if you were on that train. I need to pause and emphasize this. It should not even need saying how much I—like you—despise the stroller-bullies who go banging through public spaces, using their precious cargo as a snowplow, then give a pained look of fake sympathy to the people who have been unlucky enough to get in the way of their baby-pushing. They are sorry, but they know that God knows that they are in the right, because babies are worth more than other people.

Not me. I made a bad call and it led to me getting on your train with a poorly secured child-and-stroller combo, and the fact that I then allowed the stroller to roll amok does not mean that your comfort and safety are less important than my child's, except in the narrow sense that my choice (a choice, again, created by my idiocy) was either to let the stroller bump into you or to drop the child from a height of six feet. If, through some presently unimaginable set of circumstances, I instead had to choose between bumping my child with a stroller or letting a stranger plunge six feet headfirst to the floor of a subway car—I promise you, I would bang the stroller right into the kid. At that point, it's basic ethics.

Then, no credit to me, a nice lady in a loose-weave beige something reached out a hand for the stroller and restrained it. The Red Line is a crowded, creeping, lurching hell-tube these days, and we were riding in the Death Car, at the back of the train, where the next train would slam into us if the system failed. Sometimes people have to help one another, even when the other has done something stupid.

Getting a kid from here to there always involves some new complication. When he was tiny, we lugged him around in an infant car seat or put him in one of those fabric slings. He was only four or five pounds and always seemed to be about to sink out of sight in the sling. Then we forgot the sling at some friends' house while we were busy buckling him into the car seat. Then he got big enough for a Baby Bjorn, which was better, as long as I didn't think about the moist spot that would form when the baby's diaper pressed against my chest for a while. I can't say for sure that it wasn't sweat.

People on the subway would give up their seats at the first sight of the Bjorn, at least on the 7 train. (On the Beijing subway, they did not.) It's nice but confusing, if you're an able-bodied and not-yet-old man, to receive that particular courtesy. Is having a baby strapped to your chest a disability? Or is the baby the disabled person? Or is it just a cumbersome piece of luggage? I wasn't sure about my own answers to these questions, but it was good to be able to sit, even though it meant that the never-properly-positioned straps of the Bjorn would ride up into some new, even less ergonomically correct, position.

Possibly someone would have given up a seat on the Red Line if I'd rolled the child onto the train in the stroller. They do do that sometimes, even though now I'm definitely only incapacitated by association. Maybe it's still the unwieldy-luggage thing, or maybe they sense (correctly) that a kid is less likely to freak out and start howling if the parent is sitting down at his or her level.

But I had marched on with my head held high and the kid's head held higher. We'd come all the way from preschool that way. Outside, on a decent day, there's no better way of carrying a two-year-old. He and I agree on that. A few short months ago, he went through a phase where he was eager to walk everywhere, so eager that I could get fooled into taking him out without a stroller. Then he would run out of gas and want to be carried, but would be so wriggly and intent on throwing his weight outward that the only way to get anywhere was by slinging him over one shoulder, like a 20-pound sack of rice, only 5 pounds heavier, and squirming. Great fun, especially in the rain and with paper bags of groceries dissolving in the other hand.

Then we advanced to the shoulder-top piggyback ride, and everything got better. "Up, please!" he says, and I hoist him, as he kicks out his legs to make it easier. The physics is surprisingly good—the kid's center of mass is lined up with your own, rather than cantilevered at some back-breaking angle. The kid grabs at my ears, chortles at the sight of passing tree branches, wraps himself around the back of my skull and jams his little face up against mine and gives a little whoop. His daddy is tall and strong. "OOH, LA!" he yells, every time we reach a particular corner by the preschool. "OOH, LA!" I have no idea why.

This time, though, I had pushed the good thing too far. The change in the weather had caught us with low inventory of clean long pants, so I'd put in him a pair of track pants, and the satiny athletic fabric was sliding around, shifting his whole body toward the left. The train swayed, and I felt a thump—his head clonking into the handrail. Glancing blow. He was still happy; the game had changed from piggyback to clambering around. There were two handrails, meeting in an X, with his head swinging around inside one of the angles, waiting to clonk into one of the metal bars again. Till the train got to the next stop, we were stuck. I bent my knees a little and writhed in place, trying to swing him around toward the other shoulder. Fun! His jacket—or was it his blanket?—was covering my eyes. Down below to the right, I could see the patient lady's hand still steadying the stroller.

And… Union Station. The standing crowd squeezed for the exits. I dropped the handrail and rolled the kid off my shoulder, sliding him down toward the floor, trying to keep him out of the way. The woman let go of the stroller and headed for the other end of the car. Behind me, another woman got up. Would I like to sit down? she asked. I thanked her, kicked the stroller brake on for sure, and took the seat.

Previously: The "Family Bed"

Tom Scocca's first book, Beijing Welcomes You, is in the hands of his editor at Riverhead Books. He also writes intermittently at Tom Scocca dot com and for newspapers and magazines. He would likely write for you, for money, if you have some. Ask him!

Oh.

The kid. I had given him a small clock, last month, for his birthday. A clock that did happen to have an alarm in it. Didn't it. Beep-beep-beep-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP across the apartment, around the corner, and there the clock was, just inside the doorway, beeping until I squinted and fumbled my way to the off switch. 5:20 a.m. The kid was sprawled out in bed, immobile and unmoved.

Perhaps the clock was not such a good idea. I was proud of it when I got it. He had locked in on it during an earlier trip to the hardware store, parking himself on the aisle in front of it and not moving. So I went back and bought it later. I like it when he plays with regular stuff, like poker chips or calculators or rocks. It's thrifty and educational. One week, he's stuffing playing cards in the cracks in the hall-closet door, then, the next thing you know, he's telling you "jack beats seven!"

Most of the found playthings are also quieter than the toys made for children. Not the clock, it turns out. But he loves clocks, and this one was little and pretty good-looking. It wasn't till we unwrapped and opened it that I noticed it was a plug-in model, rather than a battery-powered one. That was what I thought the mistake was, that it wasn't portable enough.

He must have set the alarm while playing with the clock after bedtime. The sleep thing has been worse lately. We farmed him out to his grandparents for a few weeks, while my wife was abroad and I was rewriting the book manuscript. They made great strides in civilizing him in many respects, but when he got back, he was not interested in returning to his old compliant bedtime routine.

The more fully human the child becomes, the more you remember that human beings are ornery things. I had always thought that "testing limits" was silly jargon, but by the eighth or tenth time he'd busted out of his room in one night, it was clear that he was doing exactly that: experimenting to see what would happen if he resisted the arbitrary concept of "bedtime."

It was a tough test, too, on our end. It is hard to calmly and firmly reassert your authority, keeping things very dull so as to avoid the dread Positive Reinforcement, when you are choking back giggles. Three or four times, in a single bout of trying to brush my teeth, I would sense movement over my shoulder and see him standing serious-faced in the doorway, trailing his blanket behind. Put down the toothbrush, pick him up, carry him back across the apartment, put him in bed–and no sooner would I get back and raise the toothbrush than he would be staring from behind me again, Banquo's Ghost by way of Linus Van Pelt. And again.

This is where someone might want to cave in, because he is so cute and so irritating, and let him sleep in the big bed with his parents. The breastfeed-till-age-five crowd maintains that the kid should be in that bed in the first place. A whole muddy, gory front in the baby culture wars has been dug in around the question of the "family bed," and woe betide the researcher who suggests for instance that infants can get crushed or smothered that way. To say nothing of the insane, child-hating sadists who raise the possibility that piling all the family into one bed could interfere with marital relations among the senior members of the family unit.

In my own experience, the times we've put the kid in our bed for the night—when traveling, or when he's sick—have been trauma. When he was little, these family-bed episodes would leave me in a state of actual post-traumatic stress disorder: for weeks afterward, I would lunge in my sleep to grab what I was certain was the baby, who was about to plunge to the floor. As he's gotten older, the hypervigilance has been redirected toward protecting myself from being head-butted or kicked in the face.

I'm not all cruel wire-monkey-mother about it. If he shows up and wants to crawl into bed an hour before wake-up time, sure, snuggle down, little man. But the last time I was on solo-parent duty, he stiff-armed me in the jaw in my sleep, then burst into laughter when I involuntarily groaned something like, "Blaagh." "Baah!" he yelled, bouncing up and down and socking me in the face some more. "Baah! Baah!"

So the kid sleeps in the kid's room. Even if he doesn't want to. Out he came, back he went. Eventually, I ended up sitting on guard in the living room, losing count of how many times we'd repeated the drill. Eleven? Fourteen? The intervals got longer. Finally, after 20 or 25 minutes without a disturbance, I peeked in on him. He was asleep, his slumbering innocence belied only by the headlights shining from his toy tractor-trailer cab where he'd been playing with it on the floor, not far from where I would eventually discover he had also been playing with the alarm clock. But for now he was sleeping. He would stay that way, peaceful and cooperative, through the next seven or eight hours, despite the beeping alarm and the shuffling feet of his father.

Then, about an hour after I'd crept back to bed, he would finally rouse himself, look around the room, and start banging the toy cymbals together.

Tom Scocca's first book, Beijing Welcomes You, is in the hands of his editor at Riverhead Books. He also writes intermittently at Tom Scocca dot com and for newspapers and magazines. He would likely write for you, for money, if you have some. Ask him!

Previously: The Birthday Party and its Preparations

So you get the thing done, with the minimum possible amount of thinking. You are already in the quicksand. Don't flail. I would go get a box of brownie mix at the Giant, throw it together, and be done. Duncan Hines. The job was already over, in my mind.

Or but was it Betty Crocker? I was in the baking-stuff aisle now. Or Pillsbury? Fudge-style? Family-style? What is a family-style brownie? Milk chocolate, for the palate of the two-year-olds? But wasn't milk chocolate weird? Weren't brownies normally dark?

The brownie-mix industry was trying to make me responsible for these questions. I would be delivering these brownies to a room full of two-year-olds, each with his or her own parental strictures and guidelines. At the birthday party, in the park on Saturday, we tried to create a brief diversion at the end between when a child picked out a gift bag and when that child took possession, so the parents could screen the contents and cull the M&Ms or the fruit snacks or, who knows, maybe they mightn't approve of stickers. Different outlooks for everyone.

We lifted the idea of having the party in a park from one of his preschool classmates. The park was ideal because going to the park constitutes, in itself, an activity, and it's an activity that suits the atomized mindset of the more-or-less-two-year-old partygoers. The guest of honor, for instance, spent something like half an hour on the swings, ignoring the whole occasion. He can stay on the swings indefinitely. I only got him down by bonking him lightly in the forehead with a helium balloon, which is usually good for drawing him out, if a helium balloon is handy.

Nowadays, in our Age of Wonders, you can just walk into the party store and buy a tank of helium, to keep, at a per-balloon price that's not much different from the price of filled balloons a la carte, provided you don't dwell on the deliberately obfuscating choice of 9-inch balloons as the reference point for the former versus 11- or 12-inchers for the latter. I strongly recommend not dwelling. Especially since who wants to be driving a car full of pre-inflated helium balloons?

And filling balloons from your very own tank of helium there at the party clearly counts as another party activity, which means you've basically taken care of the party-activity problem, once you add in the cupcakes, which you have not frosted or decorated because you are letting the little guests frost and decorate their own. By a happy coincidence, this means you don't have to worry about keeping the cupcakes upright in transit.

Also the parents can restrict the frosting or sprinkles if they so choose, in their role as empowered parents. Moreover, again: atomization. Nobody had to gather around a central cake. The guest of honor got two candles in his own cupcake, and tried to snuff them out with his fingers. At his first birthday, I had asked my wife, who was closer to the high chair, to wait a second while I snapped a picture of the cake with the lit candle, and the result was a snapshot of the precise moment he had swiftly—too swiftly for the naked eye to register—jabbed his little finger into the interesting bright flame. His pull-back reflex was so quick he didn't get burned, or even cry.

The choices for buying matches at the grocery store were a jumbo box of something like 1,000, a huge collection of paper matchbooks, or a package of eight little normal-sized matchboxes. I got the eight-pack. When she saw it, my wife raised the possibility of putting the boxes of matches into the children's gift bags, along with the other divided-up multipacks of loot.

But that was two or three grocery runs ago, and now the problem was brownies, or the problem was preventing brownies from becoming a problem. I cleared my mind and picked a box off the shelf. Fine. Add vegetable oil and two eggs for cake-style brownies or one egg for fudge-style brownies. What? Where was "normal brownies"? Then I remembered: vegetable oil. The gallon jug of oil by the stove was almost empty.

I had left the car at the apartment building and walked to the store, without even bringing the old-lady rolling shopping bag-cart, and the list of things to buy had naturally and automatically expanded: a gallon of milk, a half-gallon of juice, some canned goods, a head of cabbage, two pounds of green beans… I was not adding a jug of oil.

Once upon a time, before there was a child, when we had a suburban house with not one but two wall ovens in the spacious kitchen, I used to make brownies. Brownie-brownies, not "cake-style" or "family-style." They were easy. They used butter, which I already had. Flour, ditto. I grabbed a package of unsweetened chocolate. I was not shopping for the children; I was shopping for the brownies.

We still had the old Nexis printout of the recipe from the New York Times. Butter and chocolate. I watched them melt together in a pan over low heat, the chocolate swirling into the clear liquid butter, and it all came back. This thing after that thing, stirred into a bowl: the butter-chocolate mix, sugar, an egg, another egg, flour, vanilla. Into the pan, into the oven, out again in 20 minutes. Effortless.

Later, after I had cut the brownies and removed them from the pan, I checked the date on the printout and saw that the recipe had in fact appeared in the Times only a matter of weeks before we'd sold the suburban house and moved away. Whatever past life the butter and chocolate had evoked had not happened the way I distinctly remembered it had.

In the morning, I brought him to school in his stroller, with the brownies on paper plates in a plastic shopping bag. I explained to one of the teachers that I had brought them in for a birthday snack. Are there any nuts in them? she asked.

No, I said, there aren't any nuts in them.

Tom Scocca's first book, Beijing Welcomes You, is in the hands of his editor at Riverhead Books. He also writes intermittently at Tom Scocca dot com and for newspapers and magazines. He would likely write for you, for money, if you have some. Ask him!

Previously: The Safety Seat Is Ruining American Family Life In Your Metal Death Box

He didn't need to use the restroom (another reason not to be hasty about potty training), but the slowing and stopping of the car had woken him up. So my wife had popped him out of the harness, and he was clambering happily around the back seat with her. I took her place in the back, and the boy started climbing over the console and pointing to the dashboard. He wanted to see the driver's seat.

I despise the child safety seat. I feel guilty for even saying that, and I'm supposed to feel guilty, because child safety seats save lives—they do, lots of lives, believe it.

(Except for the children who roast to death because they were tucked away in the back, out of view in their plastic safety-cocoon, and the parent at the wheel had a brain-blip and forgot them, for which you hate and despise the parent because the parent was so self-centered as to monstrously forget the most precious thing in the world, a child, a child which you love more passionately in the abstract, from the far-off remove of thinking about it as you read things on the Internet, than the stupid selfish child-not-loving person who gave birth to it or went to the trouble of adopting it loved it, which is why it's dead. Except it could absolutely happen to you, too.)

And I am very big on seat belts. I'm a seat belt absolutist, front or back, with or without seat belt laws. I have walked away from a totaled car with nothing but a bruised knee. You are an idiot if you ride without seat belts, and if you want to throw some libertarian nonsense around about your personal choice, go tell it to my old neighbor who used to have to scrape dead people off the pavement for the State Highway Administration after they'd made bad decisions in that particular area of self-expression.

(Taxicabs, it goes almost without saying, are exempt from all this, because they are protected by magic.)

But child car seats are miserable. We were driving through Virginia because we were coming back from a wedding, and a constant refrain among the wedding guests had been that this or that child was not in attendance because the drive would have just been too much for the child to take. This did not seem to be unwarranted coddling. After your sixth or seventh hour locked in a five-point harness, unable to look over your shoulder, propped up so you can't sleep without your head lolling awkwardly over—you'd start screaming too.

The safety seat is ruining American family life and the automotive experience. I was horrified when vehicles started coming equipped with DVD players—individual ones, even. God forbid that children should ever be deprived of constant, demographically-targeted amusements. This is why so many of them now feel free, on entering someone's house as a guest, to march straight for the TV and tune to the Disney Channel or something else hellish, turned up loud. The world is no longer allowed to be boring.

But when I was little and bored in the car, I wasn't strapped down and immobile. I had, at most, a little booster seat that went under the lap belt, with a tubular metal roll bar that probably would have impaled me in the event of an accident. A fair amount of the time, I was crawling around loose in the cargo space, or on top of rear seats folded flat. Even with a seat belt on, I could work through the dull hours by rolling Matchbox cars around the back seat, or craning my head around to watch the scenery, or sucker-punching my brother in the floating ribs. There were options.

Now it seems fairly reasonable to pump SpongeBob Montana or Hannah SquarePants at the captive audience. Or maybe when they're older—the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends keeping them in car seats till they're as much as 65 pounds—a handheld video-game system, inside of which, using their still-movable thumbs, they can roam around freely and beat up prostitutes.

Also, until we were well into our teens, my brother and I rode around in the back seat of a two-door Volkswagen Rabbit. Or a Beetle. It would be physically impossible to do that with children today. When I loaded my son in his rear-facing infant seat into the back of our two-door Volkswagen Golf, I could barely return the driver's seat to an upright position. As I drove, the frame of the safety seat steadily poked me in the vicinity of the right kidney, through my seat back.

This is an underappreciated aspect of the SUV culture wars. Yes, it's absurd and bullying when people say that, to feel "safe" with their children on the road, they need to drive a bloated modified truck. But the bloat begins inside the vehicle, with the requirement that each small, portable child be surrounded by a huge, cumbersome safety rig. The GMC Yukon starts to look like a reasonable way to get the American Academy of Pediatrics off your back.

With one toddler and two adults, we've been getting by on a borrowed Honda Accord. The Accord could hold two small children, as long as you didn't need to interact with either one while the car was in motion. I sat down in the front seat with the kid. He played with the steering wheel and the stereo buttons, squirming around, free to explore. He beeped the horn, then beeped it again. He was having a great time.

When he was an infant and we were living in Beijing, we faithfully lugged his car seat everywhere. We did not trust Chinese taxis to be protected by American taxi-magic, certainly not with a child that little, and we would hunt for one of the minority of cabs that had seat belts at all, to which to attach the seat ("Houbian you meiyou anquandai?": are there seat belts in the back?). But when he outgrew that first seat, howling on a crosstown ride because he couldn't move his shoulders, we gave up and pretended the taxis were safe. He rode loose, with cabbies fretting about his shoes on their slipcovers. He turned around and craned his head to look out the rear window at the moon.

When I was very small, maybe in kindergarten, my dad would sometimes step on the clutch in the Beetle and let me shift the gears. Children could ride up front then. Now they have to stay in the back, so the passenger-side airbag doesn't detonate and rip their heads off. Another safety innovation. It was a passenger airbag that helped me walk away from that crash.

Safety is about making tradeoffs. Not dying on the road is a very good thing to trade for—so good, nobody feels any need to make improvements to the improvements. It's churlish to complain about it. Your car is a little metal death box, and whatever joy you may find on the road is strictly a function of your insane denial of that truth. The safety gear gives you another layer of denial to work with: I am doing all this in the most prudent, least reckless way that automotive engineers have yet discovered. Got it, Death?

My wife came back from the restroom. We strapped the kid in again and got back on the road. At lunchtime, we made a nice long meal of it, at a Cracker Barrel, letting him work out the boredom. We were almost all the way home before he started crying.

Tom Scocca's first book, Beijing Welcomes You, is in the hands of his editor at Riverhead Books. He also writes intermittently at Tom Scocca dot com, and for newspapers and magazines. He would likely write for you, for money, if you have some. Ask him!

Previously:
· When Your Child Produces Dark Foul Adult-Style Excrement
· How To Treat The Screaming Magenta Two-Year-Old

Now, though, with the nap barely begun, something was wrong. I gave it a minute or two to see if the crying would subside. It got louder. He was not going back to sleep without some sort of intervention.

His bedroom door swung open before I got there. This is one of my favorite things he does, the door-opening. It's simple for him to open it anytime, but he knows that when we've closed the door, he's supposed to stay in his room. So when he lets himself out, it means he has solemnly considered the situation and decided to grant himself an exemption.

A lot of the time, his reasoning is pretty good. Before I even reached him in the doorway, I caught a whiff of poop in the air. This made sense: he hadn't had one yet, so he probably got uncomfortable and crawled out of bed to work one out. It works better for him standing up. Why? Mysteries of the human body. Change him and get him back to sleep.

I reached around behind him, under his shirttail, to feel his diaper–a long-practiced, automatic movement, to see how big a job I was facing. My hand patted a bare bottom.

My brain shut down for a second or two, to reboot. There was…no diaper? I had put a nice fresh diaper on him before putting him down, because I was being thorough. I looked past the child, into the room. The diaper was dangling from the corner of the bed, hanging open, clean and white inside. I must have not quite sealed the tape on the flaps, so it caught on the edge of the mattress when he started climbing down. The diaper was accounted for.

As for what should have been inside the diaper: it was halfway between the diaper and the child, in the middle of the carpeted floor. It was solid and well shaped, about the size of a cacciatorino, and almost intact. One end was a little bruised, with smudgy yellowish footprints leading away from it.

Overall, in this business of child-having, the part about handling the shit has not been so bad. It is one thing–maybe the only thing–that has been less difficult than I would have thought. You get a long grace period at the beginning, in which the stuff that comes out the baby's hind end is bafflingly inoffensive-smelling; only gradually, as solid foods come on, does it develop into anything like what comes out of your own intestines. Diaper technology is pretty good nowadays, and baby wipes…I'll get back to baby wipes shortly.

And by the time your child has worked its way up producing to dark, foul, adult-style excrement, your fastidiousness has been worn away. Oh, no, the baby peed on me, I have to go change, the parent of the newborn says. Then comes the phase where you say, It's only a little spot of pee, I'll blot it up and keep going. After that comes, He already spit up on this shirt, so what's a little pee? Finally, you can't really remember what fluids may or may not have landed on you, and when. Think of this as fulfillment.

As long as it stays in the vicinity of the diaper, it stops being much of a concern at all. This is why I keep forgetting to start thinking about potty training. Do we really need to mess up the current arrangement and start making him crap in a special bucket? And, what, swab out the special bucket each time? Is that a better deal?

Obviously, you want to end up with a kid who goes off to the toilet and takes care of things himself. Eventually. In China, where he spent his first year and a half, kids are supposed to be trained around age one. But being trained means they run around in crotchless pants and squat down in the street when they feel the urge. All the time—at the park, at the zoo, at the Olympics—you'd see the graduates of this advanced training program, well past the toddler stage, peeing on a wall or a grate or a flowerbed, usually within five yards of a public restroom.

Everything in its proper place and time. Though this turd was neither. Still, I'd seen worse (gushing diarrhea, new white sheepskin rug). We corralled the kid and I got out the wipes.

The wipes! The wipes are unbelievable, magical, redemptive. They are 30 dozen sheets of divine mercy, packed in twin zipper-sealed bricks. The wipes will take food off the wall, pen off a book cover, dried snot off a coat sleeve. They will take hard, dusty grease off the kitchen cabinets. Poop is nothing. The smudgy footprints came right up. I disposed of the turd, and as I did so, I had a brief scato-Proustian childhood flashback to cleaning up after the family rottweilers. No big deal, then or now. You wipe, you blot, it comes out OK. We put him back to bed, and the nap resumed.

Tom Scocca's first book, Beijing Welcomes You, is in the hands of his editor at Riverhead Books. He also writes intermittently at Tom Scocca dot com, and for newspapers and magazines. He would likely write for you, for money, if you have some. Ask him!

Previously: How To Treat The Screaming Magenta Two-Year-Old

I guess I just did, and not (while we're unpacking the assumptions behind the Graco Pack N Play Playard) for the sake of playing. I did it to shut him up. Now, in the silence, I am running a dishwasher with the lower rack more or less empty. Sorry, Earth Day. We were out of clean sippy cups, and I wasn't in the mood to hand-wash them. I missed one or two last night in the evening dishwasher roundup, which would have been fine, except then we used an extra one to give him a water chaser after his bedtime slug of Motrin syrup, and again after I gave him his 4 a.m. Motrin along with the albuterol inhaler. "Delicious medicine!" he said after the bedtime dose, because he is chatty and good-humored nowadays, within limits, even as he closes in on being a two-year-old.

Being woken up at 4 a.m. out of fever sleep and having medicine shoved at him was not within those limits. Tears squirted out as he howled, which was good, because it meant he hadn't dried out too much. When he was a little younger and sick, I used to use the soft spot on his skull as a water gauge—if it was sunken, we were behind on the Pedialyte.

The kid being sick is the normal state of affairs. Every 10 or 15 days, probably. This is one of the things that nobody tells you when you're having a child, or that nobody tells you in a way that gets through. Like the fact that, for the mother, breast-feeding is essentially congruent with the CIA's torture protocols (nudity, stress positions, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation) or that for several months, everyone's clothing will get vomited on multiple times a day. The plan was for today have been a productive work day for me—a critically important one, even—but I had just finished one productive week, and you don't get two of those in a row, so the telltale here-comes-trouble thick snot started flowing on Friday and kept going through the weekend.

Luckily, a sick child is not necessarily or exclusively a miserable child, and we had a pretty good morning for people who'd been awake and unhappy at 4 a.m.: watching subway trains and umbrellas and trucks out the window; eating French toast for breakfast; playing "Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha" for what iTunes says was the 55th time. Then came lunch. Cooking a second meal shortly after the first is not my strong suit. I put together some leftover chicken and leftover rice—when you're feeding leftovers to a young child, you have to waste time reheating them and then cooling them down again—peeled an orange and cut up a few sections, got out a bowl of Jell-O, and poured some juice into the last clean sippy cup. He sat in his high chair and ate a few chunks of orange, and I went into the kitchen, three steps away, to get something for myself.

After about half a minute, he started screaming. Maybe he couldn't get a big enough spoonful of rice to suit himself. Maybe he swallowed a chunk of orange wrong. There is a school of child-rearing they call "attachment parenting," which consists of the worst, most backward mother-abuse, expanded to include the caring father: whenever your child is crying, it is for a reason, and the most important duty in your whole world is to figure out why and to solve the problem.

This is a cruel and stupid lie. How many adults, with the benefit of decades of experience, a full-grown brain, and possibly hundreds of hours of expensive therapy, really understand the reason every time they themselves are upset? But if you do not immediately know how to correctly soothe a despairing or enraged little semi-human, it is because you have not paid enough attention to its needs, and the parent-child bond has grown weak and defective. (Maybe you weaned the baby to formula and solid food at six months, when it started growing teeth, rather than letting it chew on the breast till it was three; maybe you put it in a separate room instead of cuddling it in your marital bed.) The attachment-parenting experts are quacks and bullies and monsters, and successful and prosperous ones, because everyone nowadays is afraid of bending the twig wrong and ruining the tree, and therefore inclined to believe that there must be an unambiguous way to bend the twig right.

Now the kid was magenta and the screams were deafening. I sat down beside him and asked a few questions—did he want some help with the rice? Did he want some juice?—and got tears and more screaming. He glared around through squinted eyes, and twin shining bubbles of snot inflated, side by side, one on each nostril.

I was not interested in the root cause of the problem. I hooked him out of the high chair and carried him off to his room and set him in the playpen. I gave him a blanket and left him there. I could say that I was trying to "extinguish" the tantrum, deliberately trying to create a neutral response, but I wasn't, and neutral response is another ridiculous myth anyway. He was going to scream if he wanted to; I just didn't want to have to share a room with it.

When I went in 10 minutes later to get a dirty sippy cup, he was asleep.