Father's Day

So it's my first Father's Day as a father, but it sure as heck feels like it should be a Mother's Day - as has pretty much every day over the past couple of weeks. L's been amazing, nursing at all hours, reading to Cleo at 4 in the morning, and gracefully receiving the pleasant parade of guests who have stopped by in recent days.

Compared to that, I've been doing very little, but I have at least enjoyed trying to give L some deserved rest by taking Cleo on long stroller walks in various neighborhoods. It's worked rather well so far; we rumble slowly along the irregular planes of sidewalks or the smoother asphalt of quiet streets, under the sounds of birds and, occasionally, a splash of sunshine.

It turns out, of course, that this means that I'm now part of a community of stroller pushers, and am slowly beginning to sense my place on this unfamiliar spectrum. For example, I'm not serious enough to gauge our progress by means of a splashy strollometer, even if that means that we'll never know, exactly, our maximum speed or average ambient temperature. On the other hand, I do enjoy trying to offer loose narratives as we roll along. Admittedly, these are often pretty mundane, and sometimes little more than descriptions of what we're passing. But the very fact that I'm talking at all to Cleo as we stroll, combined with the fact that we have a rear-facing stroller, seems to put me on one side (without my realizing it) of a fierce debate regarding early childhood development that recently played out in the New York Times.

Perhaps certain types of strolling may help or hinder a child's linguistic skills. Perhaps. Really, though, such claims seem to me fall into a pretty familiar genre: parents, after all, have long exaggerated their contributions. In 1777, Mozart sent his employer a letter that had actually been written by his father, Leopold, but was signed by the young Wolfgang. It read, in part, "I therefore owe it before God and in my conscience to my father, who indefatigably employs all his time in my upbringing, to be grateful to him with all my strength..."

All his time? Hardly, at least in my case. That'd be mom. And even the time I do spend with Cleo, of course, won't ever be consciously remembered by her. Still, there's something about these regular outings that feels right, and that, compounded with the thought of L sleeping for an extra hour or two while we're out, means that we'll probably hit the road again tomorrow, as well.