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Bjorn In The USA

If you were one of the people who saw me walking down the street the other day with the dog and the baby, let me explain. It is hard enough controlling a hundred pound labrador with a brain the size of a walnut, let alone while carrying an infant child in one of those yuppie strap-on gadgets that holds the kid snug against your chest. You've seen these things around, they look like prosthetic kangaroo pouches. Only good taste and the threat of legal action stops me from mentioning them by their brand name. They are state-of-the-art Scandinavian design, and everyone knows that the Scandinavians know more than anyone about raising children, which is why they are the world's leading exporter of au pairs.

These units are painstakingly engineered to allow the hardworking parent to "wear" the child during the day while doing simple tasks, and to evenly distribute the child's weight through the shoulder straps and, in my case, directly onto the spine at the L5 vertebra which eventually causes tingling and numbness in the legs. It can be used in the "face-out" configuration, which allows the Little One to enjoy an unobstructed view of the world while experiencing the unique sensation of being duct-taped to your chest (essential for building self esteem), or the "face-in" mode, which uses the natural absorbency of your shirt to protect the sidewalk from those pesky little barf stains.

As a Homedaddy it is my duty to correct any imbalances in our household such as, for example, a shortage of plastic pants to wrap around our politically-correct cloth diapers. Yes, that's right, we've decided to participate a little less in the national pastime of Making The Landfill Overflow by using cloth diapers specially handmade by hippie moms in a tepee on an all-organic commune during the summer solstice ... diapers made using an ancient sacred technique which gives them the absorbency of masonite. Therefore it is necessary to use plastic pants made from chemicals developed by DuPont in order to catch the runoff. And since our baby, Emma, grows so fast you can hear her creaking if you listen closely, it is not unusual to discover, in any given moment, that none of her plastic pants will fit.

No problem, Homedaddy to the rescue; we'll strap on the prosthetic kangaroo pouch and walk downtown to get some new plastic pants. Heck, it's a nice day, let's take Wilson for a walk while we're at it. Wilson is, of course, the aforementioned hundred-pound labrador.

OK, maybe it wasn't such a nice day, maybe it was something like a jillion degrees, and I didn't really walk the dog as much get dragged along in his wake. But with the sun at our backs I was able to keep Emma shaded and before you knew it she was fast asleep and all I had to worry about was the dog ripping my arm out of its socket like a turkey drumstick.

It was the trip home where my troubles began. Emma was finished with her nap and wanted to be home. We still had a mile or so to go and the sun was right in our faces. I'd recently read a scary article in a parenting magazine that said if you let your baby get sunburned she'll get to be sixteen and wreck your car, so I was trying to keep her hat pulled down low which only made her hotter and less patient. When she started protesting in earnest I felt the first twinge of panic and put the power walk into gear. I was pleased to note that the increased pace and the resulting bumpier ride calmed Emma right down.

A painful moment later I realized that the action of her little legs swinging back and forth was causing her heels to come into solid contact with a part of my anatomy generally not known for its ability to effectively absorb impact. I immediately slowed my gait enough to make her legs swing a little less ... just enough to correct the previous condition, but for Emma, the decrease of urgency in my homeward motion was a big negative. The slower I walked, the more she cried.

Clearly, I had to make some adjustments. I tried walking with my hands placed protectively over my groin, but the shopping bag on one wrist and Wilson's leash on the other rendered this approach impractical. Besides, people were begining to stare. I slowed my walk down again for some quick relief but Emma's immediate cries did nothing to reassure the troubled onlookers. I sped up again, this time trying to customize my walk. I achieved some success by thrusting my chest forward every other step, which did alter the arc of her dangerous leg-swing path, but which also made me appear to be strutting like a peacock. People continued to stare, and some of them began pointing. Again I resumed a normal pace and appearance and again the baby started yelling. I finally arrived at the solution: a nifty little reverse pelvic thrust step; sort of a Groucho Marx-meets-Elvis-on-Viagra. People were staring and pointing but by this time I was in the home stretch.

So if you were one of those people who saw me out walking the other day, please, don't worry, everything's fine. The baby was in no danger. That man is her father and he is not criminally insane. A little adjustment on the straps of his Scandinavian kangaroo prosthetic ought to take care of everything.

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.