Mike Blejer

In the matter of Toddler v. Blanket, this court finds in favor of gravity. gavel/head bonk

Ok, in my defense, there was no way to know that building my toddler a small ping-pong ball rifle and teaching him to shout “Expelliarmus!” every time he fired it could have negative consequences.

Sometimes my son likes to surgeons general words (which, unlike verbing surgeons general, is a pretty silly thing to do).

I think it’s hard to argue that if you say “what up dog” and a dog immediately gets up, you’re not doing something right. Right?

Raising him to survive the economy of tomorrow. Step one: infiltrate the robots. Step two: unionize.

My kid erected a Magnatile monument to instability. It didn’t last long, but I’d like to think that in collapse, it achieved immortality.

I know the Adam and Eve story isn’t meant to be taken literally, but it really does feel like men got there first when they were handing out gender roles. Like Adam had already given all the predators badass names and was like, “Great first day.

It’s a pity “Grampa’s Treadmill” isn’t an Olympic sport, because my kid would be number one with a butt-flip. (Obviously this presumes some kind of “Toddler Olympics,” which I think we can all agree is coming to America within a decade, whether or not we beat back fascism.)

Watch out! Born swinger coming through. (And back. And then through again. It’s honestly kinda hard to make a dramatic entrance when you’re a born swinger.)

It’s a cool biological adaptation that just as boys get old enough to stop absolutely coating their faces in food every meal, they begin to grow facial hair. Like somehow evolution just knows that male faces are genetically gross when directly exposed to the elements.

At first, we thought it was adorable that he made his momma a crown out of blocks because he sees her as a queen. Only later did we realize it was less a “royal coronation” and more of a “Taekwondo sparring helmet” situation.

It can be difficult to stay in shape as an old dad, but the key is just to find a way to incorporate your kid into the workout, and be ready for a small but noticeably life-altering injury about once every three reps.

It’s time to admit that a small but apparently non-trivial part of my child’s cognitive development will be determined by the fact that sometime in the early ’90s I happened to watch Benny and Joon on VHS.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In some cases, in the rare and demanding role of ‘Mama Who Must Sing With Me With the Kitty.’ An unconventional play, to be sure, and not one of Shakespeare’s best, which perhaps explains its omission from the canon.

This year for Valentine’s Day, our toddler whacked his mother in the head so hard that it made *me* look good. Mostly just in comparison to him, and can’t rule out her head injury as a factor — but either way, what a naughty little wingman.

I don’t know if this is just because I’ve been reading him M. Night Shyamalan scripts for bedtime but I feel like every conversation with my toddler has a twist ending.

I knew parenting would entail improvisation; I didn’t realize it would involve so much interpretive dance.

Teaching my toddler the word “doppelgänger” in case his brother is born with a cat allergy and he needs a non-ableist way to say “stop copying me.”

Don’t tell his mom, but I’m secretly training my kid to be the Coyote who actually takes out his Road Runner. ACME discipline. Real-world physics. Maybe no TNT. 🧨

Part of being a parent is figuring out how to let your tiny frustrations out without your kid ever feeling it—or even noticing it in the first place. For example, if you can convince them you’re playing vampire, you never have to explicitly tell them they suck. #EverybodyWins

It’s important to give your kids a healthy sense of self-esteem. Sometimes that means helping them with a puzzle and congratulating them like they did it themselves. Sometimes it means stuffing them in a sack and calling them a leg genius.

It all first started when the Roomba ran over his foot on a full moon.

Technically at the end of this video I sing-song’ed “back away,” but the caption auto-generated it as “taco wee,” and I gotta say, as a professional writer of silly little word combinations, this is the first time I was genuinely afraid my job could be done better by a robot.

Welcome back to everybody’s favorite game show: IS IT 💩?

Next to bedtime, I’d have to say that the hardest part of being a father is probably just any time that his mother leaves me alone with him. Thank God, she doesn’t trust me too much or this would be effing impossible.

Sometimes as a parent, you find yourself wrapping your kid up in a yoga mat because that’s what he wanted. And then, when he gets stuck, you’re thinking, “Cool. Hope I didn’t just give him a lifelong fear of Little Debbie Swiss Rolls. Or Southeast Asian fitness culture.

Trying to give my kid the old college head start by teaching him all the essential ping pong ball tricks for rush week. (I assume—Oberlin didn’t have frats, so I just had to pledge a vegan book club. Now I suck at ping pong and enter a trauma fugue around lentils.)

Toddler won’t nap because he’s hopped up on horse (please don’t quote this without the video).

Kid slipped on a banana speell.

There are, I imagine, worse things that can happen when your kid finds the back massager.

Just thinking about how funny it would’ve been if, right after saying “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff,” Carl Sagan had ripped a massive fart.

A lot of people hate trigger warnings—not me. I think they’re a helpful tool; I just think we’re using them wrong. I don’t need a heads-up that a movie’s ending is a real bummer.

In which my son demonstrates an early aptitude for our people’s most ancient tradition: complaining, even when everything is going great.

Raising a child in Southern California is basically the same as anywhere else—just with a bit more emphasis on earthquake and fire prep. That’s where the Skymall neck massager and the Skymall flame-retardant neck massager really shine.

Gonna get Toddles a starter job as one of those night elves that fixes shoes. I figure since it’s magic it kind of sits outside the whole “child labor law” system, and his bedtime already lives in the land of myth, so 🤷‍♂️🧝

My kid may or may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but you can certainly tell he wants it.

“Why do we fall, Bruce?” So we can learn to bump our heads. Also, my name’s not Bruce. Sorry—I’ve fallen down a lot.

Slo-mo is great because before it you had to just imagine what it was like to be a cheerleader for a jeering team of whale demons on the moon.

Teaching my kid method acting by lying about when he’s on tape. He’s either gonna be a phenomenal actor or a guy who spends the next 40 years having flop-sweat nightmares he can’t quite explain.

Haven’t checked the parenting books, but teaching my kid spoons are instruments first and utensils second feels like a recipe for an eating disorder. On the bright side, at least it’ll be on tempo.

Neuroscientifically speaking, every time you remember something you’re rewriting the memory—like a photocopy of a photocopy—which means, technically, this is applied neuroscience, not gaslighting my toddler.

The fact remains: my son has never been seen in the same room as the Cutie Bomber. Also Spider-Man. Also Superman. So by the transitive property, Spider-Man is Superman—which explains why neither has done anything about the Cutie Bomber.

“So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” — Immanuel Kant, talking about my kid trying to get a stray cat to tickle his feet when the cat clearly has ends of its own it’s pretty busy tickling.

The key to toddler meditation? No expectations.* *Arguably also the key to adult meditation.

A tired toddler is a lot like jazz: loopy, hard to follow, and I could listen to it go on and on—but I get why people find it annoying.

As a millennial father, I feel it’s my duty to end each night by imparting one drop of foundational life wisdom gleaned from all those hours spent with my best and only childhood friends, the X-Men. Tonight’s lesson: “people fear what they don’t understand.”

Threw baby his first surprise sting operation.

Childhood developmental specialists: Is it a good or bad sign that my toddler developed “knife permanence” first?

Rubik: “separate all the colors on my magical cube to prove you’ve got a high IQ.” Nice try, eugenics propaganda dweeb, but I don’t think I will.

🎶 Baby’s Sharp do do do do do do 🎶

My kid loves two things: watching videos that I took of him, and yelling at me to stop recording videos that I am currently taking of him. And paradoxes.

Pop? Corny.

His MC Name is (((Dr. Dreidel)))

In this house we believe in hands-on learning. Today I learned that if you secretly film your kid singing, he will lay hands on you. Most father-son violence in an ABC song since the Jackson 5.

It’s devastating to me that my kid is still so young and yet already so much better at clubbing than me (I assume, I’ve never really been clubbing to judge against. It’s mostly just this with champagne, yes?)

Things got pretty sentimental telling my son he’s going to be a big brother. But there are practical concerns too. Lotta logistics. Double the car seats. Double the daycare. And a preternaturally verbal witness to silence if we ever want to successfully convince the new one he’s adopted.