Who Stole My Rightful IQ?

Well, boy have I been gipped. Ripped off, you might say. My birthright — even my honor! — has been sullied. I don’t know who to take this up with. Is there some federal agency who rights wrongs? That hands out reparations, or at least cookies, to people in my position? Maybe just a laminated card I can carry around that says, “He was robbed, and should be smarter than he is. Forgive him for his stupidity. It’s unnatural.” An injustice has been perpetrated, and I don’t know how I will go on. My wife brought it up: “Did you read the story about how firstborn children are the most intelligent?” she asked. It was on a Norwegian study that found boys who were born first — like me — had higher IQs than their younger siblings. The blood rushed to my head and boiled. “I saw something about it,” I told her, “and I’d like to know JUST WHAT HAPPENED TO ME!”

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New York a Different Town with Toddler in Tow

What a different city New York is with a kid. What a different vacation it makes with a toddler. Not bad, just different. When you’re used to one thing, and then go back to find another, it’s well different. The New York we used to know was about all manner of things. Eating well, and in places that if you came with a kid, someone would come over, grab her, hand you a ticket and then stick her in a coat closet. I’m not joking, I think they check their kids in New York. It was about going to shows and long, lazy strolls through Central Park near dusk. It was picking up and going anywhere you wanted without looking like Sherpas heading up Mt. Everest, or shopping in places where you didn’t have to worry that a little one would dismantle thirteen dozen mannequins and ruin a dress worth more than most cars.

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Surviving Toddler Traveler Trepidation

Nervousness and fear. I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m worried and scared, and I’ll come right out and say it: I was filled with trepidation. Toddler traveler trepidation. My wife and I have traveled by car for three hours with our 17-month-old daughter, but that’s been as far as we’ve ever dared to go. Diapers can explode, lungs can wail and temper tantrums can upset the Earth’s natural orbit. But we longed to take a trip like we used to and felt the little one was old enough to get a few miles under her wings. So we planned a week-long sojourn in New York with a visit to family in Long Island and a couple nights in Manhattan. It involved planes, trains and automobiles, not to mention subways, strollers, escalators and I think, at one point, a grocery cart. We’ve always wanted a child who travels well so we could re-commence journeying like in the past — a kid you could throw on your back and scoot off here or far over there. But you just never know if a toddler has the same ideas. You never know if a toddler is a homebody who thinks a trip to the mailbox is plenty ambitious. You also hear horror stories when you’re a new parent. Planes that have asked families with screaming or misbehaving children to disembark a flight while it’s still in the air. Babies whose shrill cries are so piercing that they poke holes in […]

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Waiting on the Florida Melt

The Florida melt is not a sandwich. It doesn’t involve hamburger patties on Wonderbread with some unusual sauce that blends ketchup, beach sand and a mystery substance found in the fridge that turned a color no one has ever seen before. Rather, Florida melt is that time of year when spring finally fades, taking with it that sweet, candy smell of jasmine and the cool breezes that whisk across you like a silk kerchief. Spring fades, and quicker than you can say “scorched buttocks,” Florida’s molten lava summer kicks in. Socks melt to your feet and the jasmine catches fire. Florida melt is when climbing inside a pizza oven will give you more relief than standing on the street. It’s when the mosquitoes head up north in search of cooler skies, and you start making grilled cheese sandwiches al fresco on the asphalt in front of your house. During Florida melt, the heat pours down out of the sky, enveloping every part of your body. Your sweat glands get tested to the point that you need transplants.

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