During the eight month run-up to Orion’s arrival we had ample time to think about “parenthood” and “parenting” (also “pregnancy” and “childbirth.”) I knew anything I thought about “parenthood” or “parenting” would remain strictly theoretical. I thus went out of my way to avoid piling yet more theory into my brain, primarily by not reading anything at all on the subjects. This attitude routinely horrifies our highly educated parent-peers, and runs counter to my usual habit when undertaking a new activity. But parenthood is not at all like gardening.

Also, a lot of parenting theory (as manifest in books, magazines, and websites) is panicky, perfectionist nonsense, and the last thing we need right now is more stress. For what it’s worth, we don’t yet feel like we’ve missed something really vital in the shelves of books we’re not reading. After all, parenthood predates literacy by a billion years.

As the koan says, “how can you fill a full cup?”

We accumulated a lot of theory regardless. Most of which is informed by a horror at the passivity of modern childhood, as symbolized by strollers and televisions. This is adjunct to our attitude about adulthood (OK, life), which I might express as: “engage life physically.” I’m struggling now to formulate our exact theories on parenting, e.g.:

• children aren’t passengers in or spectators of their own lives
• children small enough to carry can be carried
• children who can walk should walk
• parents can move at kid-speed; don’t use props (e.g. strollers) to accelerate kids to adult-speed for the sake of convenience
• conversely, children can be engaged in many (most?) adult activities, like cleaning, cooking, shopping, working, dog-walking, swimming, bicycling, and running
• there is such a thing as too much structure
• and you can probably give kids too much freedom, too
• we aren’t raising a child, we’re raising a person
• children learn by example; if you want your child to practice Behavior X, you need to practice Behavior X (and you probably can’t fake it)
• the home is a lousy place to hang out
• it’s OK sometimes to let a kid cry it out; this is how they learn to cope

However! We are now past the point where theory collides with practice. Reality has already forced us to reconsider our attitudes about:

• caesarian sections
• cloth diapers (which interfere with healing in the umbilical area)
• automated swings (at a certain point you get tired of swaying)
• books about parenting (specifically, we often find ourselves referring to a child health manual given to us by a friend)
• crying it out (Jenny is much better about this than me, and she also has a finer sense of when Orion is not coping)

On the other hand, we impress ourselves with how much we’re doing with Orion. We know people who didn’t take their newborns out of the house for weeks. Orion’s made one big trip every day since last weekend (when we went to Target). At the minimum he accompanies us when we walk Bismarck to Burlingame park. Yesterday we went to a movie (Horton Hears a Who, at the Kennedy School’s “Family Matinee,” which we figured would be a pretty safe place if he started fussing [which he did]).