Here’s the five-year-old, Ike. Next will be to catch the elusive critter, Zoë Ingrid.

But you’d be wrong. Dead wrong, actually. After a little questioning we discovered that these are actually the young artist’s rendering of a pair of Cylon Raiders.

Innocence restored, for a season.

Sorry, America. Football is boring.

Here’s a secret video of her song rehearsals. She chose Priscilla Ahn’s song “Wallflower,” which isn’t really a Broadway hit, but we don’t listen to many Broadway hits around here. In this respect, Alisa and I are useless to her budding career in musical theater.

Zoë’s Audition Practice from Todd Robert Petersen on Vimeo.

We’re proud of her. She auditions at 5:15 on Monday. Wish her luck.

Learn how to manage your kid’s career by taking a few courses through one of the many accredited online universities. A class or two in management and your number one star will be on the way to fame.

Thinking I am the only one
still awake, I walk the house
until I find a canted box
of light painting the hallway
in front of my daughter’s room.

I stand in the doorway
with an elbow against the jamb,
fist to my temple.

She’s contorted in her bed,
angling a book toward
the lamp. One sweep of her finger
reveals an ear.

She turns one page, then
another. How long until she
is just a snapshot on the fridge?

The photo above is a simple shot of the world through my front window. I’m not sure there are many jobs for which I am trained and suited that can outstrip having that view available. There are plenty of other reasons for wanting to live in a place, and the job should be in support of living in a place that makes everyone in your family feel right. So, that said. I’m really happy here. Who knows what that’ll mean in the future, but for now, we’re very happy.

This means I’m not necessarily going to say no to new projects and appearances, but I’m going to start selecting things that fit into the “create mode” rather than the “present mode.” There is a time and a place for present, but I feel like I’ve been presenting myself into a place where my store of created material is becoming depleted pretty fast. The tank isn’t on empty, but it’s not on full either.

I want to finish a collection of interlocking stories I’ve been working on for a really long time. It’s called Small World, and there will be six long stories of about 25-30 pages each. In each story a character and/or situation from a preceding story will take center stage. In fact, each successive story will add to the plot and subtext of the earlier stories. Yes, it is a little bit like LOST in story format.

I want to throw myself into the blog a bit more. I am working on short memoir posts. On my trip to DC this week, I’m going to be sketching these things out. I’m also working on some ideas about how a creative life and family life spark when they bump into each other. I’ll have a long first post out this Sunday.

And finally I want to work on my retelling of the old folktale “The Little Red Hen.” In my version, the hen asks for help from a pig, a cat, a goose, and a coldwar-era Soviet tactical robot.

Ike did not deny it but agreed, saying, “I put in the bones and the scary parts.” Zoë harumphed and stomped off. I don’t like to side with one kid or the other, but the Halloween parts are really the most amazing thing. It’s pretty great blown up, too. We might print it and frame it.

Zoë, without a pause, said, “Rabbit season.”

Just as quick, Ike said, “Duck season.”

Back and forth they went until Ike said suddenly, “Wait, stop. Okay, Zoë now it’s rabbit season. Boom!” Then they both collapsed into fits of laughter. It was a pleasure to watch.

I was beaming. This meant that my labors had been successful, at least partially so. You see, this is a triumph in parenting for me. I have been trying to give my kids what could be called a classical education in cartoons. I started them with Steamboat Willie and moved them on to Felix the Cat and Fleisher Brothers Superman serials. They are well acquainted with the more contemporary Pixar and Miyazaki. Thanks to YouTube and Netflix, I have been able to widen the survey to include Warner Brothers.

I had no idea if any of this was working until that morning. I am so proud of these kids. Nothing shows me a literate mind more than getting a joke. And, did they ever get it. Bravo, kids. Bravo. You make your old man proud.

1. You can’t say no to parents.
2. No throwing unless it’s a game, and the other person wants to play.
3. No one can remember rule #3.
4. No one can remember this one either.

The new principles are coming out like this:

1. You are responsible for your own mess.
2. The dining room table is not a storage unit.
3. If it’s not yours, ask.

We are also working on one kind of additional practice with the kids. They are getting frustrated a lot these days. So, when frustration mounts, particularly with something we are helping them with, my wife and I are trying to train them to say, “Thanks, but that’s not how I want it.”

We want them to say this instead of screaming.

It might be too much to ask, but if we don’t start now, it’ll just be terrible for the next 15 years of our lives.

When my wife and I married and moved to our first apartment in Utah, I started a French levain, which is a kind of mild sourdough. With just a dash of yeast and a bunch of smashed grapes and flour, I nurtured a colony of local yeast, which I have kept actively going for just about seven years (just about the length of time I have been working on my novel).

During the summers, when I’m not actively baking, I keep the levain active by changing it out at regular intervals.

I make one large boule, like this one, and two small baguettes. The first one we usually devour with butter and jam, which we did yesterday. The other baguette made it until today, when my most excellent wife handed me a turkey and blue cheese sandwich on the rest of the second baguette. I ate it slowly, and that is the treatment it deserved.

The big boy, pictured above will accompany the butternut squash soup, which is on the menu for the evening. Match that with some fresh made apple cider mixed with sparkling mineral water and an apple pie (apples from the backyard) and you have the best kind of meal, simple, fresh, homemade.

The kids were eating some almonds. I was right there, because you just don’t cut kids loose with nuts. I think they actually grill you at the pediatrician about it. You get a list of everything that a child can choke on. I thought it would be easier to list the things they can’t choke on: The Astrodome, Belgium, a crane, two shipping containers, and a rhinoceros. Zoë is nearly six and Ike is nearly three, so a person has to relax a little bit and let them try things with supervision.

Well, as it goes with old gun argument, the problem wasn’t the nuts, it was the kids. As they were sitting at the breakfast counter in the kitchen, something happened: a shoe dropped or somebody was sitting too close to somebody, and Ike started screaming at Zoë.

As he was screaming his eyes went suddenly wide and his tongue lifted and began poking out of his mouth like the tongue of a chicken. There was no sound, nothing. He didn’t know how to make the “I’m choking” universal throat grasp.

Zoë said, “Something’s wrong with Ike.”

I was right behind them both, literally 8 or 9 inches away. I reached around Ike’s middle and gave him the Heimlich three times, then looked at his face. No change. He was getting scared, and Zoë said exactly that. I picked up Ike and kicked the stool out of the way and flipped him upside down and gave him one, quick smack, right between the shoulder blades.

The next thing I heard was a scream.

I don’t know if something shot out of his mouth or what. But Ike was really pissed off at me for hitting him, until Zoë said, “Ike’s breathing again. He didn’t choke.” Then Ike figured it out and leaned into me. I stood him up and he hugged my neck. I hugged him back and listened to the snot bubbles fill and snap against his lip. I felt his little back swell and collapse. I was never more glad to hear sobbing in my life.

I said, “Buddy, that’s choking. Are you okay now?” He nodded.

Ike pointed to the ground and said, “Daddy, pick up dat stool.”

I’m pretty useful in an emergency. I go into this space I call the funnel. I don’t freak out, and in fact, the worse things get, the calmer I get. Sometimes people misread this: because I am not freaking out, I don’t understand exactly what is going on, or don’t care, or don’t value other human beings. In essence, I become a robot, usually a command-giving robot. It’s useful, but it takes a while for me to come down.

You go there, do this, then come back. You do that, this way, then do a second thing a second way, then stand still and wait for my next set of instructions.

When Ike cracked his head open, I did that to my wife. I had all the kids in the car, and we were going to the hospital. I called my wife at work and said in a very even voice, “Meet me behind the library in five minutes. We’re going to the hospital. I will explain when you get in the car.”

Later, I realized that such a phone call is probably the worst thing you could ever do to somebody. But when I get into the funnel, there is no context. There is only the next thing to do—that’s what keeps me from freaking out—there’s no time to think, what if this or what if that? There is only do this, do that.

This time, as I got down and picked up the stool and righted it and moved Ike back onto it, I had a moment to come out of the funnel, because the next thing to do was check on Ike’s breathing, which was there. I had the time to think, what if he would have choked? what if the next thing for me do have done was to call an ambulance? call Alisa and tell her Ike was dead? These were not options, the option was hold him until he calmed down enough for me tell him again, “That was choking. That is why we have to be so careful while we’re eating. We don’t want you to feel like that again. It’s too scary.”

One thing I have to keep in mind, now that I take at least a part of every day and think about how easy it is to lose a kid, is that you can’t hover over them or quarantine them or chew their almonds for them? It’s really like one of our family rules goes: “Have fun but be safe.” It goes in that order on purpose. We’d all be really safe if we just stayed in bed, but aside from the occasional extra hour on a Sunday morning.

Zoë was outraged and started calling for help. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, “Ikey’s sitting on me.”

I said, “But he has a little bottom.”

She said, “But he’s very, very heavy.”

To which I replied: “He ain’t heavy, he’s your brother.”

I was the only one smiling, but I was really, really pleased with myself.

But the cold snap that’s been getting us here in Southern Utah has motivated my wife to get pie-crazy, which is fine with me.

This pie was absolutely amazing, but our history with pie has not always been so good. When Alisa and I first got married and first started having pie in the house, we found them less than appealing. The crust was either too dry or grainy or mushy. The filling was almost always runny, though the taste was often wonderful. This led Alisa to spend a lot of time with her mother and with other members of her family trying to find all the input she could get on the making of pie — inside and out.

As Mormon people we probably ought to have been playing something by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or a Disney movie. But we weren’t. Instead we were whiling away the sabbath with jazz. This Motian record was in the CD tray right after the Chet Baker Christmas album Silent Nights, which I believe should be in every Christmas-observing American home, along with the Nashville Superpicker’s Picking on Christmas and Vince Guaraldi’s masterpiece soundtrack from A Charlie Brown Christmas. The only thing better would be a Hellcaster’s Christmas Album–I’m drafting a letter to Santa in the morning.

So, we were about halfway through the Sunday dinner when the song changed. The new track was in a minor key with a melody vaguely Jewish and John Zorn-like. Zoë (who is three) looked up with a piece of chicken in her fingers and said, “Dat song sounds like Chanukah music.” Then she popped the chicken into her mouth and chewed it up.

My wife and I looked at each other, listened intently to another two or three measures of the song, and confirmed that the melody did, in fact, have a Jewish cast to it. Then I nearly started weeping–my wife, too. I said, “Zoë you are the most wonderful little girl I have ever met.”

Zoë smiled and smiled. I was so happy that this little person could fit into my family so well. Later, as I got myself ready to draft this entry, I began thinking that my daughter is fast on her way to being a High Horser, a snob in the first degree, just like her parents, and that’s okay, I think.

I want to reward that kind of thinking. I want her to know that the connections that fire in her head are like gold to her parents. I want her to know how wonderful it feels to make connections no one else is making. I want her to know how valuble her uniqueness is.

Maybe then, during the unrelenting Saturday morning barrage of commercials for Bratz dolls and all the other dreck that is contributing to the trade deficit, maybe my child will continue to announce, “We don’t need that stuff, Dad. We have our projects. We don’t need all that. It’s just junk.”

I swear, those are her words not mine. I did not coach her on them any more than I told her that the Paul Motian was Chanukah music. My first child is becoming a marvelous person, a really wonderful girl of the first rank, someone who will probably be a horrible teenager but a wonderful, wonderful woman.

1. Zoë nicknamed one of her orange crayons “Seventy-six Thousand.” She was just moving through the house calling for it.
2. Ike has become fond of (and quite good at) spitting his food in a fine spray. One blast can coat an adult’s entire head and face.
3. Zoë was sitting on the potty the other day, saying “Gross, gross, gross, gross” for close to five minutes.
4. I’ve been jonesing for American cheese for the past few weeks. Why? Wasn’t I brought up better than that?
5. I’ve been getting very good at making accurate predictions using mathematics, and I have always been ham fisted when it comes to math. Always. So this is a curiosity.
6. A few weeks ago, I was teasing Zoë, told her that if she kept eating her yogurt with a fork she’d turn into a blueberry. She looked at me right in the eyes, her lips coated in creaminess, and she said, “Dad, you know that’s not a fact.”
7. I’ve been getting up at 5 in the morning, so I’ll have some quiet in the house. The other morning Ike got up at four. He’s going to be a gambling addict.
8. On September 26th at 9:00 p.m. Zoë asked the following question: “How are people made?”
9. I have come close to perfecting a barbecue version of pizza.
10. Zoë reiterated the “how are people made” question on October 6th at 11:00 a.m. My guess is that the answer given in September was insufficient.
11. Earlier in November we harvested apples from the trees in our backyard, but I should amend that statement: we harvested the best apples I have ever tasted from the trees in our backyard.
12. Zoë has decided to name her children Ted and Lilly.

I do understand that level of exhaustion, though. I’m just coming off a year of really, really hard work. I gained lots of weight and lost more flexibility than I thought I had left. So, I have a really good sense of why collapse is central to a parent’s life. I’ve been there and discovered how horrible it is.

What I’ve been thinking about lately, both consciously and unconsciously, is how absolutely terrible this kind of response is for the kids. Oh, it’s absolutely terrible for the grown ups, that’s obvious. But what’s worse, I’ve decided, is that a collapsed parent who has been completely dulled by daily life can offer nothing more to a child than an episode of Law and Order and a peanut butter cup.

Parents who are no longer dreaming or building or trying to better themselves show a kid that being an adult is a drag.

After the birth of Ike, our second child, I could really feel the inertia mounting. Couch potato-ness was on its way, and I had the tracking number. My wife and I both felt it, knew that we were going to become the kind of people we used to always observe with a certain degree of horror. The fatness and lethargy was the least concern

So, for all the engineers reading this–I’m putting out a call. Get me one of these, now!

But as Robert Burns once wrote, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

On Friday (April 22nd) after having her membranes stripped and taking a lovely walk up Cold Creek Canyon, Alisa started charting her contractions. By 9:00, during our favorite television show, NUMB3RS Alisa figured we’d better get to the hospital. She was contracting every 2-5 minutes, and by then she’d been doing it for over two hours.

We packed up Zoë and took her to her best friend Indie’s house, where the girls and Indie’s mother Jill had a girls night planned. While I was buckling Zoë into her car seat she looked at me and said, “Where are you and Mommy going? A meeting?”

I shook my head, and Zoë smiled. “You’re going to the hospital.”

“That’s right,” I said.

When I got back, Alisa had her bags fully packed. We did have a checklist, and really, we were impeccably organized about the whole thing. Within 20 minutes we were on the road. Alisa noticed that I we had a headlight out, and we joked that if we got pulled over, we could just say, “We know that officer. Do you know how to deliver a baby?”

The short version of the next two hours was that the nurses sent Alisa home — her contractions weren’t strong enough. So, at around midnight we glided through the Wendy’s drive-thru window and got ourselves some cheeseburgers since, the minute they let Alisa back into the hospital they’d cut her off the food.

The nurses told us to get some rest, said we’d need it. So, once we got home. I crashed. Alisa immediately jumped out of bed with a hard contraction. I said, “Good, that means you’re making progress.” I then made a mental note to put that down in the book of things not to say when your wife is going to have a baby.

Two hours later Alisa stormed into our room and said, “I’m in labor now. This is for real. I’m sorry the bathroom is a mess.” It took me a minute or two to orient myself. I was in the middle of a dream about (I am not lying about this) grading papers. Since we were already packed, it was easy to get going.

Alisa had been having skull-shattering contractions for two hours, and she just couldn’t stand it anymore. We rang ourselves into the Emergency room and made it to the Labor and Delivery wing of the hospital. The nurses took one look at us and sort of gave us the “Come on, we just told you you’re not close” look.

Alisa sort of howled, and then a nurse said, “You can go right into the room you were just in.”

They hustled about. One of them checked Alisa’s cervix. She was six to seven months pregnant herself, and as she felt around inside my wife’s body, her eyebrows lifted. “You’re at six and, like, eighty per-cent effaced. Call Dr. Lawrence.”

At this point Alisa began truly screaming. Everyone was telling her to breathe. She said that she felt like throwing up, that she was going to split into pieces, that she needed an epidural — right now! The anesthesiologist came in to the delivery room about 20 minutes later, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. The nurses were running around whispering things. They checked her again and she was at eight centimeters. There was no time for an epidural, and they tried for an intrathecal.After a few valiant tries and variations, the anesthesiologist placed his hand on my wife’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry. I can’t do it. You’re going to have to do it without the drugs.”

Alisa’s eyes went full moon. She shreiked and wailed and said over and over again, “I can’t have this baby. I can’t.”

The doctor came in, checked Alisa, and said, “You’re going to have this baby in the next ten minutes.” Alisa said, “What?” then she asked all the women in the room if they had given birth. The doctor held up three fingers. One nurse said she had 4, the other three. The doctor smiled and said, “So, that makes ten between the three of us.”

Alisa looked at each of them in turn and said, “Okay, let’s get started.”

She only had to push for about five to seven minutes, and Isaac Oscar was born. The doctor set him on Alisa’s belly and Alisa said, “You’re beautiful. You’re gorgeous. We can have another one of these, can’t we, Todd? We can do this again…can’t we?”

I said, “Let’s wait to see if this one runs us a mouth, then we’ll decide.”

After forty-five minutes of cleverly keeping clear of all the Easter candy, we came up to the register, and I drew the short straw. In the grocery story, my wife and I split duties: one of us handles the groceries, and to other takes our kid to playland. Guess which duty I pulled.

The people who put grocery stores together know what they are doing. When one parks a grocery cart in front of a register and begin unloading, one’s child is positioned right in front of a rack of candy. Even if the child is full, even if the child is eating two suckers (one in each hand), even if the child has been knocked out, they will reach for this candy…

And then scream if they can’t get it.

So my wife and I have come to the point where we must split the chore and take our kid away from the candy. That’s right, we are smart; we take our little girl away from the candy and set her up in the playland, which is a little arcade and coin-operated ride section of the Wal-Mart situated right next to the registers.

You see, they are brilliant; they will extract your money one way or another.

As a side note, there is a brilliant and fascinating section in Eric Schlosser’s book, Fast Food Nation in which he describes the race between Disney and McDonalds to capture parents’ money by enticing children into a fantasy world. Out of that race we get two things I despise: Disneyland and Playlands. This kind of salesmanship is lower than low. In fact, as far as I am concerned it’s no longer sales but pure, unadulterated mongering, complete with one of the best diversionary tactics on the planet.

Instead of complaining about the way these corporations have our children shilling their crap, we have had our attentions turned to the problems of media content. The nudity and violence of the R-rated movie (not, of course, intended for children) proves the need for the toy, meal, clothing marketing package. Their content is child-friendly, just the thing a parent needs to keep Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarentino at bay.

My wife and I have been able to navigate this business pretty well, so far. We don’t watch a bunch of television. Zoë likes old Felix the Cat cartoons better than whatever the hell they have on the tube these days. We don’t know.

That’s not entirely true, we have bowed a little to Dora the Explorer, because Dora is a can-do little girl and that’s an okay message for now. And in the Wal-Mart playland we’ve not told our child that the horse, boat, truck, motorcycle actually trot, pitch, rumble, or vroom. Up until last week she thought of these things as play sculptures, like in the park. You use them for pretending.

Saturday, my daughter Zoë and I headed into the playland. To my surprise, and Zoë’s amazement, we found a young dad and his eighteen-month old little girl in the Tigger Boat, not still on placid seas as it is when Zoë and I play on it. Saturday it was pitching its way across the bounding main, and Tigger was saying all kinds of Tiggery things about boats and silliness and being good, good friends.

As it will happen when she’s amazed, Zoë’s mouth went round and she gasped and she lifted her finger to point at the object of her attraction. “Daddy,” she eventually gasped. “Daddy, that boat is moving.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking for some explanation. I couldn’t say it was broken or that the little girl had special powers or that, heaven forbid, the girl’s father had some skills, abilities, or connections that I lacked.

After a few more seconds of noise and rumbling the boat slowed, Tigger bid his passenger farewell. The little girl and her father debarked. As they left, the other father, damn him, looked down at Zoë and said, “Now it’s your turn.”

Zoë stared at me with deep and palpable yearning. It was obvious to me that I could not simply redirect her attentions to the still ice cream truck or the horse frozen mid-gallop over by the change machine. And with a “good” father within spitting distance, Zoë would know the difference between me and the preferable parent. She would know that I am the mean father, the parsimonious father, the father who will not unlock the joys of the universe with the small round “money” I have recently begun to allow her to fish out of the couch and put in the bib pocket of her overalls.

So I conceded…

I hoisted her into the boat and told her to grab the wheel. I plucked a quarter from my pocket, let it glint before her eyes, and then thumbed it into to machine, which roared to life, bounding and Tiggering for a minute or two until it slowed and stopped.

Zoë, still clutching the helm, looked up at me, smiling. The expression on her face said, “That’s good, Dad. That was a good ride.” I smiled back, then she wheeled and pointed her finger at the horse. “Make that one go, too,” she said. “Put money in that one.”

Thankfully her mother appeared with the groceries bagged. She was folding the long receipt in half and then in half again.

I helped Zoë down, and she ran to my wife. “He make it go. Daddy make it go.”

She was so excited about the whole thing, with the ride and with the fact that I did this for her. So how could I help but feel incredible ambivalent about the whole thing. I was able to work magic for my little girl, but now we were trapped. She knew I could bring these inanimate sculptures to life, even for a minute, and in her world, that is power.

She would also know that I could choose not to use that power, and every time I withheld it would be a slight against her. It would be me choosing to love my money more than I loved her. I could see it. My wife could see it. Our lives had changed. We were in the system.

We have become fully-baptized parents, and it will take the rest of our lives to set things right.