By J Matthew Nespoli

Today was one of the best days of all-time.

Until Keller tried to ruin it with his incessant crying.

The bride and I took Keller up to Malibu, strapped him to my chest, went mountaineering, rock climbing, and tree climbing.  It was exhilarating and Keller loved every bit of it. It was a wonderful father-son bonding experience and something that I will never forget.

And then we got in the car, during Friday rush hour, and attempted to drive home.

Prior to this little jaunt, we’ve never had a problem with Keller in the car. We’d play a little Eddie Vedder and he would knock out.

Not today.

He started screaming the second we strapped him in, and didn’t stop until two hours later when we pulled into our driveway. I’m not sure what it was exactly: maybe the hiking and rock climbing and all the adrenaline that goes with it, had been a wonderful taste of freedom for him, and after he simply could not come down enough to chill out in a car.

Or−maybe he was just being dickish.

Regardless of the reason, I have now figured out why God makes babies so cute.

It’s for their own good, their protection, their means of survival.

It’s so that we don’t drown them.

By the time we got home, I had already been fantasizing for at least an hour about different means of payback and torture that I would exercise on my baby. However, as soon as we parked, and I picked him up out of that babyseat, he smiled at me, and his cute disarming smile was all it took to completely erase all those feelings of angst he’d been making me feel.

God made babies cute so that they could get away with murder.

I’m positive that my baby could poop in my face, puke down my throat (both of which he’s done), scream for a day and a half, call me on my cell phone and tell me the score of the Clipper game before I was able to watch it, hit on my bride, kick my dog, and poke me in the eyeballs repeatedly as I tried to sleep, and still, after all that, if he smiled at me, I would instantly forgive him.

Thus is the power of being a cute baby.

All animals in nature have been gifted with some form natural, innate, self-defense mechanism. The turtle has it’s shell to crawl into when it’s under attack. The camelion changes colors and disappears into it’s environment, and the puffer fish blows up to about ten times it’s normal size in order to scare away predators.

The baby is cute.

It God made babies to be ugly creatures, if they came out looking like the offspring of Ron Jeremy and Rosanne Barr, then the population of the world would probably be about forth percent of what it now is. People would not be as inclined to want to make a baby. But when lovers finally did swap DNA to create a little mini-me, then the first time they took it driving to Malibu and had to listen to it wail for two hours without stopping, they would prudently get out of their car, find the nearest church, and leave the ugly little shit on the front doorsteps.

Now maybe that’s a slight exaggeration (stressing slight), but you get the idea. Babies cuteness factor is a powerful thing. It causes beautiful, graceful women to stop dead in their tracks, approach some middle-aged, balding, old, smelly man, and flirt with them as they oogle the baby; it causes grown-ass men to make idiotic faces and babble baby talk that is four octaves above Michael Jackson’s most ambitious “he-he, Shamoan!”; it causes fiscally responsible people to completely lose their minds, run out to the nearest baby store, and buy every product they can get their hands on that might possibly stand an outside chance of making that baby giggle.

Simply stated, their cuteness dumbs us down.

And thank God for that, because my little sexy cutie pie is about the greatest buddy and coolest little mini-dude I’ve ever known.

And I’m sure you feel the same about yours.

Please buy Matt’s debut novel, Broken.

BUY IT HERE!

Matt Nespoli, J. Matthew Nespoli and Matthew Nespoli are all copyright material for Naked Word Surfer © 2009-2010

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J. Matthew Nespoli

Keller has discovered his penis.

I always knew this would eventually happen, but I figured it would likely happen around the age of five or six, about the same age that I was getting into trouble for masturbating behind the coat rack during recess.

Nope, not Keller, not yet five months old and he is addicted to tickling his Richie Cunningham.

99% of the day, his little Johnny Depp is wrapped up in a diaper. So, the only time he can get his hands on it is when we are changing him, or when he’s in the bath.

And that’s fine. Really. We are both fine with it. Except for one major thing…

Typically, when we are changing him, we are doing so because he has dropped a deuce in the diaper. Keller, who has already been documented numerous times as being a dirty and filthy self-absorbed jerk, doesn’t care about the reason he is naked. He just cares that he is naked and he knows that his little Siegfried and Roy is within grasp. So, he yanks it. Before we are even able to clean the dookie off of it, he has the little Antonio Banderas in his grasp. Thus, his hand is soiled with nasty dookie. Typically, his next move is towards the mouth. This is about the time that the bride starts having a heart attack. In fact, recently, changing him has become a two person effort. One of us holds down his arms, as he screams in frustration for not being able to get at his Dikembe Mutumbo, and the other cleans it up. This method is effective, but does not work while I’m at work. I fear that if this continues that before we change him, we may have to tie him to the table, much like a mental patient in a hospital for the criminally insane.

Today, my bride called me at work, half laughing and half hysterical with tears. She was totally cracking up, losing her mind. This has been a long and slow process, but my bride, who was only about 23% crazy when I married her, is now a full-fledged 87% whack job. I love her, but it’s true. Anyway, she was laughing and crying something hysterical about Keller grabbing his Johnny Rotten and dirtying up his hands and then wiping them all over his chest and belly. Thus, she took off all his clothes and put him in the bath. In the bath, she tried to keep him off his Mick Jaegger. She decided that she was going to forcefully keep him away from it so that he would stop the habit before it became too much trouble. However, my son is a Nespoli, and his love for his penis is likely as great, if not greater, than his love for his mother. Again, sad but true. Anyway, she restrained him, his face got beat red with anger, and unable to do anything else in response to the restraining, he shat the tub.

This was her melting point.

If you’ve never actually listened to a person as the cross the boundary from irritation to complete insanity, it is not something I recommend. Not entertaining. Not one bit. Actually, it’s a bit horrifying. More horrifying, in fact, than watching your baby put his sticky dookie covered fingers into his own mouth.

Keller, you made your mother into an insane person. I hope you are proud of yourself.

Please buy Matt’s debut novel, Broken.

BUY IT HERE!

Matt Nespoli, J. Matthew Nespoli and Matthew Nespoli are all copyright material for Naked Word Surfer © 2009-2010

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J. Matthew Nespoli

I don’t think my son hates me. But sometimes I think he doesn’t like me.

Today my son vomited in my mouth.

We’ve now hit the trifecta.

At four weeks, he peed into my mouth during a baby photo shoot.

At nine weeks, he pooped into my mouth at an attempted movie theatre changing.

And now, at 18 weeks, he vomited into my mouth.

I had him over my head, lifting him up, bringing him down for kisses, lifting him back up in the air. He was laughing and smiling and I thought he was having a good time, but in reality, his laughs were dubious in nature. Like Dr Evil in Austin Powers, he was simply chuckling at his evil plan to vomit in my mouth.

And then he did.

And I promise you, as soon as I can save nine hundred dollars for a ticket to England, I’m taking him there and selling him on the black market.

White babies can bring in big dollars…

Or so I’ve heard.

Anyway, since returning from my near fatal excursion to Peru, my son has seemed to hold a grudge for my disappearance. I tried to tell him that it was for business and hopefully the trip will result in us being able to save enough money for him to go to college one day and drink and get naked with 19 year old co-eds, but he just wasn’t buying it. Nearly everyday, around five pm, when my bride takes her break from Keller and goes out running errands, or maybe seeing her new boyfriend (I’m getting suspicious); Keller starts wailing.

We’re not talking about crying; crying I can handle. Keller cries when he’s hungry, when he’s pooped, when he can’t poop, and when he’s tired. These are not cries. These are, Dude, you’re kind of a dick−I want my mommy wails of anger.

She typically leaves at around five and comes back at seven. In this time, he wails, without stopping, for one hundred and twenty minutes. I have no idea how he can scream that long and that loud without either blowing out his voicebox, having a stroke, or breaking all the fine china in the kitchen… Wait, we have no fine China, but still.

Two hours into this, I have sang and danced with him, read him books, rocked him, patted his butt, changed his diaper, tickled him, tried to feed him, and just about every other parenting strategy I have in my arsenal and nothing works.

Nothing.

The bride walks in, looks at Keller, and not only does he stop wailing, but he starts laughing. I feel as if his laughter is directed at me, Dude, you’re such a gullable dick. I just got you to run around like a maniac for two hours. Ah Daddy, you’re good entertainment. Mommies home now, you can finally go lay down and have a heart attack.

Seriously, he’s a jerk.

I realize that leaving him for two weeks may have created some kind of trust issue. And I realize that he is too young too understand that

1. It was for work and
2. I was trapped in a flood of biblical proportions

So, you tell me, what can I possibly do to earn this child’s trust back?

Or, at the very least, how do I get him to stop physically assaulting me with feces and vomit?

Please buy Matt’s debut novel, Broken.

BUY IT HERE!

Matt Nespoli, J. Matthew Nespoli and Matthew Nespoli are all copyright material for Naked Word Surfer © 2009-2010

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J. Matthew Nespoli

Keller has started talking.

Or at least he thinks he has, anyway.

For months now, daily, we’ve been reading to Keller, singing to him, talking to him. Just in the past week or two, he discovered his own vocal cords. And now we can’t get him to shut up.

All day long, from the moment he wakes, until the moment he falls asleep, he is babbling. Maybe what he has to say is of vital importance, or maybe, being that he is my kid, he just likes to run his mouth, but either way, I’ve heard enough.

“Keller, dude, I don’t understand what you’re saying. Kindly shut it,” I find myself saying about ten times a day.

I’m not sure he understands me.

We live in a world of noise. We’re surrounded by it. There is no escaping it. The sound of the ocean as we fall asleep, the sound of the wind beating on the windows, the sound of car horns blaring as the go by our house, motorcycles with amplified exhaust systems, music coming from the neighbor’s stereo, the loose manhole that makes a noise every time a car runs over it, the random creaking in the house at the foot of the ghosts that wander it, birds chirping on their way to the ocean to get lunch, etc, etc. We hear this noise all day everyday and most of it fades into the background; we’ve been desensitized and trained to the point where we barely recognize it anymore.

I promise you, that this babies babbling has not faded into the background. In fact, it’s anything but.

I love my son. And I love that he’s growing and advancing. But he has discovered his vocal chords before discovering his volume control or the off switch, and frankly, this is causing mild insanity. If I turned on am radio, put it on Rush Limbaugh, turned in up full blast, and laid my head on it for the entire day, I imagine it would not make half as bat shit crazy as I’ve become in the last two weeks, listening to my child rant.

Is this how others feel about my own ranting? Do I make them insane?

There are only three times that he stops talking over the course of a day:

1. when he falls asleep
2. when he can’t talk because his mouth is too busy crying
3. when he is either eating or vomiting.

Thus, we either shove a bottle into his mouth or try to rock him to sleep, about twenty times a day.

It’s gotten to the point that when he does finally fall asleep, we put the apartment on lockdown. We shut his door, put on gentle music, turn the TV volume down so low that it is barely audible, and talk to each other in hushed whispers… that is, if we dare to talk at all.

Total madness.

I long for the day to arrive when my son and I can go for a walk on the beach together (we do that daily now, but we aren’t walking, I’m carrying him, and my back is too old for that crap), and discuss the merits of life, politics, sports, girls, philosophy, whatever. That is a day I dream about. However, recent weeks have me beginning to fear that day. What if my child is like me, only worse. What if he never finds the off button? What if he rants and raves and rants morning-noon-and night, with seemingly no direction or any real goal in mind? What if he’s just as annoying at fifteen as he is at five months? You know, it’s said that love for a child is unconditional, but I just can’t by that… unless you are allowed to unconditionally love your child from afar. For if he doesn’t soon find the mute button deep within himself, then we, as parents, won’t have to worry about empty nest syndrome when he leaves us for college, because by then, we will likely be living on some beautiful beach in the Caribbean, sending postcards to our eight year old in Pennsylvania, care of his grandparents, asking him how school has been, and telling him we will be looking forward to his annual Christmas visit.

So, Keller, let this be a warning.

Pipe down!

Please buy Matt’s debut novel, Broken.

BUY IT HERE!

Matt Nespoli, J. Matthew Nespoli and Matthew Nespoli are all copyright material for Naked Word Surfer © 2009-2010

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By J. Matthew Nespoli

Every night, to get my child to sleep, I play Pearl Jam’s Black and sing along until Keller falls asleep.

I get some shit from friends with children and family for this.

They say things like:

You can’t feed your child rock music, it’s too stimulating

Or

The lyrics are too adult for a baby

Or

Babies don’t like that; they want to hear nursery rhymes.

Sometimes, people seem so brainwashed and irrational to me that I simply can not process their way of thinking. I mean, what do they possibly think will happen?

• That by the time my kid is two that he will be a tatted up, head banging, heroin addicted, long haired, freak?
• That he will worship the devil because I played Pearl Jam for him?
• That he will be affected by the rebellion of rock, turn gay to spite us, shave his head, and become an anarchist?

I honestly do not know what they think, but we’ve gotten some seriously nasty responses for this.

So, if everyone thinks this is bad for my child, why do I insist on doing it?

Five reasons:

1. We’re different. We do what feels right
2. He genuinely likes it. It puts him to sleep
3. Nursery rhymes make me insane. I want my child to have good musical taste.
4. He’s already developing a good sense of rhythm from it. Rhythm impacts intelligence.
5. Have you ever really listened to the lyrics in nursery rhymes?

Any parent who thinks that the lyrics in Pearl Jam, or any other rock music, is too adult for a child, needs to take the cotton balls of conformity out of their ears and listen to the lyrics in our most beloved nursery rhymes. These lyrics are, by far, more adult than any rock music I play my child.

Here are a few examples:

Ring around the rosie,

Pocket full of posie

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

A nursery rhyme about the greatest plague in history, and burning human bodies in the streets to kill off the disease?  Nice.

When I was a bachelor I lived by myself,

And all the bread and cheese I got I laid up on the shelf;

The rats and the mice, they made such a strife

I had to go to London to buy me a wife

The rhyme goes on, and by the end, this woman, who is clearly a victim of sexual slavery, is being transported in a wheelbarrow, and has a nasty fall.

Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,

Had a wife and couldn’t keep her;

He put her in a pumpkin shell,

And there he kept her very well.

Peter’s wife is going to leave him, so he locks her up and keeps her prisoner? Yeah, I totally want my kid down with that.

As I was going to St. Ives,

I met a man with seven wives.

Polygamy? Cool.

All of the above examples were from a book I received as a present for Keller. They were the first three rhymes in the book. And the rest of them do not get any better:

The old woman in the shoe puts her zillion kids to bed without feeding them.

The hickety pickety hen lays eggs for gentlemen.

Diddle dumpling John seems to have a masturbation problem.

The cats of Kilkenny beat the shit out of each other and both end up dying.

Georgie Porgie kissed girls against their will.

Old Mother Hubbard’s dog likes to ride goats.

The pig shaving barber is addicted to snuff.

Jack Sprat had an obese wife who always licked his plates clean.

There’s a giant who makes bread out of the bones of Englishmen.

There’s a thief named Taffy who gets caught stealing by his friend and the friend beats him to death with a bone.

Please buy Matt’s debut novel, Broken.

BUY IT HERE!

Matt Nespoli, J. Matthew Nespoli and Matthew Nespoli are all copyright material for Naked Word Surfer © 2009-2010

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By J. Matthew Nespoli

Please buy Matt’s debut novel, Broken.

BUY IT HERE!

Matt Nespoli, J. Matthew Nespoli and Matthew Nespoli are all copyright material for Naked Word Surfer © 2009-2010

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Please buy Matt’s debut novel, Broken.

BUY IT HERE!

Matt Nespoli, J. Matthew Nespoli and Matthew Nespoli are all copyright material for Naked Word Surfer © 2009-2010

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As I mentioned in the last chapter, we don’t yet have a toddler, but I have a nephew who’s of toddler age. He’s a lot of fun and though chasing him around is exhausting, I really look forward to Keller being that age. I often wonder why I’m so drawn to my nephew. I mean, honestly. He’s a giant pain in the ass, and about the most selfish person in the world (not a reflection on him, all toddlers are self-absorbed brats). I guess it’s partly because they are just so damned cute.  Physically they have none of the traits associated with aging. It’s also because they’re so much damned fun. Everything to a toddler is about playing and having fun. Their life revolves around it. They are 24/7 party animal;, like college kids minus the debauchery.

What is most amazing to me is the curiosity of a toddler, as well as their ability to imitate. Cameron, my nephew, is constantly asking questions, inquisitive about everything.

“Why do you have a baby, Uncle Matt?”

“Where did you get the baby?”

“Does the baby like transformers too?”

and so on.

I do my best to answer his questions honestly. I want to be the kind of dad that encourages my kid’s curiosity and creativity, but I can also see how fatiguing that could be.

Two years ago, when Cameron was two, I taught him to run up to girls, grab their boobs, and yell “boobies!” I thought it was hilarious and so did he. His mother was much less thrilled.

“Great, Matt. Thank you very much!” she yelled.

“Relax, Monica. He’ll forget about it in a day.”

Fast forward two years, my bride has Cameron in the supermarket and bumps into one of her friends. Cameron reaches out, grabs her boob and yells, “Booby!” and then starts giggling like a little tyrannical maniac.

See, kids don’t know the definitions of words, but they do know when they’ve found a powerful one. If a child finds words that elicit any kind of reaction: anger, laughter, outrage, you ‘d better believe that the child will wield those words around like literary num chucks. So, by giving Cameron ‘booby’ and laughing when he used it, I was, in essence, guaranteeing about four years of inappropriate behavior for his mother.

I’m sorry, Monica. Truly.

I admire the raw honesty and lack of inhibitions of a toddler. They are all id, no superego. They run around like little drunks for the duration of their toddler years. They have no filter between their thoughts or impulses and their actions, and it’s a beautiful and honest thing. If a child is hungry, he’ll tell you. If he wants to play, he’ll tell you. If he has too poop, he’ll tell you. No matter where you are.

During the vows at a wedding, I once heard a relative’s toddler loudly say “Mommy, I need to poop now.” Half of the congregation started laughing. It was funny as hell, but I doubt the bride was as amused.

Once last year the bride and I babysat for little Cameron. It was about 11:30pm and he was still up and getting a bit cranky.  My bride started scratching his arms, and he liked that.

“Yeah.  Scwratch, scrawtch, scrawtch,” he said.

Five minutes later, “Scwratch here,” he said, touching his belly.

Five minutes after that, “Scwratch here,” he said, touching his penis.

We erupted into laughter and then Rea composed herself to explain to him how it wasn’t appropriate for her to “scwratch” him there. But that’s the great thing about kids. If they want something they say it, and they totally get away with it.

I’ve been accused of being one to lack a filter between my thoughts or impulses and my mouth. However, when I say or do something inappropriate, it isn’t met with as much enthusiasm.

One year, playing volleyball on the beach, I decided to take off all my clothes and run around the beach aimlessly, for absolutely no reason other than I felt like being naked. This did not go over well. Nobody laughed, my bride was not amused, nor did anybody excuse the behavior with a remark like “He’s just a child.” (Though sometimes I do receive comments like that).

At some point in all our lives, parents start teaching their children about social behavior. We teach them what is socially appropriate and what is not so they can function in society. In a way this is necessary, but it also is the beginning of teaching a child to lie, as well as the beginning of the end of his lack of humility and creativity.

Until I was about five years old, I would drop trou often and randomly and just start running around. I couldn’t stand being in clothes and would get out of them as often as possible. I’m still like this to a degree, but I’ve learned that I can’t do this at work, or at church, or at a social gathering (unless there’s a hot tub). I often wonder what the world would be like if we never squashed this brutal honesty in children. It would probably be total chaos, but it’d also be a lot of fun.

Maybe tomorrow I will try approaching a woman in the grocery store, grabbing her chest and yell, “Booby!” I’ll let you know how that works out for me.

Matt Nespoli, J. Matthew Nespoli and Matthew Nespoli are all copyright material for Naked Word Surfer © 2009

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