Nostalgia or Hipster?

No one truly claims to be hipsters in this family, yet the family all has some hipness to it. Like have you ever see babyboy move, there's literally a lot of one sided hip action. Babygirl has always been on the cutting edge of putting an outfit together, these days she's seems to be married to her pink converse, and has finally taken to wearing socks. Babymama is the hip dressed prof at the college, so hip that she may be the only one in rural TN sporting cowl neck sweaters that get mistaken for a backwards hoody.

There are things that as parents that Babymama and Babydaddy do for unknown motivations such as Babymama has been slowly amassing old school Little People playhouse and house accessories from ebay for the past 2 years for the kids. She also introduced Follow that Bird to Babygirl, that Sesame Street movie was made in the 80's. She also got Babygirl interested in the Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake cartoons, and also sports s new but retro looking Rainbow Bright T-shirt. Babygirl has been known to watch Yogi Bear since we don't have cable (Babydaddy was given a box set of Yogi Bear Hana Barbara cartoons way back when). Babygirl's has seen more hours out of Snagglepuss and Yakee Doodle than Babydaddy has during his whole childhood. To the point he's scared she'll let a "heavens to megatroid", or "exit stage left" slip at school.

How many other parents like to recite a little Billy Madison when washing their child's hair. Babydaddy has been telling Babygirl that conditioner leaves her hair "silky and smooth." He wonders at what age she'll realize that was not just fact but also a quote from a character Adam Sandler played. Perhaps all kids will reach an age where they will have watched Billy Madison on youtube or something, and all have this eureka moment.

Both Babygirl and Babyboy are into the Letter People an educational video back in the day to help kids learn about letters(google it, it's pretty entertaining). Babyboy has also been known to sport vintage Cleveland Indian paraphernalia as well.

Are we hipsters just re-living our childhood through our children? Or is our stuff from our childhood infinitely better than what's available today. Are the moral lessons of GI Joe really on par with the moral lessons from Veggie Tales? While the new Transformers movies are ok, the original Transformer Movie with the banging soundtrack was even better.

Remember the days when the Nintendo wouldn't work, you would pop out the cartridge and blow on it. To this day Babymama does this with anything that does not work. Lo and behold Babygirl does this as well. At what point in college will she encounter other friends that do the same and discover that this was a phenomenon to solving technological problems in the mid 1980's?

This daddy ain't sure where all the retro 80's stuff is coming from, perhaps it has to do with our perceptions of what is safe, and well the 80's were safe according to our small world view than it is today in 2011. Will irreparable damage be caused by such exposures? Only time will tell.

Go Play Ball!

For the past month babydaddy got to play softball on a weekly basis, sometimes playing more than once a week. Ya see, babydady got asked to play on babymama's colleague's faculty softball team, that primarily plays against other student in the university's intramural league.

Babydaddy having never played organized baseball, softball or T-Ball in his life, this was going to be comical at best. Nuances of the game from a defensive positioning and strategy, etc. Many times I was just focused on two things, make contact with stick and ball, and run as fast as possible to the next base. In the field well, after couple of games in right field, it was clear I was better off being the catcher, which I didn't mind.

It's been humbling and fun for babydaddy to play a sport that he knows he's not good at. It's also good that it was competitive, but at the same time due to babydaddy's own skill level, he couldn't take the game so seriously.

Sometimes when opportunities present itself to us dad's, we have to take it. Even if it may be a humbling experience or something that's embarrassing. The need to get out, to have fun outside of family makes for good life balance, and if anything it's a great story to share with the kids. At the end of the day, they don't care if you won or lost, but just knowing that you're a "softball player" or that you have other roles than just official swing pusher, and lunch maker gives children other ways to identify/interact with their dads.