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| Father and daughter |
Twyla Birch is an L.A. girl, and no amount of reminiscing about her parents’ early lives and young adulthood on the Great Lakes will change that. It’s a beginning I never expected, but one I welcome with open arms, wide eyes and the big smile of an Angeleno who’s tasted pride in calling the city home.
(OK, the eyes have been a bit red and blurry since April and the smile has more to do at this point with Twyla’s smiles, pouts and new physical achievements than anything Los Angeles has to offer. But allow this new blogger a little flourish for an opening post.)
What’s to follow here on 10th Street is a lot of writing, photos and videos that I will weave together into what I hope will be an interesting, inspiring, funny, occasionally heartbreaking but, above all, entertaining story about being a first-time father to a daughter in Los Angeles.
I’ll explore how the city can be a wildly amazing place to raise a child. It is a multicultural menagerie, a little globe in 468.7 oddly-shaped square miles, with incredible large-scale natural spaces to explore and great weather to do it. L.A. is a wonderful place to expose kids to food, with much of it on offer at fun, colorfully decorated trucks, and the music offerings can’t be topped.
I’ll also let the city have it when it proves an exhausting, trying place to raise a child. The lack of adequate, affordable daycare -- so many are either costly or have a two-year waiting list -- can be maddening for two middle-class, working parents. And while the city is surrounded by mountains, oceans and deserts to explore, L.A. has a terrible dearth of neighborhood parks that seriously degrades the quality of life here.
However, the jury of our 3.8 million peers have ruled: this city’s beauty far outweighs its blemishes, scars and open wounds, albeit with a lot of makeup and sunshine.
In the coming months, I’ll use this space to write stories about the delicate financial and personal calculus of choosing daycare for my daughter. I’ll share interesting, silly ways to spend time with an infant and some that are sure to fail. We’ll talk about playing sports and exercising as a parent of a newborn. I’ll take you on adventures shopping for a baby, from the city’s posh boutiques to some downright practical consignment shops with plenty of bounty. It’s never too early to talk books, and we’ll do some of that here, with an emphasis on where to find them, which ones rock, and which ones not. We’ll hopefully meet some L.A.-based children’s authors along the way. I’ll document fun and hopefully cheap ways to expose a baby to music and dance. And I’ll publish a regular series of videos with advice from Angelenos about what a baby growing up in Los Angeles today needs to know.
Why call this 'Burp!'? It’s onomanopoeic. It just feels good to say, almost like the relief a baby gets from actually burping. Also, it is such a visceral part of initial parenting. It is a physical necessity of being a baby. A burp, in the early days is so often the dividing line between pain and pleasure. Burping provides relief, physical and emotional. “Burp!” is what you want to yell at 3 a.m., when you know a good burp is what your baby needs, when, at your lowest moments, gentle pats on the back turn to near karate chops. It’s also what you say with glee after a big one comes out of that tiny little belly.
Twyla is 2.5 months now. She’s walked the city’s halls of power and downtown streets. She’s driven from the Valley over the Santa Monica Mountains to Malibu and dined on the coast. She watched a once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse as the sun set on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House. She’s walked a hip stretch of Highland Park and perused the nation’s largest indoor year-round craft marketplace at the Port of Los Angeles, part of San Pedro’s hoped-for renaissance. And she’s been under and around the towers built in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s by the Italian immigrant Simon Rodia in Watts, structures, it seems, were intended to remind adults about our shared humanity and the pleasure of creativity. The structures make instant sense to children. I’ll put some of those adventures down here and plenty of new ones yet to come. And I’ll hopefully bring you some perspectives other than my own with interviews and occasional guest writers.
I hope you will be entertained and curious about what you find here. I hope you’ll comment and start conversations with me and other visitors. Send me ideas for what to write about and things to do with Twyla. Call me to task when my gaze is too narrow, and, occasionally, pat me on the back for doing a pretty damn good job as a first-time father to a daughter in Los Angeles.
