Burp!

A new dad's account of the trials, tribulations 

and ecstasies of raising a little girl in Los Angeles
By Richie Duchon, father of Twyla

Spirited Away | August 13

It’s hard not to believe Twyla, at 3.5 months old, responded to my sadness this past weekend with her smile.

My wife and I put our 14-year-old chocolate lab to sleep on Saturday after it became clear her spirit had outlived her body.

We cried a lot after it was over. And as we sought solace and distraction in Griffith Park, Twyla smiled. A lot. This week the images tell the story.

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Travels with Twyla

July 30, 2012

Waiting for the Red Line and still out and about with a baby in L.A. | Photo via Richie Duchon for 10thStreetLA

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me in the year leading up to the birth of my daughter, “Congratulations! You’re life’s over,” or, “Get to the bar now, cause you won’t see the inside of one for a loooong time,” I’d have about $15.

That’s not a college fund, but it has happened and it highlights a dominant paradigm that I’d like to explode: That parenting somehow means you stop living your life and that it’s about sitting at home with your infant dangling garish toys for her to grab and waiting for her to roll over, sit up or crawl.

Don’t get me wrong I spend epochs of time doing that stuff. For the record: Twyla can hold toys on her own and roll over (when she’s in her birthday suit), and we’re practicing sitting up, too. My point is I’ve been to the bar (with her) and had more fun out of the house in the three months she’s been with us than in the year before.

Life isn’t over when you have a kid. It gets better. Here’s how it did for us:

It started with a mind for Twyla to grow up curious about her home, with an urge to explore her city and eventually the world. As with most habits, I know she’ll get that from us, or she won’t get it at all.

As I dreamed of a future taking my daughter around to museums, beaches, mountains, book stores and ice cream shops, I felt a little static in my brain, a kind of cognitive dissonance. How would she pick up those habits to travel wide when our experience of late has been to go to the same museums, beaches, mountains, book stores and ice cream shops again and again.

It occurred to me we’ve lived in Los Angeles for a few years now and there are scores and scores of neighborhoods, i.e. scores and scores of book stores, cafes, markets, shops, restaurants and bars we’ve never even laid eyes on.

Figuring that out led me to launch the splendidly informal, perfectly unstructured L.A. Neighborhood Tours and Snores initiative for our family - an effort to go places, see things and talk to people we’ve never met before, adventures so life-affirming that we’re all ready to sleep afterward. Snores is also a reference to the fact that Twyla sleeps through most of the tours.

I put my faith in that idea usually attributed to Woody Allen: 80 percent of success is just showing up.

Our first stop was Northeast L.A.’s Highland Park, the neighborhood that’s on the tip of many tongues and written about often of late. We walked York Boulevard. We popped into the Pop-Hop  bookstore/print-shop/community center/salon where I found the most amazing pop-up version of Moby Dick, among other things. Go there. It’s awesome and sandwiched by two nice cafes. The Pop-Hop was also advertising for infant sign language classes at the time, which is pretty cool. We dropped in Mi Vida Boutique, where I found a great selection of kids books, including Mo Willems’ “We Are In A Book,” which I had been hoping to find in person since long before Twyla was born. The store also had a great selection of books for teaching kids espanol. We bought “Mis Colores” and now walk around looking for la rana verde, el pez azul y el caracol morado. And, yes, we closed out our stroll of York Boulevard at the bar. OK fine, the proprietors want to be called a gastropub. Whatever. The York  has a fantastic selection of beers, great fries and other babies. We spotted at least three other sets of new parents there.

Another day, we spent some time in San Pedro, that inscrutable little town next to the nation’s busiest port. We went to check out Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles, which boasts that it’s the largest indoor year-round craft marketplace in the country. The inchoate market in two massive converted port warehouses was a little underwhelming, an amateurish version of its bigger seasonal brother Unique L.A., but with far more potential. I was a fan of David B. Cuzick’s designs under the moniker Circles and Squares, especially “Hot Lava.” We went south for crafts, and we stumbled upon Point Fermin Lighthouse and park. A lineup of classic rock bands playing the park’s bandstand drew a crowd of picture perfect bikers manning grills and coolers full of beer. The scene was more Sturgis Rally than Hollywood and so refreshing.

A third trip to Watts to see the Towers should be on everyone’s to-do list. Simon Rodia’s quixotic work of art is a reminder to engage in simple acts of creativity. If the towers is the beating heart of Watts, about two blocks away we found the food that feeds’ the city’s soul: the Watts Coffee House. Nestled inside a community building turned school is a restaurant with roots in the healing after the 1965 Watts Riots. Kurt Streeter’s story on it in the Times paints a good picture. It’s part hangout, part history of black music and Watts’ role in that scene, with a few proud nods to our black president. Be sure to chat it up with the gregarious owner-cum resident historian Desiree Edwards. She might just foist some red velvet ice cream on you to top off your fried chicken and waffles at lunch...or breakfast.

We met friends on a recent Thursday evening for beers at Golden Road Brewing Company, a beer oasis snuggled in an industrial cranny between the L.A. River and a set of train tracks where the 5 Freeway meets the 134. The beer was pretty good for craft beer in Los Angeles while the loud buzz of conversations around the warehouse space turned bar lulled Twyla to sleep. We talked with friends for a while and left pretty confident our social selves were alive and well. We left ready for a good time dangling Whoozit for Twyla to ogle and grab.

Getting out takes more preparation than before, and we don’t always make it. We’re missing a picnic at the newly opened Grand Park as I write and sometimes the rides home from our adventures with a screaming baby are hair-raising. To be sure, though, it’s so satisfying when we leave the pressure to parent at home and travel wide. My life doesn’t end where my daughter’s begins, and I’m confident it’s better for both of us that way.

I can hear the haters now: “Big talk. Just wait till she’s walking.”

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What No One Told Me About Changing the First Diaper or How I Found Myself Up Shit Creek
July 23, 2012

Twyla

People love to talk about the body of parenting work that is diaper changing.

They talk disposal systems and smell mitigation. They say, “You HAVE to get the Diaper Genie. It’s the best.” They ask moms the tired question about dad: “Is HE changing his share of diapers?” And the subject of diapering almost always lands at some point on the phenomenon parents call “poop up the back,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

To be fair, with eight to 10 changes a day, it’s a huge part of a new parent’s life. Plus, the size, color, and consistency of what’s inside can be an important indicator of a baby’s health, so the subject begs a lot of attention.

Before Twyla arrived, we decided to use a hybrid regime of cloth diapers during the day and disposables at night. We carefully engineered what containers to put dirty diapers in and their location and proximity to the changing area. We gussied her changing area with adorable painted baskets and containers for cremes, q-tips, diapers, wipes, etc. Suffice it to say, we were prepared for the Battle Royal of diapering...at home.

What no one told me in advance was that diapering 10 times out of 10 starts at the hospital (if you have a baby at the hospital), where we did not carefully engineer a system and location for all the relevant pieces and parts of diapering. Sure, we packed a bag with the necessary tools to change a diaper, but the focus of the packing was squarely on the couple super cute outfits she might wear home from the hospital.

Additionally, for reasons boring and not, we came to the hospital on a Tuesday night and my wife gave birth by C-section on a Friday morning. After some 60 hours at the hospital with about eight total hours of sleep and one move from a Labor and Delivery room to a Post Partem room, bags were scattered and wipes to clean a dirty tuchus were nowhere to be found at the big moment.

Worth noting, is that a newborn’s first poop is usually pretty large. She’s been storing it for weeks in advance of arriving. Twyla was two weeks late, so it was extra large. The following video is a classic and hilarious tableaux of a dad failing miserably at one of his first acts of parenting:

In case you missed that last bit at the end, it was my wife and I, in chorus, giving the nurse a hearty “yes” to her asking if we needed help.

The idea of having just met the daughter that we wondered about for nearly 10 months prior, plus the exhaustion from days of labor completely obscured the reality of actually caring for our newborn.

Guess I should have known that parenting, even in the first few hours of life, involved more than staring at my likeness like a complete stoner.

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Burp! Stories, Sights and Sounds of Parenting a Newborn in L.A.

July 16, 2012

Father and daughter

My daughter was born steps away from the intersection of Sunset and Hollwyood boulevards, in the shadow of those nine iconic letters, under the gaze of the many locals and tourists at Griffith’s observatory on a Friday in late April. Among her first field trips was a visit to Los Angeles City Hall to see her dad at work, reporting on city government.

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.

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