I Have A Kid

Hulkita and me.

I have a kid. She’s five-and-a-half months old, weighs about seven kilos two-hundred, measures 65.5 cm, and as of a week ago, has two lower front teeth, each about two milimeters wide.

Once a couple of days ago, she was sitting up on my lap when I got a random hiccough. It so startled her that for a moment, her expression froze as she stared into my eyes—then she burst into tears, terrified.

But no matter how bad her mood, if I raise her over my head and say, “Airplane! Airplane!” while I smile and blow kisses at her, eventually, she smiles back and starts laughing. If I rub her upper chest with the tip of my nose, she giggles. If ever I start singing Iggy Pop and The Stooges’ Search & Destroy in her presence, she begins kicking and waving her arms, revved up to rock out; it’s her favorite song, hands down—bigger than Barney in our household.

When her diaper is full, she’ll complain. She complains in two ways: One is, she babbles incomprehensibly, but with the rhythms of speech of someone dressing somebody else down (namely my wife and me). This babble often sounds vaguely like Mandarin. The other way she complains is, she lets out a low flat growl from the back of her throat, her face turning bright red as she stares fixed at us. My wife calls this her “Hulkita” growl, as she looks like a tomato-red version of a miniature Incredible Hulk.

My wife and I were walking her in her stroller a few days ago, and some asshole came tearing into a driveway immediately in front of us, his pickup truck crossing our path barely three feet from her stroller. His window was rolled down, and the driver shot me an unconcerned look. In that split second, I seriously considered killing the guy, and the guy realized it, ‘cause he apologized and backed the fuck off.

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