for the dad who has, um, everything

Thanks, Malled, for pointing me to a purveyor I would surely never have found on my own. 

Too late for this year's Father's Day, but hey, you might want to bookmark the site for next year. Unless you live in Glasgow or Edinburgh where Father's Day is now banned. Reportedly, the new policy was put in place in deference to the growing number of single-parent and same-sex households. But isn't this penalizing kids with involved dads?

According to the Telegraph :

Father’s Day cards banned in Scottish schools

Thousands of primary pupils were prevented from making Father’s Day cards at school for fear of embarrassing classmates who live with single mothers and lesbians.

The politically correct policy was quietly adopted at schools “in the interests of sensitivity” over the growing number of lone-parent and same-sex households.

It only emerged after a large number of fathers failed to receive their traditional cards and handmade gifts.

Family rights campaigners last night condemned the policy as “absurd” and argued that it is marginalising fathers, but local authorities said teachers need to react to “the changing pattern of family life”.

An Office for National Statistics report in April found that one in four British children now lives with a lone parent — double the figure 20 years ago.

The Father’s Day card ban has been introduced by schools in Glasgow, Edinburgh, East Renfrewshire, Dumfries and Galloway and Clackmannanshire.

Scottish mums can rest easy--Mother's Day still passes the PC test. 

Thanks to DKR,  involved dad who lucky for him lives this side of the pond.

seeing the midwife, 21 years later

There I am in my neighborhood mani-pedi factory, on the way to the wax room when I pass the midwife who delivered my first baby. She is soaking her feet in a tub. We look at each other and in that first moment of recognition it all comes back to me: those 24 grueling hours of back labor in the (now defunct) Maternity Center on E. 92nd St., her gently advising my transfer to a hospital (my baby didn't want to come out! Even in the womb my daughter was a person who does not like transition), her wise insistence that it would be more comfortable and faster to transfer to the hospital in a cab instead of an ambulance, her preceding my husband and me out to the street to flag down a taxi--but it was rush hour! No cabs! (Another trait of the child I was about to birth: always time things so you have to do them the hard way), her running to the corner of Madison to see if she'd have better luck there (my husband was busy being a human armchair to help me get through the next contraction.) If she couldn't find a taxi--would I give birth on the sidewalk?

Almost unbelievably a lit cab appeared in the distance and we watched from afar as the midwife claimed one door, a middle-aged woman another. They gestured to each other through the open doors of the cab, exchanged heated words. Then, to my great relief, the midwife got in and the cab inched along in traffic down the street to us. "You'll never believe it," she said as my husband helped maneuver my contorted body into the back seat. (I thought of a soldier loading a torpedo.) "I had to fight off a woman who said 'I know you saw it first, but I really need this cab. My 87 year old mother has to get to a party.' I can trump that, I told her. I've got a pregnant woman about to give birth who has to get to a hospital. Without missing a beat, the woman asked, "Which hospital? Can we share?"

"How is your daughter," she now wants to know, shifting her feet in the soapy water. I tell her the baby she delivered is in college, stressing about final papers and exams. She tells me about her son the same age. She has a son the same age? She'd been pregnant, it turns out, the same time I was--which in my self-absorption of first pregnancy I had not noticed.

"Happy Mother's Day," we say when her pedicurist arrives. We give each other a hug for solidarity, and for old times sake. Then resume our attentions to the duties of maintenance which women of a certain age can not neglect.