Jeepers, creepers

Jeepers, creepers....where’d ya get them peepers

Jeepers, creepers...where’d ya get those eyes

Gosh oh, git up....how’d they get so lit up

Gosh oh, gee oh....how’d they get that size

Jeepers, creepers....where’d ya get them peepers

Oh, those weepers....how they hypnotize

Just a few weeks after Harrison was born, I confessed to Kama that Doug isn't Harrison's real father—it's Brad Pitt, and now that he and Jen have finally broken up, I'm letting the cat out of the bag to the rest of the world.
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Like every other expectant couple on the planet, Doug and I often speculated and fantasized about what Minty (his fetal name) would look like. "He'll definitely have dark brown hair and olive skin," we decided. And either brown eyes, like me and Grandma H, or hazel, like Doug, Grandpa J, Grandpa H, and Great-Grandma Helen.

No way did we think we'd end up with Aryan Baby. Recessive Gene Boy.

Sometimes, this bothers me. Like the time Inga, Harrison, and I went out to eat and the intrusive waitress (aka The Space Invader) went on and on about how much Harrison looked like Inga! Or the fact that everyone, everyone, says, "He looks just like Doug!" Which isn't really true. It's just that he doesn't look Vietnamese. At all.

Certainly, I see bits and pieces of myself in Harrison. He has my almond-shaped eyes, my Hooper chin, and my Vietnamese nose. But overall, from his baby blues, to his golden brown hair, to his alabaster skin (the softest skin in the universe)—the whole baby package—Harrison looks nothing like me.

Like most American biracial children, I (and Val) am still dealing with issues of identity, and I wonder how race and ethnicity will shape Harrison. Like his father, he will always experience the benefits of white, male privilege, but I hope that Doug and I will also be successful in instilling in him a sense of pride in his Vietnamese-ness. I pray that he'll eat fish sauce.

The truth comes out

I only had this kid so that I could groom him to work at DSW and use him for his employee discount.

Image: Al Bundy

The Face

Harrison has been cracking us up lately—the kind of cracking up that surfaces hours or days later when you happen to think randomly about whatever-it-was when you're alone at your desk or car and causes coworkers or strangers to wonder whether you've (finally) gone off the deep end.

The funniest of Harrison's activities is what we call The Face. It is rather indescribable. Not many of you have seen The Face, and it hasn't really yet been captured on camera, because The Face is often fleeting and the owner of The Face is a bit of a spaz. The Face may actually be more difficult to capture on film than, say, a charging wildebeest in the Serengeti. Perhaps we should call in National Geographic.

The Face consists of a whole lot of eye bugging and mouth opening—mouth opening so wide that the corners of the mouth are strained and could split. The Face is often accompanied by excited twitching and sometimes by arm flapping and shrieking. It is a sight to behold.

Inga was privileged enough to witness The Face this weekend when Doug presented Harrison with his first ball—a mini soccer ball. You're just getting him a ball now, you ask? Now you'd think that finding a child a ball would be a relatively easy task, but it's not! Infant-friendly balls do not exist—not at babysrus, toysrus, kbtoys, kmart, target, or walmart! The closest we could find to a baby-sized ball was a dog ball that was meat flavored, and we weren't that desperate. Toys that are not battery-operated and constructed to produce a deafening, irritating electronic cacophony are hard to come by. What's the world coming to, folks, when it takes you 9 months to locate a goddamned ball for your child?

But I digress—Inga, Doug, and I started rolling the ball to Harrison, who, because he's a genius, figured out right away the object of the game and rolled it right back to us. And then my beautiful child's face was morphed into the most extreme, ugly, and hilarious version of The Face Doug and I have ever seen. And he did it EVERY TIME he rolled the ball.

I will do my best to capture The Face on film. In the meantime, you can get an idea of what it looks like below. It's like this. Only with more eye bugging. And mouth gaping. And twitching.

Image: Nearly The Face