“Dad!” pounced the kid as I walked in the door for lunch. “Ready to do some science experiments?” Ambushed is more like it. Was it even at the door? Maybe it was out by the front gate. She jumped me from the bushes like some kind of jungle cat. “Come on. Let’s get to work!” I didn’t even have time to put my keys down before I was dragged off. Pop was in town. That’s my dad. He went shopping. “I hope it’s OK,” he said. I came in to find a mad scientist’s den. That’s what the science kit was called. “Extreme Secret Experiments Inside!” the booklet said on the cover. There were little beakers and test tubes with colored liquid in them. White powder in packages. Eye droppers. Funnels. My daughter had a pair of goggles. There was a giant monster with a flat head hooked up to wires on a gurney. OK, maybe not that. My dad smiled. It was the kind of smile that said, “Sorry … but this is really funny as hell!” Funny for YOU! You get to leave. I get to clean the exploding volcano off the ceiling and figure out why the dog is coughing up blue bubbles. “Dad! Dad!” barked my daughter. She sounded like a seal. “Want to make slime? Glowing alien slime! oooOOOooohhh! What color slime do you want to make?” Here’s what lunch is to me: A chance to come home. Unwind. Read The Wall Street Journal. Learn […]

Dear Daughter, I’m not sure they’ve taught you this word yet, but I am envious of you. Do you know what that means? Have you learned it yet in school? It’s when you want what someone else has. When you have this resentful desire to possess it. “Resentful desire,” daughter. It’s jealousy, more or less. Your papa is brimming with it! I’m envious of you for one simple reason: Tomorrow I’ll go to work, but you? Well … SUMMER STARTS FOR YOU!!! No school. You’re done. You can wake up late. Stroll out to breakfast with a big, long, lazy yawn. Hair a mess. Pajamas still on. You don’t have to listen to anyone say, “Kid! … eat, eat, eat! You have 13 seconds to brush your teeth, get that knot the size of a hornet’s nest out of your hair and make it to school.” Your life is gravy now! GRAVY!!! You can play with your cereal until the O’s turn to mush. You can flop on the sofa and drown yourself in TV. You can go outside and wash the car for me. (Thought I would throw that in to see if you would fall for it.) Yet, through all of this — after the yawn, after you pull up to the breakfast table in pajamas, after the O’s turn to mush and you wash the car (still trying!) — do you know what the first words out of your mouth will be? I do — “I’m bored!” […]

Youth. That’s the size of the red bike helmet with pink tiger stripes. It arrived in the mail for my daughter. (Not for me! I would have picked butterflies.) The size? I’ll say it again: Youth! With an exclamation point. As in, “daggone” or “are you kidding me?!?” Because that’s the way it made me feel when I read it. More like: Youch! The old bike helmet had started fitting her like a Yamaka. Like one of those silly, undersized hats that monkeys sometimes wear. I had tried to loosen up the plastic strapping and press it down hard on her head. “Suck in your breath!” I told her. “I think we can squeeze it on if I get the rubber mallet.” But the “child” size helmet, which had long ago replaced the “toddler” size helmet, was done. We stared at each other in disbelief. What did this mean? Certainly not that my darling baby girl had become a “youth.” Could a bike helmet really be the arbiter of that? We both cried. I cursed the world. Here’s Merriam-Webster’s definition of youth: “The time of life when someone is young.” Here’s another definition — the one that will make a parent like me wet his pants: “The period between childhood and maturity.” Gulp! “Between childhood …” — as in no longer there? “… and maturity” — where she’s heading like a wild cheetah? Way to lay it on heavy, Merriam-Webster. Have you no decency? No respect for a poor parent coming to […]

Now comes the time when talk turns to getting out of town like you’ve robbed a bank. Travel books come home from the library. Credit cards are polished and prayed over — “Please have money on you! Please!” It’s vacation-planning season. Time to start thinking about where to go, how to get there and most of all, how to screw it up when you arrive. I love vacation-planning. Almost as much as the trip itself. So as we all ready for excursions, here are some planning tips from my years of experience: • Make sure you get your dates wrong. You know, make a hotel reservation in some far-off land with checkin the day AFTER you get there. I did this once. My wife and I were going to the Keys. We had booked a house in the historic area. (I say “we” liberally. I was the culprit.) When we got there, they told us “we” weren’t expected until the next day. Nothing is more relaxing than starting a vacation homeless. • Pick a place with lots of wildlife. Indoors! Like the cabin we rented in the North Carolina mountains a couple years ago. Beautiful place. Little stream running by. Luscious landscape. And at night, flying squirrels used the rafters for dune buggy races. Mountain avalanches make less noise. We expected to click on the lights to find base-jumping squirrels leaping off the giant deer antlers perched above the living room. “Yippeee!” My daughter still asks if we can go […]

As I took it out of the box, I wondered if I had made a mistake. Another screen? What was I thinking? Until now, my house only had one TV. That’s far below the American average of 33.5 per household. (Why do so many Americans have half a TV?) No TVs in the bedrooms. No TVs in the bathroom. No TVs in the toaster oven. There was one in the living room, and that’s where all the fighting took place. Saturday mornings. When my daughter wants to watch cartoons and I want to watch soccer. “Mom!” I would say, stomping off. “She’s hogging the TV again!” I always lose, then trudge off to watch a game on the computer. It’s not the same. So when we took some toys and a little kid kitchen playset out of the loft, I decided to put a TV up there. Screen No. 2. The fighter preventer. Oh goody! But as I pulled the new set out of the box — a TV that could miraculously connect to the Internet all by itself, and patch into the Hubble space telescope, and tell me the future, and synthetically create a PB&J sandwich at the touch of a button — I wondered if I had made the right decision. Shouldn’t I be eliminating screens, not adding them? Because this wasn’t really the second screen in the house. There was also the computer, as well as the iPad. And the Kindle. Some days I bring the laptop […]

Math has never been my thing. I can do simple arithmetic — two plus two stuff. Put a couple numbers together and see what comes of it. Like this one: 8 + 8. You know what that one is? It’s 16. Eight plus 8 equals 16. SIXTEEN! I came to this conclusion over Christmas break when my daughter turned — GASP! — 8. She’s lived 8 years already. When she lives another 8 she will be … no, I can’t say it again. It’s too horrible. Too terrible. The big 1-6. The age. It’s just over yonder. That’s been my reality the last couple weeks. Thinking about how my wife and I now have a daughter halfway there. It’s all psychological, of course. The damage caused when we get hung up on what we think numbers mean. I remember when I was 6 looking up to some 8-year-old girls in my neighborhood. I shouldn’t say “looking up.” I should say “idolizing” or “dreaming about” or “drooling all over myself.” They were “big kid” girls. Older. Mature. Wise. And (as much as a 6-year-old knows something about this) super cute hotties. “Man, I can’t wait until I’m 8,” I remember thinking. I was probably staring out the window. Head propped on my wrists. Sighing. Cooing. (I cooed!) Little pink hearts floating above my head. Everything would be better when I was 8. Everything would seem different. I would get a mortgage. Start reading the newspaper over morning coffee. Start wearing suits […]

Dear Santa, How are you? I am fine. How is the weather up there in the North Pole? Did you get a vacation this year? I hope so. I hope you went somewhere nice and sunny. Did you get a suntan? You look really pale in your photos. Sunlight is very important for vitamin D. Anyway, my daughter sends you lists every year. She makes out pretty well. Sure, she didn’t get the full-size Barbie Jumbo 747 with the Ken pilot last year, but only because you couldn’t land it on our street. We’re expecting the Public Works permit any day now, so gas that sucker up! Anyhoo, I thought I would give it a shot this year, too. I’ve been good. I’ve been nice. I ate all my broccoli. So here is what’s on my Christmas list: • Answers – To big questions. Like why is it when you’re running late for school and work, your child just sits at the table singing and drinking her orange juice one molecule at a time? And do children hear any of the 1,300 times we say, “Hurry up! We’re going to be late! Are you listening to me?!?” A simple “yes” or “no” in my stocking will suffice.

So you’re a dad, little brother! Now what? Oh, the fun has just started. Snicker, snicker, snicker. First bit of advice from someone who’s been a father for almost eight years: When you hear someone say, “Oh, you’re a new father. The fun has just started … Snicker, snicker, snicker …,” resist the urge to run them over with your car. Because you will hear this a million times. They will tell you how you have no idea what awaits you. Because they do know what awaits you, and you don’t. Parenthood isn’t easy. Especially those first weeks and months. It’s like going to Army boot camp, only there you actually get sleep and pretty much everyone is potty trained. Not so with this.

“Could still be a week, a minute, three days …” said the text from my brother. “The imprecision of this process is a hoot.” Amen! Children. Especially the non-born kind. They have no respect for time. Due dates. Promptness. That people might have lives and need to get on with them. Masters of imprecise processes. Boy, if that doesn’t sum it up! My brother and sister-in-law are due pretty soon. Any day. It’s their first child, and as we all know, it can be an agonizing wait when you’re down to the final days. Uncomfortable. Anxious. Excited. Nervous. Wondering why in the world you thought this was a good idea. How you are ever going to use all the diapers stacked up in the baby’s room. What horrors will await you as you change those diapers! The more you wait, the worse it gets. I mean, it’s great practice, right? A taste of the patience you’ll need throughout parenthood: Waiting for teeth to get brushed. Waiting for shoes to be put on. Waiting for them to remember you told them 18 times to brush their teeth and put their shoes on. It’s a wonder we get anywhere or do anything.