Fatherhood’s First Stress, Part 2

On a pleasant autumn night similar to the night of our daughter’s birth, when we drove past the hospital and I started to reminisce fondly about that daughter’s planned delivery, my wife objected.  Not only was induction significantly more painful than spontaneous labor, but also she had always wanted to start labor naturally and to experience…  well, whatever

Lesser Known Signs of Affection

My mother and I have a sickening competition, or rather we have a competition about sickness.  I’m not usually competitive, especially against people’s mothers, but this rivalry developed naturally over several years.  Right now she’s winning.  Unfortunately for her, that also means she’s losing.  As the aphorism says however, “Sometimes you have to be

Headlong to Greatness

My daughter is probably doomed to become either extremely analytical, or extremely creative.  I don’t mean that she’ll inherit one of these qualities from my wife or me; rather she’ll earn them through repeated head trauma.  She always hits the same part of her head: the right side of her forehead above her eye.  I figure the brain underneath will either atrophy from the bludgeoning, or balloon because of all the extra blood flow in the bruises.

It all started one evening this past summer when I took my daughter to a meeting I had at a

Admittedly Bad Parenting

My wife and daughter are trying to ruin my life.  In fact, judging from the cheering and applause, the whole business seems to excite them both entirely too much.  They want to abandon my perfectly workable and orderly methods so that they can substitute a complex finicky mess, with the emphasis on mess.  I think they’ve even been looking forward to this for months.  It seems to me like some sort of insanity; whereas I quite rationally want to