The Absent Herr Thornburgh

Yes, I haven’t been around much this week (or last) on DadWagon. I would fear that my co-bloggers might dock my pay, if indeed there were any pay here at all.

It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about kids; in fact, my kids have been very heavy on the mind as I’m traveling through Russia and Germany for work. So much so that I’m now one of those people who smiles a little too much at the cuteness of other people’s children. They can’t see that I’m a father who misses his babies. Instead, I am sure I come across as a strange and bleary-eyed man trying to make eye contact with their babies.

This was not so much a problem in Moscow, which, as one German I met yesterday pointed out, is “totally without babies” (I assume that those babies who are born, despite the low birth-rate, are simply kept with grandparents and out of the city center). But in Germany, where it is Spring (cold and damp, but Spring, nonetheless), babies abound, in their brightly colored Euro-onesies, and it makes me miss my own all the more.

Anyhow, I’m never quite sure what fine people there are reading this blog, but I know my kids aren’t among the readers, since the younger can hardly say Book and the older writes Dalia with a K. But anyhow, let me address my babies directly, without Skype:

Hey kids. Miss ya. Stop calling strangers you see on the street “daddy”. I’ll be home on Friday.