Giving Nico his flu shots was easy. It was like Basketball Diaries. Dude practically chased the needle.

Dalia was not so easy. She’s almost four. She knows to anticipate pain. So her good mood yesterday afternoon, which came in part because she was excited to take a trip with her dad (taxicab!), ended with an agonizing shriekfest and forcible restraint while she got her shot. Not sure which of us was more traumatized, but it wasn’t fun.

It did get me thinking about whether plunging a needle into your kid is the only way to do this. So here’s a few pediatricians talking about how to give kids pain-free immunizations. The average child, they say, will have 28 immunizations before the age of 6. Why not make them pain-free?

Besides the nasal spray option, there’s a prescription drug called Emla that numbs the skin about an hour before any shot. Or an over-the-counter numbing cream called LMX-4.

But I’m not so sure it’s a good idea. The woman who bore me these children is a gas monkey/tube jockey in her day job. As such, she loves all sorts of anesthetics. But she also says that Emla, like any drug, could be toxic if given the wrong way–there’s a risk, even if it’s pretty small, that the drugs could be misapplied and poison the blood. Check this death in North Carolina: the girl was going for laser hair removal and died from lidocaine poisoning. If you think that’s a ridiculous reason to die, try explaining that you wanted your kid not to cry at the doctor’s office.

OK, so the death talk is overblown. But something about trying to numb your kid for an injection reeks of overparenting. Yes, the shot sucked while it was happening. She felt bad, I felt bad. But it was temporary. We got over it. We had ice cream. We were survivors. It was a good day.

Seattle has given the world so much, from orca sex to Rainier Beer: the beer from here. But did you know there are a lot of doctors out there? And that one of them studies daycare?

Here’s Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, commenting on his dismal finding, in December’s issue of Pediatrics, that kids in home-based daycare watch 2.4 hours of television at their daycare, 2 hours a day more than kids in center-based daycare:

Research continues to link excessive preschool screen time with language delay, obesity, attentional problems and even aggression depending upon content. At the same time, studies show that high quality preschool can be beneficial to children’s development.

Of course, you don’t have to have an MD to know that center-based care is almost totally unaffordable in this county. According to the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies, the average cost for an infant in a daycare center in 2008 was as high as $15,895. For home-based daycare, it was $10,720. So in America, I hope you can pony up that extra $5000 a year. Otherwise, your first teacher will be Mr. Squarepants. Good luck competing in the global economy, little fry.

At 5:30 a.m. this morning, I dragged my suitcase down to the ground floor of my in-laws’ home in Taipei and hailed a taxi to the airport. Trailing me were my wife, Jean, and daughter, Sasha, and as the cab driver loaded my bags into the trunk, I kissed them good-bye in a ritual that is becoming so familiar that I worry it’s losing all power to unsettle me.

I travel. It’s my job. I go away for a week, two weeks, at a time, to random corners of the globe (today: Tokyo), on missions almost too ridiculous to describe (eat ramen till I burst).

Meanwhile, back in Brooklyn or Taipei or wherever home happens to be at the moment, Jean and Sasha carry on without me. The baby eats, sleeps, poops, plays, laughs at jokes only she understands, and cries at every minor head bonk or perceived abandonment. The nannies come in the morning and leave in the evening, and sometimes my mother comes down from Connecticut to help out.

Really, I don’t know what things are like there. I’m having picnics in Paris or sailing the Caribbean, and though I whip out the iPhone to show strangers photos of my darling daughter, to be honest I feel a bit of relief that I don’t have to get up at 6 to change her diaper and prepare her bottle. With that comes a bit of guilt, of course, that Jean is stuck with the chores, but such are the paths we’ve chosen. This is my job; what am I supposed to do?

At the end of it all, though, I get to come home, and there confront an infant who’s probably on the verge of forgetting my face. The first few times, it was as if nothing had happened at all. Daddy’s here—she grins! But the morning after the last trip, when we brought her into bed with us for that first bottle, she smiled and gave me… this look. “You again?” she seemed to say, a bit sarcastically. “So glad you could join us.”

Did she really know I’d been away? I mean, she knows if I put her in the playpen and walk into the other room. I can tell by the screams. But not to have seen me for 16 days—does that compute for a 10-month-old?

For now these reunions are easy. What more does a baby want than a bottle and a cuddle? But soon, I know, she’ll see the packed bags in the hallway, and though she’s recently learned how to wave and say “Bye-bye!” what I’m sure I’ll see is tears.

Just a quick follow-up on my previous post on the virtues of messiness: science agrees with me! Not that I had any doubt, but according to researchers at UC San Diego, letting children play with messy stuff is actually good for their skin.

Thank you, wise scientists, for confirming what I already knew: my ex-wife is a jackass.

Or are they on to something with this whole dirt-is-good jazz (clever nerds)?

I mean, the essence of these hygiene hypothesis arguments is really nothing more than the stark differences in mother/father concepts of clean, plus charts and statistics.

Seen from my perspective, then, one must ask: why are all mothers crazed germophobes? Have they all been brainwashed by Lysol advertising blitzes? Have they in fact been drinking Lysol?

Will this breakthrough in silly science be enough to finally set them straight?