Did I sense a bit more ambivalence over fatherhood this week? Although we started off debuting our very first video feature—a trip to the Toy Fair, yay!—and successfully redesigned America’s favorite lethal foodstuff, the hot dog, we spent a lot of time angsting over who our children are and what we’re doing as parents.

The awful truth, as Ted put it, is that our kids don’t particularly want to be around us. Nor, as Nathan explained, do we necessarily want to be around them: Given the right price (say, a cockatoo and $175), we’ll gladly wash our hands of the rugrats. Christopher, meanwhile, was torn between admiration for Yitta Schwartz, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor with 2,000 living descendants, and criticism of the ultra-conservative religious world she lived in. Make up your mind, Bonanos! Me, I made unnecessary confessions: to wanting to put my daughter in a pet carrier, and to having apparently fathered a celebrity model’s child. Who knew?

But we were also nice and happy! Or at least amused. Like when Dalia had a bad hair day! Or when she wanted to marry her brother! Or when JP out-haggled his dad! Or when Chris caught fancy-pants Upper East Side moms tossing their babies around like cats! Oh, those were funny. Boy did we laugh!

Whatever our individual cares and concerns, we were united, as usual, by the Tantrum, in which we tried to figure out whether to go broke getting our kids decent educations, or let them go to public school and wind up idiots. Either way, they’ll be smarter than we are.

Blizzard permitting, we’ll see you next week…

As Nate said earlier today, it’s a snow day. As a 10-year-old, I would’ve considered that the best possible treat. But when you work on a weekly magazine, you can’t shuffle work from day to day as you can in some places. Deadlines are measured in hours, and not in doses of 24. In our case, most of the magazine goes to press on Wednesday and Thursday nights, trailing into Friday morning. And one of this week’s Friday pages had my name on it, which meant I couldn’t really stay home. Add to that some Web work that I’ve taken on — stuff that was meant to go up online no later than noon, or thereabouts — and my day was no longer my own.

None of this would matter if we were a single-income household, but of course we’re not. My wife’s job is plenty demanding, too, and since she runs a lot of  her company’s finances, and today is the last workday of February, nobody would get paid if she didn’t go to the office. So that had to happen, just as sure as I had to hit (some approximation of) my deadlines.

We split the difference: I worked the morning, she got the afternoon, and each of us hoped a nap might occur during our shift. So far, no sleep this afternoon, and in fact that means… I gotta go. Snow’s just about stopped, and we have no driveway, but I’ve still got to (metaphorically) shovel out.

Nathan’s somewhat mournful post from earlier today (Coors really bums me out), about work and snow and parenting, reminded me of one of my few straightforwardly sincere posts on death (most of my thoughts on slipping the mortal coil are outrageously funny).

As I wrote earlier, one of the teachers in JP’s preschool passed away and the school had made the policy decision not to tell the children anything about it.

Because this is New York and the 21st century, a flurry of parent-email-list hand-wringing ensued. (I hereby decree that any future email sent to me that runs longer than two paragraphs be required to involve my winning the lottery, free Mets World Series tickets — in 2040 — or dirty pictures.) Most of it was critical of the school’s decision; child-psychology theories were advanced; poignant details about earlier death conversations were related in memoiristic detail; and generally the yadda-yadda-yadda flowed.

Then the kids started talking. Now, JP hasn’t breathed a word and, in fact, hasn’t yet seemed to notice that his teacher is gone, which is sad but kind of a relief, as I wasn’t all that keen on explaining the whole meaning-of-life thing to him just yet. But apparently, if the next round of tiresome emails was to be believed, some children got wind of it, questioned the parents, concepts were explained, and a few tears were shed.

Anyway, bottom line is now the school wants to tell the kids. They are bringing in a child psychologist to discuss it, which means God knows what, other than that now I will likely have to reckon with it, which isn’t so bad but still kind of sucks. I’m still not sure what’s better: to explain a difficult concept like this in the context of someone he wasn’t attached to, when the stakes or low, or when someone he truly cares about passes away. No easy answers.

First, a disclaimer: What you are about to see in this commercial for Boost Mobile is something I would never do to my daughter, Sasha.

Second, a confession: God, I would love to. I mean, she’s pretty much a natural traveler already, but there’s something so lovable about this ad—the kid so sweet and deadpan, the other characters both flat and charming—that I’m tempted to… Well, maybe you’d better just watch it for yourself. Then tell me you haven’t dreamed of doing just the same thing.