Vacation: where things go wrong

JP and I are on vacation this week, visiting my mother and stepfather. It’s a good time for both of us—I get a week of round-the-clock babysitting, and JP gets seven days of blissful 100 percent attention from all the people around (not to mention about twenty desserts per day). My mother has also redone …

A Week on the Wagon: Keep your voice up edition

A week of notice me, please on Dadwagon, and why not? Summer has reached a boil, school is out, the children are running amok in the street–don’t we all have to raise our voices to be heard over the din? First, there was our Tantrum for the week, on whether or not it’s okay for …

Good Advice (i.e., Bad Advice)

Pulled from the oh-no-she-didn’t files of American letters, I bring you this short item on unibrows from the “Dear Prudence” advice column over at Slate. The scenario: mother writes in complaining that her “smart, pretty, and fun” 7-year-old has inherited her “Hispanic” father’s hirsute genes. This was less of problem when said tyke was younger, …

Bad Dads We Love: Schmucks at the Hospital

Last night the girlfriend and I took a tour of the hospital where she is going to deliver the baby. Rather than bore you with my thoughts about how different it was doing this the second time around, how nervous the other first-time parents seemed, how much of an old pro I felt myself to …