Two of my favorite things in life collided this afternoon when we (and my parents) took L to the California Academy of Sciences, where she was transfixed by the fish at the Steinhart Aquarium.
No tank was safe from her breathy, fingerprinty trail. She crawled here. She crawled there. And at just about every tank she [...]

L experienced her first-ever county fair today (in Santa Rosa), and she certainly made the most of it. Under consideration for best moment of the day:

• Her unprovoked “Baaaa” noises at sheep in the livestock area.
• Her obsession with the baby ducklings in the petting zoo.
• Her solo dance party to a (terrible) band that played through dinner.
• Her [...]

Finally got around to reading an article about only children in a back issue of TIME magazine (full disclosure: they are a client). As an only child who is currently the parent of one kid, the piece certainly touched a nerve.
I’ll spare you the details, but the story cites “current” psychological “research” that suggests kids [...]

I previously have documented in these (virtual) pages my alarming spatial ineptitude. To reiterate: I pretty much suck at anything considered handiwork.
The challenge, of course, is that in my new role as father (on top of my old role as husband), I’m tasked more now than ever to perform Bob Vila-like tasks around the house. [...]

Bad news has multiplied like Gremlins in the Villano house this week. First L came down with her first doozie of a cold. Then the cold triggered a double ear infection—one in each of her tiny little ears.
Since Wednesday evening (during which Powergirl was up all night), we’ve crafted our lives around L’s routine of [...]

As you probably know from reading this blog, I’m a die-hard Yankees fan. It was with great pleasure, then, that I read this terrific Mike Vaccaro story about another father celebrating the accomplishments of his child in today’s New York Post.
In a nutshell, the piece is about Jed Curtis, father of Colin Curtis, a reserve [...]

With a house full of ill humans (as of this writing, all three of us now are ill), I was dispatched today to purchase a new thermometer to help us monitor the baby’s temperature and stay abreast of any fevers.
My spoils: One of those newfangled jobbies that you scan across someone’s forehead like a wand. [...]

If you were alive in the 1970s or 1980s, surely you remember that old Carly Simon song, “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain.”
Those lyrics could be the story of my life since the last post on this blog.
Saturday night, after a long run in 90-degree heat, this summer cold that nabbed me during our Colorado [...]

As a one-time choir dork (and current “Gleek”), singing is a pretty major part of my life. Imagine my joy, then, when little L started “singing” along to Hawaiian music while we were playing in her room this morning.
Granted, she wasn’t singing with words—the girl’s vocabulary is limited at this point and she can’t actually [...]

I’m always a sucker for parent/daddy news, and today stumbled upon two links worth sharing.
The first, a story that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle (my de facto hometown paper), is a friend’s positive spin on the bad news from a story in New York magazine about how people with kids tend to be more [...]