After a long night with L (she was up from 2 to 4 a.m. in major tooth pain) and an even longer morning of work, I escaped for an hour today to grab a quiet lunch in town.
The escapade started out swimmingly. No traffic between home and one of my favorite local Mexican restaurants. Grabbed [...]

Psychologists and divorce attorneys know all too well about the “seven-year itch,” the phenomenon through which married people generally get sick of each other after seven years of matrimony.
But an essay this week on The New York Times “Motherlode” blog discusses a different kind of seven-year disillusionment: One with your kids.
The story, written by Alison [...]

L’s vocabulary has been expanding exponentially in recent weeks; we estimate she’s adding six to 10 new words each day.
Perhaps her favorite new word: “No.”
At first, this concerned us significantly. Kids going through the Terrible Twos are notorious for talking back in this fashion, and Powergirl and I feared that L had evolved into the [...]

Big deadline here in Healdsburg today, so I’ll leave you with a short post about a hilarious blog that an editor friend recently recommended: Shit My Kids Ruined.
The Web site, an obvious take-off on the popular @Shitmydadsays Twitter account (and forthcoming book), is a compilation of photos documenting the havoc children have wreaked, and (sometimes [...]

Earlier today I returned from three days of reporting a story in Las Vegas, and I couldn’t be happier to be home. Interestingly, the effects of my life as a stay-at-home dad followed me to Sin City in ways I never dreamed.
To make a long story short, my assignment was about spa treatments for men. [...]

Dear sloth:
I’m sure you enjoy your lazy afternoons in the Healdsburg plaza, canoodling on that blanket with your (beefy) man. Your public fondling sessions appear to be so wonderful—so intense—that it’s no wonder you are incapable of paying attention to your adorable three-year-old as she wanders around the park.
With this in mind, allow me [...]

My little girl has a new favorite word: Booty.
Yes, she’s saying it in reference to her derriere. And yes, when she says it, she wiggles her tiny behind like a cat about to pounce. For most of the day today, she said the word roughly 200 times an hour. The house has sounded like that [...]

After five days flying solo with L, I got my parenthood partner back late Saturday, when Powergirl returned from her trip.
I was glad to see my wife for a number of reasons. For starters, I missed her terribly; it was the longest we’d been away from each other in three years. Second, though I savored [...]

Fatherhood has changed me in many ways, but perhaps none of these transformations is bigger than how it has inspired me to dance.
Allow me to clarify. First, I’m about as stiff and White as we dudes can come; it took me months to learn steps for our high school musicals, and my wife has likened [...]

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 [...]