Kindergarten commences

Tony started kindergarten last week, which partially explains my disappearance of late. Actually, last week was optional kindergarten “camp,” during which his teacher had the students come in before school officially started, to get them accustomed to the facilities and the routine before the big kids arrived and completely freaked them out — a scheme that seems to have worked, since the little beastie worked through his usual social shakes and extreme shyness in the first few days.

This week, Tony is doing fine — better than his dad, who is trying to figure out just how to manage his new schedule. With roughly three hours between dropping Tony off and picking him up, I’m finding much of the AM consumed by my compulsive workouts. Yes, I’m a bit of a body nazi, and I’m not giving that up. Let’s call it therapy.

Afternoons … Well, I’m trying to not settle into too much of a routine.  I want to leave days flexible so we can have fun and explore whatever comes our way — or just get chores done, such as weeding when the tumbleweeds threaten to engulf the house. Yesterday, we started out just running the dogs, but diverted from our usual route to eyeball the 800-years-old stone ruins of an Indian village that occupy a hill not far from our house. That led to a discussion about why the Sinagua Indians disappeared and where they probably went.  I’m a bit of a lost civilizations buff myself, and I see the glimmerings of that in Tony, in addition to curiosity about this particular set of ruins and the people who once lived there.

Today is different — a drive up to Flagstaff to have lunch with a buddy of mine. Of course it’s educational — Tony will be learning the value of chatting with friends over a glass of wine. I don’t want him to be a workaholic, y’know.

Fear of scheduling

I had planned to write before now — really and truly I did — but it took me days to recover from the whirl-wind pace set by my sister and my mother on the East Coast. Before we ever set foot among the too-verdant greenery in the vicinity of the nation’s capital, a week-and-a-half-long itinerary had already been established. My son and I just hung on and hoped for the best. If I listen closely, I’m pretty certain I can hear Tony cry out from the depths of his nap: “No! Please! Not another museum …”

Which is as good a lead-in as any to some musing about parenting style. I’ve never really bothered too much with a formal parenting philosophy — oh sure, I know all about helicopter parenting and the reaction it has sparked in the form of free-range parenting — but I just raise my kid as best I can and don’t worry excessively about what I’m supposed to do.

And my sister is restrained as far as well-educated, urban eastern parents go. She and her husband are pretty laid-back and don’t push their kids to excel, excel, excel. They let them have a good time and do things they enjoy.

But there always seems to be something scheduled. Karate lessons, soccer practice, music lessons, nature camp … And that, of course, is the daily stuff, aside from the very full agenda presented to visiting relatives upon their arrival in the state.

Prodded by my son’s fatigue and growing resistance to planned activities, I was about to mutiny at the end of the week, until it was clear that one of my nephews would mutiny, too, if Tony and I skipped miniature golf in favor of gasping for breath for an hour or two. That ran the risk of ending the visit with a round of recriminations, which I preferred to skip. So off we went, and in fact we had a good time.

But what would we have done by choice …?

Some parents seem to think that an unscheduled afternoon is a lost opportunity, while others think an unscheduled afternoon is a blank slate that can become whatever a kid’s imagination wishes. There’s a certain amount of truth in both approaches, I’m sure. But where my sister prefers more formal activities, with a few hours for fun-with-Legos, I prefer to keep the calendar relatively uncluttered and let Tony fill more time with books and three-way battles among Spider Man, dinosaurs and Jedi Knights.

Part of the difference in styles, I think, has to do with our respective communities. Kids still roam free around me, while meet-ups with friends usually have to be scheduled in my sister’s town. My son and my younger nephew are still too young to be wandering the streets solo, anyway, but the different tones are already set by the culture around us. When kids are unlikely to bump into opportunities for play on their own, the calendar becomes a necessity; if kids wander of their own accord, there’s no reason to fret about playdates.

We talked about that difference in our communities, which led me to ask my mother when I first was trusted out on my own. After a little discussion, we realized that I was darting down the block from our apartment building in the small-ish city of White Plains, New York, crossing the street, and amusing myself with whatever friends I met by the time I was seven or so (my father, in his youth, was tossed out the door of his Bronx apartment at the same age and forbidden to return before dinner).

Oddly, my mother is the uber-scheduler these days.

So, if you live in a community of helicopter-style parents (to use modern terminology), or even just schedulers, you’re likely to become a bit of a scheduler yourself out of sheer necessity. A more free-range environment opens things up a bit.

With the exception of the extremes, I think any well-intentioned approach is likely to end up in a happy and positive childhood, so long as it takes any given child’s individual inclinations and needs into account. That is, there’s no one “right” approach to parenting, so long as you don’t go nuts and/or ignore what your own kids are telling you.

But adjusting to other approaches, however successful they are, can be … exhausting.

Please. No more goddamned museums.

A-wandering I shall go

I’ll be on the East Coast until the end of the month, escaping the desert heat by stepping into a swamp. I plan to post while I’m on the road, but I’ll be on a whenever-it-happens schedule.

This also means that I may be a bit slow to approve comments. Be patient. I’ll soon be along with a mojito in my hand.

To breed or not to breed

Jennifer Senior’s New York magazine piece on “why parents hate parenting ” (hint: in general, it makes them less happy than non-parents) has generated plenty of buzz. It’s a well-written article, full of interesting insights, but I’ll be damned if I understand why an analysis of the down-side of squeezing out yard apes strikes many people as such a revelation after so many generations of first-hand experience.

It’s not like having kids is a recent fad with unforeseen consequences.

The key insight in the article is this: “From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think.” The reason for the mystery quickly becomes clear, as Senior summarizes the rather copious research on the subject of having kids and the effects of breeding on those of us who engage in the activity:

As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns. But some of the studies are grimmer than others. Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their circumstances—whether they’re single or married, whether they have one child or four.

In past generations, when kids were your labor force, your disability insurance and your retirement plan, all rolled into one gooey and then pimply package, the stresses of having children could be balanced against the pragmatic advantages of having mini-mes roaming around, tied to you by bonds of law and culture.

But today? Today, every dollar put into raising a child is a dollar that doesn’t go into the 401K — or into the new entertainment system, for that matter. Having kids is purely optional, and an expensive option at that. So why do so many people still do it?

In fact, as Senior explains, parenting is, in many ways, more stressful than it once was — probably because it is so completely optional these days. According to one study, parents today spend just nine hours alone together each week versus 12 hours as recently as 1975. The TV series “Mad Men” has stirred interest in the way children of the 1960s are portrayed — largely in the background, and expected to stay out of the way. But while the show puts its own spin on reality, there’s no doubt that kids in the past were much less a focus of familial attention than today’s wee tots who barely have time to catch a breath between their Spanish tutor and piano class. All that modern effort to craft the perfect offspring is likely a bit more stress-inducing than even our great-grandparents’ dilemma over whether having ten kids was enough to make sure that eight survived to work in the fields.

From an economic necessity, child-rearing has now become the equivalent of that meticulously detailed landscape your odd uncle built in his basement around his HO-scale model trains.

Senior’s conclusion is that modern first-world people (because much of the world is still at the labor-force stage of parenting) continue to have children, though at a much-reduced rate compared to the past, because if parenting isn’t necessarily enjoyable, it’s still rewarding.

But there’s a major point that our thoughtful author is missing: A great many people aren’t thoughtful at all.

Oh sure, Manhattan is infested with people who plot against each other for placement in the right nursery schools, and for them, parenting their one perfect child (who is destined to grow up to be a highly talented basket case) is certainly rewarding, in a twisted and obsessive way. But for much of the population, bearing children really seems to come as something of a surprise, to be dealt with only when the unanticipated new arrival explodes from their groins and skitters across the salty snacks aisle at Wal-Mart.

Where’d that come from?

And some of us … Some of us arrived at our current status through a deal-making process of negotiation that completely missed the big picture and, in retrospect, seems almost as arbitrary and ill-considered as the “where’d that come from?” surprise that animates so many of the parents of my wife’s patients (as their disturbingly earnest kin assure them that “every child is a blessing”).

Jennifer Senior’s article thoughtfully points to the competing considerations many people face when deciding whether or not to have children. I wonder, though, if she gives us too much credit in assuming that actual reasoning is necessarily involved.

Some of us, anyway.

Don’t try to teach about evolution before your morning coffee

Some of the greatest teaching opportunities come just after I’ve woken up, while I’m standing in the kitchen in my underwear, furiously cursing the coffee maker for being so damned slow

“Daddy.”

“Yeah.”

“How come the dinosaurs are extinct?”

If I were ten years younger, I’d answer that it’s because of time-traveling big-game hunters who over-used a common resource to satisfy the bizarre appetites of jaded restaurant-goers in the year 3000, and that the only solution is to recover dinosaur DNA, clone the scaly beasts, and farm them for their meat. But I’m less of a wise-ass than I used to be. And that’s too complicated to come up with before my coffee has brewed anyway.

So instead I try to explain natural selection and the effects of cataclysmic events to a tot while the ten-year-old Krups gives every indication of needing a hefty dose of Flomax. Even to me it sounds garbled and incoherent. I do, that is. The Krups just sounds … obstructed.

“Tell you what. Let’s get a book out of the library.”

But is there a decent book on evolution that’s appropriate for not-quite-five-year-olds? And can a copy be found at the Cottonwood Public Library in a town where a fair percentage of the population seems to think babies come from using public restrooms?

Thank Darwin, the answer is yes, and yes.

Allow me to recommend The Beagle and Mr. Flycatcher: A Story of Charles Darwin, by Robert Quackenbush. Published in 1983, the book is apparently now available only in second-hand form, but it’s worth putting up with a few stains on the binding. It’s a well-written, but basic, outline of Darwin’s life, his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, and his theories on natural selection and evolution. It’s also pretty funny, with amusing illustrations. Here’s a sample, about Charles Darwin’s experiences in the Galapagos Islands:

… he also found thirteen varieties of finch, each with beaks of a different size and shape. Darwin concluded that the finches must have descended from one variety of South American finch that had flown across the ocean to the islands in prehistoric times. The finches had evolved in different ways in order to survive. On one island, where only berries were available for food, the finches gradually developed larger, rounder beaks. On another island where there were seeds to eat, the finches’ beaks became smaller and more pointed. Over  the thousands of years it took for this to happen, the original finch ancestors tended to die off and become extinct, because their beaks were less useful for finding food.

The day we borrowed the book, Tony asked me to read it to him twice.

There may well be other books that handle this topic as well for a (very) young audience (it’s actually targeted at kids rather older — about ten — but Tony had no problem understanding the concepts), but I’ll be damned if I can find them.

Remember, it’s not a serious gap in your knowledge or your ability to explain scientific concepts; it’s a teaching moment!

Now I’m just waiting for the little SOB to challenge me to delve into theology. Well … again. We’ve actually already ventured in that direction, with very strange results. Beware of holding funerals for plush toys. That’s all I’m saying.

Culinary Interlude: Home is where the pizzeria is

I love pizza, but I can’t stand cheese. If this sounds like a contradiction to you, you’ve been eating too much of that goopy American abomination sold as “pizza,” but which represents a significant devolution from the real thing.

In Italy, pizza might or might not contain cheese. If it has cheese, it’s always a lot less than you find on the usual heart attack by the slice you get at Pizza Hut. When I was in Italy watching the university students go on strike (yeah, really — whether anybody cared is another issue), I enjoyed pizza marinara: crust, sauce, garlic and basil. It’s one of the three legally recognized versions of Neapolitan pizza (not that bureaucrats should be telling anybody what to eat). My favorite, though, was pizza puttanesca, with crust, sauce, anchovies, capers, olives and (sometimes) pignolis.

Good U.S.-style pizza can be found, of course. At heart, the American variety is a variation on pizza margherita, with sauce balanced against cheese and crust. Add toppings as you wish, but keep the flavors and textures balanced. I remember the original Ray’s Pizza on Prince Street in Manhattan offering a great slice, and Arturo’s on Houston and John’s on Bleecker were both amazing. New York City has gone through a generation or two of pizza joints since my day, so there are any number of good new places — probably better than the ones I remember.

But out here in the hinterlands, pizza is too often … nasty. While I can get the real deal if I look around, most pizza places sell something that is so heavy and cheese-laden that it has more to do with quiche than pizza. Honestly, any joint that takes pizza, and boasts that it smothers the unfortunate crust under a pound of cheese is just trying to find out how far it can push you.

Frankly, instead of hunting around while remembering what I ate in Florence, it’s easier to just make my own. Made at home, pizza becomes, once again, a light supper instead of a belly bomb — or the belly bomb of your dreams, if that’s what you really want.

Pizza marinara and pizza di patate

Look upon my pizza, ye mighty, and despair!

Last night I flashed back to Italy, with two traditional pies: pizza marinara and pizza con patate e rosmarino. Yep, that’s right. The second pizza is made with sliced potatoes and rosemary. Really, it’s amazing. The pizza marinara on the left is made with homemade sauce, slivers of garlic and oregano. I was going to add fresh basil, but somebody (I ain’t saying who) forgot to water the basil plant. I saved the thing, but it was in no condition to spare any leaves.

Making pizza dough is, trust me, easy. It’s flour, water, salt  and yeast. Here’s my version:

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 cups whole-wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon yeast
1 cup warm water
1/2 teaspoon salt  dissolved in 1/2 cup warm water

In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast in 1 cup of warm water. Add 1 cup all-purpose flour. Stir. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest an hour.

After an hour, add 2 cups of whole-wheat flour and 1/2 cup of all-purpose flour (dust your work space with the remaining 1/2 cup all-purpose flour). Stir. Add the salt water to make the dough pliable and workable.

(Note: the amount of salt water needed varies according to local conditions, so you may want to have more salt water and flour ready to add as needed.)

Turn the dough onto your flour-dusted work space and knead by hand for ten or so minutes. Add more flour to the space if necessary. The dough should lose its stickiness but remain elastic.

Rinse out your bowl and rub the inside with olive oil. Shape your dough into a ball roll it around in the oil to coat the surface. Cover the bowl and put  aside for an hour or longer.

Preheat your oven to 550 degrees (if it will go that high — as hot as you can, otherwise).

When the dough has risen, lightly dust your work space with flour again. Dump the dough out and divide it into two equal parts. Cover one part with a damp cloth and stretch the other onto a pizza pan or baking sheet, Use your fingers to stretch it out — thin, but not so thin it’s translucent.

Now top it. Then pop it into the oven for roughly ten minutes (I put the potato pizza in for twelve).

Toppings are up to you. I’ve already described the very basic topping on the pizza marinara. The pizza con patate e rosmarino was made with thin slices of red potato tossed with olive oil and spread in a single layer, rosemary, sea salt, and a final drizzling of olive oil. Tony helped with the dough stretching (though he found it “squishy” and “yucky”) as well as the spreading of sauce and application of toppings.

Italian law doesn’t apply to you (probably) so vary it as you please. Just try not to turn it into a gooey belly bomb.

By the way, you’ll notice that the pizzas above don’t include much protein. I addressed that by adding edamame to the salad of spinach, red-leaf lettuce, walnuts, strawberries, tomatoes and cucumbers — soybeans contain complete protein. We also had a Tuscan white bean spread (think of it as Italian hummus) with homemade bread slices as an appetizer.

The glass contains a Rodney Strong Sauvignon Blanc. Damned if I remember the year.

Is it better to have vacationed and hated it than to never have vacationed at all?

Vacations … How can something so simple become so goddamned complicated?

Oh yeah. We had a kid.

Hey, babe. Where did you leave Tony?

Vacations were supposed to be like this (from our Alaska honeymoon)

Once upon a time, vacations were easy. Before meeting my wife, I’d traveled across Europe, living out of a shoulder bag. I partied my way through the Bahamas, and engaged the local cops in a medium-speed car chase (hey, you can only go so fast on those narrow island roads). I explored the Southwest and sampled nice restaurants in San Francisco.

Before Tony, my wife and I together backpacked the Painted Desert and stayed in B&Bs and boutique hotels. Basically, we did whatever we pleased that we could afford.

But since Tony …

We were going to be the kind of parents who don’t let a kid slow them down. We’d camp and go on adventures together and raise the kid to be bold and self-reliant. And we tried. We really tried.

But then we found ourselves in a wide-spot-in-the-road town in Utah, injecting antibiotics into our own tiny son who was howling with pain from an ear infection. Days later he was still howling — out of frustration, I guess, confined as he was to a baby backpack in Canyonlands.

So we tried resorts. And house rentals. And hotels.

At one point, I told Wendy that we’d had our last vacation; we could ditch Tony with his grandparents while we went somewhere, or we could wait until he was old enough to drive. But we were taking him nowhere any time soon. I had come to hate vacations.

So, you're saying we're gonna be trapped on that thing with a four-year-old?

Somehow, though, we let friends talk us into a cruise. We’d get adjoining cabins, open up the barrier between the balconies to use as common space, and the kids could amuse each other.

Do you know … It worked?

The thing about a cruise is … Well, there are a few things. You bring your hotel with you, so the kids aren’t strapped in a car for hours on end. You walk to the restaurant, which has kid-friendly chow. If you pick the right cruise line, there’s even day care, complete with activities the kids prefer to hanging with you all day.

What a revelation.

We’ve done two cruises now, which means we’ve had two good vacations since Tony was born. Frankly, I wouldn’t have been easily persuaded that a cruise ship was the way to go if you’d told me when I had my son pinned on that bed in Utah while my wife plunged a syringe into his thigh. I’m glad I let myself be convinced, though. I credit exhaustion with my surrender on the issue.

A bow tie and a smile -- top that!

Honestly, I really have no excuse for being blind-sided by the whole sucky vacation thing. I remember a string of lousy trips with my family when I was a kid, punctuated by the look of sheer misery on my old man’s face. I’m sure it was a special joy considering how little money we had early on. Oh, OK. Disneyland had its moments — for me and my sister; it still distinctly exuded awfulness for my parents. I think the first vacation my parents actually enjoyed was a family trip to Europe when I was 16 and old enough to legally drink (over there, that is). My father and I propped up a couple of bars in Germany and I argued us, in my high-school French, out of a hassle with a traffic cop in Brussels.

But cruises? I used to make fun of the sort of unadventurous people who go on cruises. Maybe, though, the key to a good vacation with a young child is removing a fair dose of the adventure, or, at least, the unpredictability, from it. That Bahamian car chase would not have been enhanced by a tot. Nor would a certain house rental in Virginia Beach. I think (I can’t remember that week very well).

That’s OK. Tony will get older and bolder as time goes on and we’ll try something different when he’s ready. Maybe we’ll drag him to out-of-the-way destinations in France and Italy, or perhaps we’ll choose a more adventurous cruise (yep, they exist). We’re fortunate that my wife makes a good living, which expands our options, and we have pretty wide-ranging tastes, so Paris sounds as good as the Galapagos.

For now, though, we’ve found a way to make a family vacation a pleasure instead of an ordeal. From what I’m told, though, he’ll have his teenage years to turn our time together back into an ordeal.

The only thing better than building sand castles is knocking them down.

Tony and daddy day

A cherished ritual my son and I have is our Friday routine, referred to as “Tony and daddy day.” The day starts at the same time as any other, since we’re all pretty much programmed to fly out of bed at about 5:30 to accommodate my wife’s schedule (which is, at least partly, based on her persistent fear that something, somewhere, is being done without her oversight).

Once my wife is off to do good deeds for her patients (and spread anxiety among her staff), Tony and I play for a while — this morning involved the construction of a Lego truck and a house to go with it. Both were under imminent threat of destruction from a Lego Star Wars tank.

After that, we run the dogs down by the river. There’s a jeep road that leads to an overlook with a great view of a new vineyard, where some pretty impressive local wine is being made. Most of the local winemakers specialize in Zinfandel, but this place has a more diverse range, including some nice Malbec. Not that the dogs appreciate the growing wine culture of the area, but it’s a nice addition to the usual terrorizing of jackrabbits.

Then it’s off the playground, where Tony tests his dad’s cardiac health and agility with a continuous chase up the equipment and down the slides. I shimmied up a pole this morning for the first time in years, so I think I’m still up to the challenge.

The library is a short walk across the parking lot from the playground, so off we go to get greeted like the regulars we are and pick new books to replace the batch we’re returning. We usually do a mix of two fiction and two nonfiction books, basing the nonfiction books on stumpers Tony has posed to me during the week about matters of natural science or otherwise cool stuff. (I’m not ignorant about insects! I’m just looking for teaching opportunities!) This morning we picked a book about jellyfish, because my knowledge pretty much ends at an anecdote about flipping my kayak in the Chesapeake Bay after puzzling over a warning about “sea nettles,” only to realize to my horror, as I stared up at the clusters of tendrils reaching down toward me from the surface, that “sea nettle” must be Maryland lingo for fucking nasty jellyfish.

So a jellyfish book it was.

We also do a reading lesson at the library — we’re 79 lessons through a 100-lesson phonics plan based on the Distar reading program. May I say, this is a damned effective lesson plan that already has my four-year-old more literate than some of the DMV clerks I’ve dealt with over the years.

And then it’s off to lunch at Bing’s, a local retro diner owned by an acquaintance of mine. Tony gets a hamburger, fries and a milkshake, and I pretend that I’m not going to end up eating half of the burger after my own grilled chicken sandwich.

The afternoon, after nap time, is looser than the morning ritual, but we spend the whole day together.

Kindergarten starts in August, but it’s a four-day program, so Tony and daddy day should continue until Tony is sick of chasing daddy up the monkey bars, or daddy takes a disastrously unplanned tumble.

Culinary Interlude: Bread day

I can get truly mediocre baguette at Safeway for under a buck — it has a decent crust that seems to surround cotton batting. Or I can get top-notch loaves at an independent bakery in town — at about four bucks a pop. We eat a lot of bread with our meals, dipped in olive oil or spread with roasted-vegetable puree, so I’ve purchased both in the past. But these days I mostly bake my own.

Baking bread isn’t hard — I just started with a recipe out of a Williams Sonoma cookbook and went from there. You have to be willing to make adjustments to suit your circumstances, though — temperature, humidity and altitude can play havoc on the balance of flour and water, and on time required to rise. In bone-dry Arizona, I generally add more water unless it’s monsoon (which just started), when I might actually need to add more flour. I find my dough rises a lot faster here than the recipe suggests. I’ve also switched up the recipe a bit by using a 2:1 ratio of unbleached, all-purpose flour to whole-wheat flour.

Roughly every other week, I bake a batch of baguette, which I freeze and pull out as needed. When it’s gone, which it is as of last night, I break out the mixer and the flour and start the day-long process.

Honestly, I like bread days. No matter what else I may be doing (or not doing), I accomplished something that day. The house smells great, and I have something to show for my efforts.

But I bake bread not just to save money and give the old abode a fresh, yeasty scent, but also because it’s appreciated. We’ve always eaten well — plenty of vegetables, fruits, grain, lean meat and the like — and we dialed up our efforts earlier this year, down-playing meat a bit (though I do wish my wife would eat rabbit, which I can bag just by sitting on the back patio with an air pistol). My wife has a family history of cardiac trouble from both sides, and her mother needed a triple-bypass in January. With her own cholesterol count edging into the danger territory, it was time to make some changes.

The more of our food I make, the more I can control what’s in it. That’s certainly good for my wife (who is just about due for another cholesterol test), for my son and for me. And, hell, I certainly have the time.

Acceptance — the latest stage of being a dad

I think the biggest hurdle I’ve faced in becoming a stay-at-home dad has nothing to do with the home-based responsibilities themselves — actually, I prefer teaching my kid to read, baking bread, cooking dinner, fixing toys and even repairing the roof to deadlines, meetings and exhortations to be a “team player” (when employed, I’m not a team player, I’m a goddamned mercenary for hire). The biggest hurdle has been publicly admitting what I actually do when the question comes up.

“Oh, I’m a writer,” I’ve been accustomed to saying. Or, “I’m a writer and editor.” And, in fact, that’s what I used to do. But, really, I haven’t made significant income from writing or editing in several years. What I really do is obvious from this blog: I take care of my son and the house.

A huge part of the problem is pride. Answering “what do you do?” with “I’m a stay-at-home dad” is the final step toward openly acknowledging that I’m not going to be the important scribbler I’d once planned to be — at least, not anytime soon.

So, here we go. (Deep breath.) I’m a stay-at-home dad.

Then there’s the issue of people’s reactions. As much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, I do let it get to me. So when, after emphasizing to both my sister and my wife the importance of having a parent at home, my mother continues to call me to ask about my job search and have I tried career option A or education option B?, it does get to me much more than I want to admit. Really? The writer is going to work while the physician stays home? By the way, mom, I’m telling Gloria Steinem (mom still gets all feminist-y when you push her.)

So I’ll breathe deeply again and say it: I’m a stay-at-home dad.

And I’ll just have to get used to the reactions, whatever they are. (Don’t smirk, you bastards.)

It’s a big step for me, though I don’t expect much sympathy from jaded moms out there.

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