Our breakfast cereal is narrated by the morning news while the Girl is dripping honey down the front of her pajamas. But then such a mess is nothing compared to usual coverage of overseas protests, international economics, and local traffic reports that have been following a late-night snow on the already icy streets. It’s only a bit of honey after all, but: “Daddy.” She bleats. “Oh! *gasp* No!” And an exasperated and futile attempt to wipe the spill with fingers even stickier than the mess itself ensues. “It’s just your pajamas. Wait.” I sigh, pulling a damp cloth from the nearby sink and — smudging-more-than-cleaning — dab the honey from the cartoon visage of some Disney princess emblazoned in fleece fabric. “Wait. Stop touching it.”

Agree or not, this past summer we made the decision to give into Claire’s requests and we let her get her ears pierced. We went through a “waiting period” and proceeded through a whole set of rational kind-of anti-earring arguements to try and convince her out of it. She stubbornly stuck to her request. And to me? Ultimately, it didn’t really matter. It’s just earrings after all, and so long as we had her cooperation in making sure nothing bad happened — infections, etc — as a result, then we’d go ahead with the piercings. So we did. Then something bad happened. It was Monday evening and Karin was putting Claire to bed as usual. She took a few minutes to do a routine check [...]

This is a post from my (new) “Daddy Daze” series, an anecdotal exploration of my odd little adventures in parenting in bite-sized chunks (for your reading enjoyment) and because the last thing this world needs is yet another doting parent blog. Rudolph Overload Unlike my childhood when the desire to watch the annual allotment of holiday specials needed to be coordinated deeply with the weekly TV Guide and a patiently timed aggregate effort by myself and my siblings to claim the tube for that half hour span of precious programming, Claire is spoiled by a PVR. A few minutes of thumbing through the digital program guide netted me a swath of programmed recordings, and having nearly forgotten the effort the list of shows suddenly available [...]

A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy. Tree & Cold The downtown business association last weekend held it’s annual tree-lighting celebration, where the forty-one foot spruce that will adorn the pedestrian strip in front of City Hall was set to power and all ten-thousand-ish (or so they claim) lights were turned on. Santa rolled the countdown and it was quickly followed by a sparkling fireworks display. Karin was sick, but Claire and I braved the bitter, bitter cold — a chilly and windy minus twenty-five Celsius below zero — and [...]

Something congealed on the edge of last week. I couldn’t tell you what it was. It just was. That’s all. Whatever the reason I’ve been left to contemplate things in a rather mundane way. It was a peeking of a sort, a look of some airy weightlessness over the lip of life and wondering if I might get caught in the process. Some might consider this a fluttering moment. I can’t. My head can’t get around it all. My brain wants to analyze moment-by-moment the fractured bits of time that have been strung together for the past weeks, months and years. Yet here I am. Nothing quite so weighty as a mundane sort of contemplation that doesn’t seem to have legs quite yet. Claire has [...]

This is a post from my (new) “Daddy Daze” series, an anecdotal exploration of my odd little adventures in parenting in bite-sized chunks (for your reading enjoyment) and because the last thing this world needs is yet another doting parent blog. Calendar Iconic Claire has always been a bit neurotic when it comes to her schedule. She likes to know in advance… to avoid surprises, if you will. When she was wee little this manifested as a kind of random meltdown when her schedule and routine varied too much. Now that she’s a preschooler it’s manifesting as a kind of calendar obsession. It started with me sketching out a few little pictures on our calendar: a pencil for her school days, a pumpkin for halloween, [...]