Family

Watching your kids learn how to speak is always interesting, but rarely in ways you’d expect. Oh, sure–every parent beams with pride the first time the baby says “Mama” or “Dada,” and not long after that pretty much everything comes out sounding like the cutest thing you’ve ever heard. Take my son Christian, for instance. Like his sister, he’s got a mind like a steel trap–which means he’ll pretty much repeat everything you ...

I never used to consider myself an especially sentimental person. Heck, even the wedding scene from Fiddler on the Roof wasn’t enough to get me choked up–but that was before I had a couple of kids of my own. Nowadays, I find myself blubbering at the least provocation. Daughter goes off to her first day of preschool? Cry myself silly. Son gets too big for that set of yellow duckie pajamas? I’m in recovery ...

One of the blogs I read is from fellow author Max Barry, a terrific satirist from Australia who just happened to share the same literary agent with me several years back. Max just had a baby girl (although I imagine his wife also had something to do with it), and posted a few hilarious revelations about fatherhood, including his surprise at:

“The amount of time I spend staring at [my daughter’s] butt. I mean, not just from a distance. ...

Not that I’m biased or anything, but I happen to have the cutest, sweetest little daughter in the world. After all, who could resist this face? I know I can’t–especially when she walks up to me and asks, “Wanna cuddle, daddy?”

She does, however, have some interesting eating habits. Her favorite game these days is to store one last bite of food in ...