Dadding
When Frank Roder, 38, took his 5-year-old son, Aidan, to feed ducks along the Rahway River in New Jersey, he had no idea what kind of father and son bonding moment awaited them.
Roder, according to Fox News (I know), was in the process of parking his jeep when Aidan, feeling the vehicle slow to a near stop, got excited and jumped out. The thing is, Dad wasn’t actually parked yet, he was still looking for a space.
Aidan had no time for such technicalities. He had ducks to feed. He took off running — right toward a cliff hanging 35 feet above the river. Continue reading »
I have been a stay-at-home dad with twin toddlers for over eight months and it’s safe to say we will survive. In fact, it appears I am doing a darn good job. Need evidence? My 14-month-old girls are showing many age-appropriate signs of emotional and physical development per official barometers: they laugh, understand the word No, often throw things in response to my telling them No, eat with their fingers, high five, utter a few words, and are attempting to toddle free of parental support.
However, we do not settle for mediocrity in this family. Meeting milestones is one thing; crushing them is another. To provide my girls a leg up in life, I decided to set them an achievable goal: the Women’s World Cup, 2035.
In the year 2035 my daughters will be 24, the average age of a 2011 Women’s World Cup soccer player. I will not rule out qualifying for the 2031 Cup at age 20, but at that fledgling age they will likely spend the majority of their time warming the bench and by 2039 will be past their prime. So it’s 2035 or bust. Continue reading »
Breakfast: Old School Style!
Parenthood is a maze/a quagmire/a gauntlet of choices and decisions that come at you faster than a swarm of Hitchcock’s birds from the second you find out she’s pregnant until the day you waffle down your last bit of oxygen.
It isn’t usually easy, but that’s kind of what makes it cool.
These days though, there’s just too much information. Trying to make your mind up about what’s best for your kids used to be a matter of talking to your mom on the phone, ignoring her know-it-all advice, and then following your guts (which just so happened to be a happy swamp of real butter and steak and mint chocolate chip ice cream that you housed last night during Three’s Company).
Nowadays though, the fun is over. Nowadays, you want an answer or an idea: you type it into Google Search and you get 60 trillion shots of differing opinion jammed down your throat until it’s coming out your nose like Dr. Pepper used to do when you laughed with at with your best friends in your summertime yard.
And that’s okay, I guess. You can’t stop progress and who would want to anyways? Continue reading »
Nothing could keep me asleep on Saturday mornings past 6 a.m. as a kid. No way was I going to miss any of my favorite cartoons. He-Man, G.I. Joe, Smurfs, Inspector Gadget, The Chipmunks, Captain N: the Game Master, and Kissyfur were all cartoons I watched religiously on those mornings.
My favorite cartoon was easily He-Man. What young boy didn’t like a show about swords and cats transformed by the power of Gray-Skull? G.I. Joe took a close second to He-Man. My friends and I collected the action figures from both shows and regularly had massive action figure wars that rotated from house to house.
In those many battles the good guys always won. There was always a cause worth fighting for even if it was a pretty silly cause. In the end the good guys had to have a good cause or what was the point?
Meet your new daddy?
Like most parents of small children, I live in a world chock full of life.
There is constantly someone crying or laughing around these parts. Hardly a minute goes by when someone isn’t marching through the room pulling a toy train or running for the baby wipes we left upstairs. Heck, they don’t call it the living room for nothing now, do they?
So, it seems fairly natural that my wife and I wouldn’t spend too much time considering our impending demise. But, it’s out there, huh?
It’s out there written somewhere in the stars, our leap into the great beyond/the next chapter/Side 2. For most young parents (okay, I’m 40 so I’m basically hurling my name into a group without anyone’s real approval!), but for most young parents/middle age parents of minors, creating a will is something often put on the back-burner. Still, here are questions that need to be addressed in the event of an early dismissal.
Mainly, who would get our kids?
Who would we want to take them in and love them like their own?
Who would we trust to do that for us? And who might actually want to do it?
We are at war, my wife and I. And it’s getting out of control.
This is making sleep difficult.
The problem is … the whole war is about sleep.
We like to think everything else in our family life is fine and dandy, but we are constantly at odds over something so simple: our mattress. How can something ostensibly about relaxation and comfort — the very thing on which we rest our weary parental bodies — provide so much fodder for marital discord? Continue reading »
My family has had a membership to a gym on and off over the past eight years. We formed this habit well before Addie was born.
I learned pretty quickly that Casey isn’t much of a jogger. She doesn’t use the weight machines, the free weights or any weights for that matter. The girl is a dancer and she enjoys a good yoga session now and then. However, those are both exercises that my wife does at home with the help of our XBox Kinect.
Casey is also capable of eating good healthy food, like spinach. I can’t even stand to look at spinach, let alone eat it. When Casey feels like it is necessary to, um, well, I’ll just say eat less and dance more, she’s fantastic at controlling her appetite and increasing her physical activity. With these abilities and her love of all dance games, Casey has no problem keeping her physique exactly the way that she wants it.
Cody 
Whit Honea 
Serge Bielanko 
Mike Adamick 
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