MyThreeDaughters

I shouldn’t do this, but what the….I just won’t spell it out. Let your sullied, grown-up minds fill in the gaps. Here goes: Wife and I need some grown up time every night, during which we usually sit around, watch something on TV and have a drink. Fontaine, being nine now and wanting to be [...]

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Bet you don’t think I can connect those three, in 400 words or less. Driving to a birthday party yesterday morning with the three girls. Fontaine mentions hearing her favorite song, “Sweet Home Alabama,” coming out of someone’s car. Before I had chance to think, “Man, we have to move north of the Mason-Dixon line [...]

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There are times that having young kids gives you a chance to be young again. You can legitimately be 40-way-plus years old and walk along the edge of a street and play the walk-a-tightrope game along a curb, you can imitate silly voices and laugh at bodily sounds. And my favorite thing: You have the [...]

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Now, there’s a whole philosophical debate to be had over how much privacy a child should have. How much a parent is entitled to know, to learn, through snooping. E-mail accounts, Facebook friends, all that stuff. But as with all matters of serious parenting, I’m not going to get into that here. My Dad always [...]

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Wife and Wife’s out-of-town friend are meeting up today, kids in tow, at a campground in Maryland. They have been planning the “menu” for several days, and I suggested a collaborative list be produced on Google Docs. To my surprise, this suggestion was met with a “Good idea!” Not to my surprise, the Google Doc-ument [...]

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It’s probably not news to Wife, but when I bought a new car about a year and a half ago, sure, gas prices were high and a big reason I chose a small car was great mileage. But another reason was — and here’s the part that wouldn’t surprise Wife — I LIKE having my [...]

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When I was a kid, my brother and I loved watching the movie “Tora, Tora, Tora,” but of course, at the time, I never thought I would use a lesson from a movie about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor as a guidepost for raising children. But so it is: So many daughters; so many war [...]

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We were driving down the street last evening, reveling in the usual melodic sounds of a Van Load of Kids (Hey, she poked me with her marker; Mommeeeeeee, she’s in my personal space; Tell her to stop kicking the back of my seat, etc), when we passed the neighbor’s house and saw the neighbor guy [...]

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“The Bigs,” as Wife and I sometimes call the two older daughters, have a saying: “Flashback.” (I think that’s the word, something like that.) It means, “Back at you.” It’s a short version of the ultra-childish, old-school “I am rubber and you are glue/whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” Gosh, I’m [...]

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Disney almost always gets it right. No detail is too small. No flaw is overlooked. So a few months ago, when Wife sent me a picture of a new Disney Princess cup that Rosebud had picked out at Target, and when Wife questioned the placement of the straw in this cup, I gave the Disney [...]

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