Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

    
US News has come out with their list of best colleges and universities – again, and the list looks pretty much the same as it looks every year.  Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, MIT, blah, blah, blah … .  Yes, we all know some Universities stand out above the rest.  And we also know that if you have the money and grades to attend one of the top, say 10, schools you’ll have some prestige going into a job interview after graduation.  Most of us, though, didn’t go[…]

     
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends weaning a child from the bottle at 15 months.  That doesn’t seem too unreasonable considering most babies are ready to eat solid foods at 4 to 6 months and most doctors recommend transitioning from a bottle to a cup at 12 months.  In fact, the AAP states that kids at 12 month don’t require nighttime feeding at all.  But, need and want are two separate things.  A lot of kids use their bottles (and the contents) for comfort.  That’s why,[…]

     
The fertility rate in the United States is steady at 2.1 kids per woman (it’s slightly higher among immigrants though).  That’s at replacement level.  However, women in the poor countries of Guinea-Bissau and Liberia can expect to have between 7 and 8 children in a lifetime.  There are a lot of factors that go into determining the number of kids a woman is going to have in her life, but two of the biggest are education and financial stability.  Educated people don’t generally have kids unless[…]

        
You’ve heard of the personal enrichment classes offered at your community college, usually in the evenings.  The classes are filled with stay at home moms and retirees who dream of spicing up or changing the direction of their perceived unfulfilled lives.  They think ”Maybe I’m a dormant genius!”  The example that always comes to my mind when I think of personal enrichment classes is “The night was humid.” from Throw Mama From the Train.  Danny DeVito’s character, Owen, wants to be a writer so he signs up for the personal enrichment class where[…]

   
Recently I’ve gotten a few obnoxious e-mails from Redbook magazine.  They’re collecting stories about stay at home dads who became stay at home dads after first being working dads, then switching places with their wives, and finally, who are now considering going back to work (or something like that).  In any case, the criteria for a submission does not apply to me.  I wrote back to them twice, first politely saying it didn’t apply to me but that I’d be happy to let them know my story.  Then[…]

Yesterday I took the boys to our favorite restaurant to eat our favorite meal, crêpes.  I ordered a German Apple Strudel crêpe while the boys each had a ham and cheese one.  As we ate, and were sitting at our favorite table, I reflected on what a simple and enjoyable tradition eating crêpes at that restaurant is for us.  When, on any given day, the words “Let’s go get crêpes!” comes out of my mouth and the boys say “Yaaaay!” I smile and feel rewarded for the[…]

 
Neil (my 7 year old) has extra wide feet, and that makes buying shoes for him difficult.  His feet simply do not fit into regular width shoes.  Even wide shoes are a squeeze.  Having no desire to see him develop misshapen feet due to ill fitting shoes, I sometimes end up spending an entire day driving all over Denver looking for a single pair that fits him.  Recently though, I’ve taken to ordering him shoes online to avoid wasting my time driving.  There are several places[…]

 
You think it’d be easy to tell your kid, “Don’t lie, don’t cheat, be honest, and good things will happen.”  But it’s unfortunate that life doesn’t always reward our honesty.  Sure, we tell ourselves that it does, but does it?  Are all happy people good people?  Are people who lie and cheat any less satisfied with themselves than people who stick to honesty and good deeds?  I don’t think we can truthfully say so.  John Steinbeck said it best.   

“It always seemed strange to me,” said[…]

 
By now everybody has heard of Abby Sunderland, the 16 year old girl who tried to be the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo in a sailboat.  She failed, and was feared lost at sea until her rescue signal was picked up and she was confirmed alive by aerial reconnaissance.  Today she was rescued by a French ship and will be back home in about a week. Meanwhile, her sailboat will be scuttled and her dream is over.  I wrote about her brother, Zac, last[…]

     
Obese parents are not by rule bad parents.  Yes, it’s unhealthy to be really fat, but it’s also unhealthy to be an alcoholic, chain smoker, lazy and a bunch of other stuff.  We are all human and we all do stuff that could be construed as making us unfit parents even if we really aren’t.  However, I am not talking about your every day, run of the mill stupid human behaviors.  What I’m talking about is Donna Simpson of New Jersey who currently weighs a bit over[…]