Everyone tells you to raise a reader. Read to them when they are babies, read them stories every night, model reading behavior.  A great, or even good dad, will devote hours in slavish devotion to this idea.  Well, here’s one dad who will tell you what the evil publishing scientists and lobbyists won’t:  reading isn’t fundamental; it’s fundamentally mental. Teach your child to read and you’re in for fifteen years of hardship and maybe even more.  Here’s why:

1. Reading with your kid eats up precious time.  “Lost” is on at 8PM where I live. Enough said.

2. Nightly reading isn’t a good habit. It’s an expensive addiction that will only lead to more books and larger books. Books that will bleed a family’s budget dry and consume short-in-supply storage space faster than a collection of restaurant napkins.  If they must read, start them early at the public library, which was invented to help the addicted and afflicted.

3. Teach a child to read and you lose them forever.  If I have to say, “Put that book down and watch this football game with me,” one more time, I will scream. Books interfere with things you could be doing together.  Don’t get me started on how hard it is to clean off books soaked in mashed potatoes when read at dinner time.

4. Book-reading kids are sassy know-it-alls. At ten, my child should know exactly ZERO more than I do. It does no one any good if she can name the capitol of California, when I know it’s Los Angeles.  Book reading children extract every advantage they can get and will trick you out of ice cream cones and cookies if you bet with them.

5. Book readers don’t listen and they hide behind the immersion in a book to avoid household chores like cleaning the furnace or hosing down the cats.  “Let them read,” is society’s way of giving up on the problem and allowing book-reading to expand unchecked.

6. Book reading leads to to writing.  Writing can lead to poetry, short stories, and even fiction.  These are not healthy pursuits for young bodies and minds.

7.  Reading leads to higher education. It has been proven that higher education leads to penury.  And if not penury, a career waiting tables “while waiting for that big break.”   Education is just a big hole. Not since the 19th century has anyone even hoped they could learn it all and dominate the subject.

So, there you have it: as cogent an argument against reading as I can muster.  Let them read if you must, but monitor the practice more carefully than if you saw them reaching for a pack of Salems.  This stuff is dangerous, it grows like bamboo, and it lasts a lifetime.

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[From NYC chef creates breast milk cheese]

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A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty. -Unknown

Any man can be a father. It takes someone special to be a dad. ~Unknown

A father carries pictures where his money used to be. ~Unknown

It is much easier to become a father than to be one. ~Kent Nerburn, Letters to My Son: Reflections on Becoming a Man, 1994

The days are long and the years are short. – Unknown
And the one dads have been saying for all time:

It all goes by so fast.

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You gotta love kids and the stuff they say based on what they hear and how they put together a dictionary of stuff in the world.

Some of the following words are not only understandable, they actually make for a better choice than the original.

1. Webbins – He’s a boy and he’s 6, so as much as we’d rather he wasn’t continuously jumping on the furniture making ak-ak-ak noises, he likes things that explode. Hopefully, he’ll be a webbins inspector and not a webbins trader when he grows up.

2. Valentimes Day – Most kids say this one for a while and it’s very cute, summing up a period of time rather a specific day.

3. Moat control – Ah, some days I wish that my remote control actually had this functionality as well.

4. I “sawr” it and “sawl” it. Maybe it’s his East coast roots, one generation removed, but sometimes my son sounds like he’d be more comfortable in Havahd Yahd.

5. Hermos – I guess if it kept little girls warm, rather than drinks, it could be a “her-mos,” but in this case, he almost has it right.

And finally, and my favorite, “Canimals.” These, of course, are camels. We’ve been playing Indiana Jones Wii a bit since the holidays and the scenes with “canimals” get him quite excited.

Like a lot of things about your kids growing up, I regret not having written more of them down. But it’s impossible to capture it all. Instead, you have to enjoy being the moment with them, without taking time to scribble their latest antics into Twitter. Otherwise, you miss it all.

What are your favorite malapropisms from your own kids?

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My son woke up yesterday morning, despondent that the tooth fairy had missed him. This was only his second tooth, so he has illusions of hitting the lottery with a take that would keep him in new Lego sets from here until his next birthday. His faith was unbending on the existence of said fairy, but he needed a reason for her non-appearance. Like any dad trying to keep the magic of mystical creatures, including Santa, alive, I had to think quickly.

Quizzing him, I discovered that he had been up since dawn waiting for a little flying creature to appear bearing banknotes to exchange for his “lost” tooth. The solution was easy. As man has done for millennia, the trick to maintaining faith in whatever is to embellish the story to make up for every exception. Faith isn’t created by belief, it’s created by the desire to believe. All I had to do was suggest that the Fairy only comes at dawn and would never appear if he/she knew that a little boy was sitting wide-eyed waiting for the guest appearance. With a quick “OK,” I bought myself another day.

This time, I had my cash ready and I surveyed the position of the tooth before sleep so I could get at it early. Within 15 minutes after my little boy went to sleep, the fairy arrived. His existence was secured. And all was right with the world.

If you have a child with at least two lost teeth, I bet you already have a tooth fairy story. Let’s hear ‘em!

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Okay, I was a sucker for the Bonnie Hunt Show. It was pretty funny, but also had a lot of heartwarming stuff that felt kind of true three or four years ago when we were parents of very little kids. This video, as she says in the intro, doesn’t contain anything bizarre or amazing, but if you’ve had a baby or even if you just are human, it’s hard not to smile when you see it.

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A recent survey by Jockey brand underwear survey (Insert PR accolades here) names the following dads as intensely viewable in their underwear. This is not me talking, but rather 1000 “people” 18 or over in a random telephone survey. And the winners are:

Brad Pitt – 29%

Matthew McConaughey – 24%

Hug Jackman 16%

Will Smith – 16%

Barack Obama – 13%

The survey also actually queried whether people thought Obama would want boxers, boxer briefs or briefs as a gift for Fathers Day. I won’t titillate you with what style underwear most Americans fantasize our president wears.

I actually don’t recall getting the nomination form for this survey, which may explain why the list is so full of “non-surprises.” I gotta say, though, that since Bill Clinton, made the question “boxers or briefs” so important to the country’s future, I really don’t want to ponder Mr. Obama in anything other than a blue suit and rep tie.

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Lisa Belkin gives a good round-up of where Mother’s Day money is spent and what mom’s really want. She also lists the worst presents, toting up examples of just plain dumb stuff, like long term care insurance or socks. Wow, that is stupid.

She sums up with her own conclusion, which would probably go for most dads I know (or at least this one).

What do I want for Mother’s Day?

To have someone else cook dinner. To get hugs from my boys — even the youngest who doesn’t like giving them so much anymore. And to take a long afternoon nap — without anyone noting whether or not I snore.

[From What I Don’t Want for Mother’s Day - Motherlode Blog - NYTimes.com]

After the weekly existential grind of carpools, and lunch-making, and allery medicine, and picking up dirty clothes, we all just want a little peace and quiet. Not time away from the family, but time with the family where we don’t feel that we still have to empty the dishwasher or put the wash in the dryer or even turn the burgers over on the grill. Just for one day…to live a TV family version where everything is in it’s place and food is magically on the table with kids magically washed and dressed, all set to say Happy “whomever’s” day.

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If you’ve read Ian Frazier in The New Yorker or elsewhere, you’ll know he has a real ability to satirize situations in a unique manner. If you’ve ever fantasized that you should be the Moses, King Solomon, or maybe King David, you’ll enjoy the longer piece the following extract comes from in the Atlantic. I read it to my kids and my five year-old enjoyed my solemn and Sunday school-like reading, but my nine year-old understood all the thinly veiled references to admonishments parents make every day and we had a good chuckle together about it.

On Screaming
Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault. Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you, and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even now I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat of it myself, yet do not die.

[From Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father - The Atlantic (February 1997) ]

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I found this during my daily Google troll on the words “stay at home dad” and was introduced to the work of Jon Lajoie, a Canadian singer and comedian. Most of his other videos are funny, but are not meant for “General Audiences.” This one, however, is a crafty rap song with heavy metal guitar riffs on the life of a stay at home dad. Nothing new in here except that the production values and his sincerity belting out the lyrics (“I don’t do drugs. I get high on baby hugs.”) are impressive.

Other videos show his skill at touching introspective ballads that always take a salacious turn after a few verses. I have to admit to laughing out loud at some of them.

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