Over Thanksgiving Larkin was sick. It was the first time she's been really, really sick, and it turned our holiday into hell.

She'd had a few brief episodes over the course of her 21 months -- a runny nose or slight temp -- but always it went away. This time, in the run-up to Thanksgiving, a nighttime fever deepened, and her days became lethargic. Her fever reached 104, and we took her to the doctor.

It was a virus, our pediatrician said, most… Read More

The joke started early on, whenever Larkin would go through a phase of total mommy attachment. "What am I," I'd say to her, "chopped liver?"

It's silly, how wounded you can feel when your toddler starts giving you the cold shoulder, the turn-away, the contemptuous diss, the wailing look of horror.

That's the treatment I was receiving last week. Usually in the morning Molly gets Larkin from her crib and dresses her while I scrounge a last few minutes of sleep. Then the two of them come… Read More

I often wonder what my parents would have said, back in 1965 or so, if they'd been able to see into my future. Here I am, a robust American male, and how do I spend my time? Take one recent Thursday. After squeezing in some morning writing, I dealt with a caterer for an hour over the details (food, flowers) of a fund-raising party Molly and I are involved in. At 12:15 I picked up Larkin and stopped for a visit at my buddy Dan's house.… Read More

Before we had a child, Molly and I used to yuck it up over parents who boast about their kids. Couldn't they see how wrongheaded, how tacky that was? One friend breathlessly updated me on what grade level her son was reading at, as each year the little Einstein raced further ahead of his peers. Another spent 20 minutes one time discussing his 18-month-old daughter's "intellectual interests." Meanwhile, the girl was sitting in front of us, dismantling a red wagon with the savage zeal of a Visigoth,… Read More

One morning last week I took Larkin around the corner to a public meeting concerning three curbside trees the city wanted to take down. People listened to a city engineer explain that the trees were causing a problem. The sidewalk was buckling, its plates of gray slate pushed up by roots. A maximum 1 inch gap was allowed between those sidewalk sections, he said.

When it was our turn, some kids from the grade school read poems ("A tree is something I know," began one), and… Read More

Summer drew to a close, and Molly and I were still asking each other, "Are we relaxed yet?"

For us, summer means travel, and this year's centerpiece was a week in Ireland, thanks to an article I was writing for Bon Appétit. We considered making it a family trip. But with Larkin launched into early-onset Terrible Twos, we envisioned a holiday that started with a sleepless, screaming transatlantic flight and diplomatic crises with fellow passengers, then went downhill from there. So I traveled to Ireland alone.… Read More