Nothing Starts a Day Off...

...Like waking up five minutes before you're supposed to meet someone half an hour away because you were counting on the kids to wake you up at 7 like they have every single other Saturday since the dawn of time. Fortunately, they heard the panic in Daddy's voice and got dressed in record time (for a six year old, that's less than an hour). I called the person I was supposed to meet and let them know I'd be late, and still was only a half-hour late.

It's funny. You don't see your kids getting older. They're just your kids. I'm sure Mom G. looks at me and sees the little boy who fell off his bike and skinned his knee, or who stepped on a nail and got blood poisoning and was in the hospital for two weeks. I'll probably always look at TheBoy as the frail little infant not gaining any weight the first month of his life, even when he's a surly teenager trying to eat me out of house and home. BabyGirl G. will always be Daddy's little girl in her white Easter dress gazing longingly at the puddle of mud, even when her white dress is walking down the aisle on her wedding day.

When you become a parent, you become a parent for life. It's not something you sign up for part-time - you've got to throw yourself into it with everything you've got and more. You need to grow, yourself, learning new things and changing old, set ways to live with this strange new entity you've made called a child. You get to see everything again, through the eyes of your child, and you start to realize that there really is magic in this world. It truly is wondrous.

The other side is equally frightening. Your kids will get sick, in some cases severely. You need to be prepared to sit by the hospital bed praying frantically that your child will be all right. You'll find yourself bargaining with G-d: Please, G-d, take the sickness from my child and give it to me ten-fold. Let me assume this burden so that my child does not suffer. You realize that you would sacrifice your own life for your children; for some, you realize that you would not only die for them but kill for them as well.

"Welcome to the Parent Club. Your membership in it expires when you do". Words of wisdom from my boss nearly ten years ago when we found out that we were having a child. I didn't fully appreciate the full weight of those words until later; I suspect that, even now, I don't fully appreciate them. I have yet to send my kids off with friends alone and worry about if they'll come home safely. There's the whole driving thing - while TheBoy might still have more than six years before he gets his license, his friends will be up sooner. Then the prom, and choosing a college, and leaving the nest...

It's a magnificent, terrifying job. It takes everything you have and then some. Some days, you want to just quit - I hereby tender my resignation as "DADADADADADADADADADADAD". Just yesterday I saw a bumper sticker on a minivan that summed it up perfectly: "Some days I wish I was a missing person". But you stick it out, and you work through the hassles, and you deal with the 3 AM vomiting because they ate their way through the carnival, the wrecked car, the broken heart, the shattered knee.

Is it worth it? That's a question every parent asks themselves at one point or another. The vast majority obviously answer in the affirmative, as our species marches ever onward. In other words, it's a good thing they're so darned cute, because if they weren't I think we'd eat our young like other species... Am I glad I have kids? Oh hell yes. Are they "worth it"? Again, hell yes.

I can't imagine any appellation that makes me happier, prouder, or more scared, than "Daddy".

That is all.