Starting with the “Fast5” is a mixed blessing with Nutrisystem. I can say that now that I’m a few weeks into the program and have finally started losing weight again. The jump-start — as I write about here: Nutrisystem Fast5 Was Fast and Easy — gets you moving down the scale quickly, but then it’s an adjustment afterwards to get back to your regular eating habits and metabolism. The result was that for the first…Read More
In my imagination, a beautiful woman is poised to surprise me with gifts and a surreptitiously planned super romantic overnight get-away to celebrate Valentine’s Day. In reality, however, I’m a single dad and life isn’t quite that exotic. There’s no beautiful girlfriend in my life at this point, so today’s actually all about my kids. And that’s okay. It is fortunate that my youngest, now 11yo, has arranged for a small Valentine’s Day party, though,…Read More
Received a nice note from a reader that’s worthy of discussion: I stumbled upon your website. Being that I am a single mom (sole parent) and a member of our neighborhood single mom’s club (which is really play dates involving wine), it was refreshing to read some of your articles and how you actually spend time with your children and take care of them, and most importantly love them. Most of our group’s ex-husbands do…Read More
I’m all for gratitude and taking the time to remember what we appreciate and are thankful for. I think we all tend to be so busy yearning for something newer, bigger, better, shinier that it’s way too easy to forget all the blessings we have in our daily lives, whether we’re living the good life in a fancy penthouse or big house or otherwise. For my family, I’ve been chugging along as a single dad…Read More
Last year I spent an afternoon at the At-Home Dads Convention and enjoyed the chance to meet a number of passionate dads who had opted to stay home and raise their children while their wives focused on careers and bringing home the proverbial bacon. A role reversal from the traditional male/female roles in a family, for sure. This year when the 19th Annual At-Home Dads Convention was again going to be in Denver, I proposed a…Read More
Ah Father’s Day. A day that should be fun, easy, light and enjoyable, with kids showering Dad with love and tokens of their affection. I see it on Facebook and on TV, so it must be true, right? I mean, I love my kids and I know that they love me too, so we’re good to go in that department. Except for that pesky thing called reality. This year my two younger ones are in…Read More
I’m working on an article for Parents.com about being a single father and have to admit, I’ve been doing this for so many years I kind of forget the initial panic and struggles of those first few months, realizing that I couldn’t tag-team someone else into play if I felt overwhelmed or exhausted or just had no energy. It’s a jarring transition for both parents, I think, though obviously the parent who spends less time…Read More
I last wrote about Kiwi the cat (aka “Keyword” or whatever name we come up with him for a given day) back in mid-November when I talked about him being our timesharing cat. At the time, we’d just gotten into a groove where he travelled from home to home with the kids, bouncing between my house and Linda’s house. It worked pretty well, actually, except for one stymying issue: Linda has three dogs and one…Read More
It’s been an eventful 36 hours, as people northeast of Boulder, Colorado know. If you’re in Gunbarrel, Niwot or even Longmont, you got a triple-whammy: sub-zero temperatures, a gas line failure that caused over 7,000 homes to be without heat for 24-hours or longer, and an electrical outage to boot. We got all three, and the kids and I kept our sense of humor – in fact, it was rather a grand adventure – but…Read More
When Linda was first pregnant with A-, our now 17yo (seventeen? Where the deuce did the time go??) one of the books I can recall us talking about was one of the bibles of pregnancy: What To Expect When You’re Expecting. I don’t think we bought it, though, as I remember thinking that it was very mainstream and by half-way through the pregnancy we’d decided on a home birth and were taking birth classes from…Read More
As I have written about before, I had a wicked cool cat for many years called Newton. He was a one in a million cat who loved people, never destroyed anything, didn’t sleep on my head and was fine if I vanished for a day or two and then resurfaced without prior notice. He was great company the first few years of my renewed singledom, though I swear he spent most of his life laying…Read More
Much of yesterday was taken up with helping a friend move from her flood-damaged house to a new place. Hundreds of hastily packed boxes locked in a semi-sized storage unit unceremoniously dumped on the street in front of her house with as much salvaged as possible. Her house, three weeks after the flood, is still clearly a disaster and where there used to be walls you can now see through the back of garage and…Read More
It’s been a rough few weeks, no question. The big flood didn’t help anything, but even before that, we have all sorts of things going on in our little family unit, including us deciding to pull A-, my 11th grader, out of the private school she’s been attending since kindergarten. We’ve switched her to an online high school, Laurel Springs, with the hope that she can focus on academics and really jump head first into…Read More
One thing I find fascinating about parenting — when I have the time reflect on my life — is how often I vacillate between thinking I’m doing a good job as a parent and being convinced that I suck at the job and am really messing up these poor young souls who have to deal with my “stuff” on a daily basis. You know what I mean. You just counseled your child on a tough…Read More
One of the smartest retailers in the world, Amazon.com doesn’t miss a trick. Whether it’s recommendation engines, group selling, auctions, or sending you notifications of new works by artists and authors you like, there’s not much that the Seattle-based powerhouse doesn’t get right. Except for one thing. For reasons that escape me, the corporate team at Amazon seems to be unable to grasp that Dads are parents too. Their membership club for parents in the…Read More