Building Castles on the Beach

Last week my wife and I had a Facebook duel with competing comments on a friend's post. It was Brad Pitt's fault. It was one of those posts where someone has taken a saying or a quote and pasted it onto a famous face or embarrassing picture in order to give the text heft. Sometimes the person actually said what they are quoted as to have said, sometimes not. For instance, Nelson Mandela did not say, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, blah, blah, blah." But the internet memes seem to think he did. I didn't create this...and I've just added to the problem, haven't I? People think these memes are funny or, worse, meaningful. They share them to Facebook and write things like "Wow!" or "So true" underneath. I don't get most of them. Rather, I don't get what most people see in these memes. I mean--and this is what I said in my Facebook joust with my wife--I say pithy stuff all the time and no one puts together a ...

Previously on " The Great Sleep Debate ": Dad starts to lose his cool after waking up at 3:00 in the morning for the five-hundredth time in a year. Then I remembered that back when the boy was still the size of my forearm and his whole head would fit in my palm, my wife had picked up the book  Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child  by Marc Weissbluth, M.D. At one point she told me in this totally incredulous way, "This book says if you put your baby down to sleep at six o'clock, he'll sleep straight through until six in the morning." We scoffed out loud together, for what did I care, anyway? Xander needed sustenance every two hours. Sleeping through the night would have to wait. We waited too long. I was beginning to feel like it would just be better to lie down on the hardwood floor of the nursery while the boy rattled the slats of his crib with his bottle all night. So I made an agreement with May. If I read this book, which she only ended up reading...

Xander has kept us up nights for over a year. His first month he was still in the hospital, so that part doesn't count. But when we brought him home, he was feeding every two hours. My wife and I would alternate nights staying out in the living room and sleeping on the couch while Xander slept his short periods in his little chair. Where he spent most of his time a year ago. When we brought him into the bedroom, we bought a co-sleeper that attaches to Mom's side of the bed--I think it's  required to be on Mom's side--but we continued the trading procedure, and every other night I slept next to the baby. (Talk about waking up on the wrong side of the bed. I only sleep well on the right side of the bed.) After a few months, though, the day came when I woke up in the morning and realized I hadn't had to soothe the baby all night. Huzzah! What followed wasn't every night, but sometimes we would all get a full night's sleep. Roll over, put pacifier i...

I finally finished Crime and Punishment . I've been teaching it since before the Winter Break in December. Don't tell my students. I actually read it just for fun back when I was in college. Well, for fun and to meet chicks. I carried it around with me and hoped girls would ask me what I was reading. Okay, I wasn't that desperate, but it worked that way at least once. I was on the window ledge of one of the girls' dorms working as a window washer. (I'm not making this up. It was actually pretty good, easy work, until the weather got cold and the outdoor window washers became indoor bathroom cleaners.) Anyhoo, a girl in one room started flirting with me through her window, and when she saw that I was reading Crime and Punishment , she became so captivated by my mystique that she began stalking me. That's a slight exaggeration, but she did find out where I lived, met my roommate, and they got married shortly thereafter. I try to explain the power of carryi...