ↁ's Notebook

My nearly eight years as a stay-at-home parent have been filled with humorous moments that come with being the rare dad who is with his kids all day. Random kids who come up and start telling me about their potty habits. Boys who mistake me for their dad because I’m the only guy around. And, my personal favorite, kids yanking down their mothers’ shirts while I’m talking to them.

Friday, Lia and I were at the library. We were sitting in a quiet corner of the toddler area, working through a stack of books she had picked out. Around us, other kids and parents played, read, and chatted.

One of the books Lia picked out was a magazine for toddlers, kind of a mini-Highlights, full of short stories and poems. One of the poems was Edward Lear’s famous “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Thus, as a couple moms circled us, either chasing their kids or browsing through the board book racks by us, I read the following lines to Lia:


The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are,

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!

I had two choices, either plow through those lines in my normal voice, and then give a Joey Tribbiani wink to any moms who looked at me. Or lower my voice and mumble through them. Obviously, I took the second route. And then I told Lia it was time to go check out the movie section so we could flee quickly, just in case anyone had heard me.

Good times.

ↁ