Like a drunk person crashing at your house, a baby may need to be carried inside; paw at your breasts, with or without other people present; and insist on telling long, incomprehensible stories.

After ten months, three days and an extremely difficult labor and aftermath, my little girl arrived, making each obstacle and every pain worth it. For her, I'd do it all again. In a heartbeat.

We fill our spaces and silences with banter about sleep and snacks and strollers and field trips. We dance, and skillfully too, around the harder, nameless stuff -- the stuff that makes us shake with worry and spin with wonder, the stuff that makes us real.

The more we teach our kids that nature is dangerous, creativity is out of bounds and physicality is not to be tolerated, the more I worry for our society.

I watched my sons carefully to see if they were buying into mom's passionate ode to nature. The boys seemed to be warming up to the cicadas swarming around them when several flew up and landed on Connor. "Dad!" he yelled. "Get them off me!"

You see, being a dad in midlife is not about superficial externals such as dying one's hair or getting a facelift to pass as a younger man. It's an inside job. It's about accepting the unique realities and learning to accentuate the many attributes mature men bring to the table.

Was it a place she wrote about what worries her? Is she describing her scary dreams at night? With a heavy, worried heart, I unlocked her diary to see what was inside. What did I find?

These days, mixed-race babies account for 7 percent of the kids born to American moms every year. So why are the parents of biracial kids still hearing the same tired, old comments our parents and grandparents heard (or, God forbid, made!) back in the day?

Sure, your little kids may not have slept, may have barfed in your hair and thrown tantrums in the grocery store, but teens still throw up, only now it is a much bigger worry, and good luck picking them up and putting them in their rooms when you want to change their behavior.

Adoption is a lot of things. It is a prism. It is an hourglass. It is dark cave. It is a light at the end of a terrifying tunnel. It is a beginning.

There's been waaaaaaay too much talk of bad dudes in the news lately. It's got me thinking about what goes into making a perfect person, about what ingredients we need to have in our parental pantries, if you will, to help us raise a great child.