Season’s greetings from the depths of the Internet! It’s been months (and months and months) since I last posted here, and with the end of 2023 upon us, I thought it was a good time for an update (and, for those of you who are interested, a tease of what comes next).
And what a year it has been. Miles said goodbye to pre-K and hello to kindergarten (a journey that has been fraught with its own challenges). He also said goodbye to several teeth this year (and some of them weren’t even lost to injuries!). He’s proudly reading sight words and Bob Books now, and is decoding new words like a champ (even some multi-syllables!). Miles also learned to swim over the summer (using a method I never thought would work, that was basically “toss his ass in the water”) and has been taking taekwondo classes (which appear to have started him on the path to things like “integrity” and “listening when someone is giving you instructions”). He visited the nation’s capital in the spring and managed not to start a riot despite attempting to go shirtless at the Capitol building.
Parenthood is still an exhausting journey. The highs are high, and the lows are absolute rock-bottom. But good grief, this is the most rewarding experience of my life. Nothing else comes close (and I’ve seen the Sistine Chapel and been to three Flaming Lips concerts for God’s sake).
When I last posted, I suggested that this blog wasn’t entirely finished, and while it’s taken me the better part of the year to deliver on that promise, I thought that New Year’s was a good time to reward you, dear reader, with the next phase of things (and, admittedly, to fulfill a promise I made to myself while there was still a few hours left in 2023).
Beginning tomorrow, New Year’s Day, I’ll be posting the first episode of Conversations with a Five-Year-Old, a series of podcasts Miles and I recorded together this year. New episodes will drop every Monday until I run out of ’em. These will only be available here on the blog (for now), but if you all enjoy them I might look into bringing them to other platforms (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc). So please do let me know your thoughts!
Here’s to 2024!
The Perils (& Pride) of Paternity 