DADWAGON

Did I sense a bit more ambivalence over fatherhood this week? Although we started off debuting our very first video feature—a trip to the Toy Fair, yay!—and successfully redesigned America’s favorite lethal foodstuff, the hot dog, we spent a lot of time angsting over who our children are and what we’re doing as parents.

The awful truth, as Ted put it, is that our kids don’t particularly want to be around us. Nor, as Nathan explained, do we necessarily want to be around them: Given the right price (say, a cockatoo and $175), we’ll gladly wash our hands of the rugrats. Christopher, meanwhile, was torn between admiration for Yitta Schwartz, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor with 2,000 living descendants, and criticism of the ultra-conservative religious world she lived in. Make up your mind, Bonanos! Me, I made unnecessary confessions: to wanting to put my daughter in a pet carrier, and to having apparently fathered a celebrity model’s child. Who knew?

But we were also nice and happy! Or at least amused. Like when Dalia had a bad hair day! Or when she wanted to marry her brother! Or when JP out-haggled his dad! Or when Chris caught fancy-pants Upper East Side moms tossing their babies around like cats! Oh, those were funny. Boy did we laugh!

Whatever our individual cares and concerns, we were united, as usual, by the Tantrum, in which we tried to figure out whether to go broke getting our kids decent educations, or let them go to public school and wind up idiots. Either way, they’ll be smarter than we are.

Blizzard permitting, we’ll see you next week…