An empty suit

My father-in-law spent his whole career as a public-school teacher and administrator, mostly in New York City. He’s made powerful and persuasive arguments in favor of our public schools, noting that most kids actually come out of them with better educations (by well-defined measures, like achievement in college) than their private-school compatriots. Add to that the fact that any school, whether superb or half-decent, is secondary to the reading and other forms of edumucating that we do at home. That the only way public education’s going to get any better is when parents of promising kids don’t avoid it. That a number of elite-private-school kids whom I know as grownups are — how to put this delicately? — horrifying people. (No, I don’t mean this guy.)

Besides which: Our local public school is pretty good. Or, to put it another way, would a private school be $30,000 per year better? No.

And therein lies the only cloud on the horizon. That well-regarded public school is pretty full already. There’s an immense real-estate development planned a few blocks east of us. It will join the hundreds of condo units already plunked into the neighborhood in the past decade. And five years from now, when our son is looking to go into kindergarten, I hope to god that the local K-through-6 hasn’t become so swamped that a lottery system comes into the picture. We’re in a race against time: I’d like to see the economy improve in the next five years, but if the real-estate market could just stay a little sluggish, just to slow down the building spree, I really wouldn’t mind.

Of course, that’s easy to say when your kid is 11 months old. Get back to me when I am up against the pre-K wall, like my colleagues here, and I too might consider moving to another continent just to make this whole thing simpler.

I got the call at 6:20 this morning from Dalia’s teacher. Snow day.

It’s not hard to tell why. The backyard looks like a Coors light commercial. That lump in the middle? That’s Nico’s big plastic car.

What is bumming me out is that I still have to crawl off to some hole and write all day. No sledding, no snowmen, no snowball fights.

I like what I do for a living. But there’s something particularly incalculable about the time it takes to write: do you need to read that one other book? Make the 29th phone call for a story? So much of the reporting and research ends up cut from the finished product anyhow. And with kids, there’s such a tangible trade-off: you make that phone call, you miss another moment you could have had with your daughter. That’s all the more reason why I keep such regular hours, so that I don’t have to weigh each decision as a referendum of work vs. family.

So, yes, dads are heading out into the snow to go to work (does that make you happy, Dr. Laura?). But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

Sexy time!

Thank you, Nathan, for your post earlier today. Your thoughts on Dr. Laura only served to remind me why “doctors” with only one name really get my blood boiling.

Yes, Dr. Laura is a zipperhead and should be silenced. But when I really want to get the circulation moving, I think of a different doctor–Dr. Ruth. For sex advice, relationship advice, oh hell, just cause she’s so damn fine. That’s one central European immigrant who can sock it to me any time.

Oh, wait–parenting blog. Forgot. Here’s a video by Dr. Ruth in which advises couples with kids to have date night (go to the opera–nudge, nudge, wink, wink), or something like that. I was too busy drowning in those dreamy, bespectacled eyes to pay too much attention.