The thing that keeps me up at night. (And I don’t mean a crying baby…)

We’ve got lots of friends with little teeny, tiny baby’s.  And whenever I see one this these friends and say “How’re you doing?” they look at me with hollow smiles and say…well they usually say nothing because they are too tired to say anything. They just give me a little sideways grin and give me “I’m going to shrug my shoulders and give you a little grin, but you know dang well how I am” look.

And I do know how “dang well” they are.

(I use “dang well” because this is a family blog. The actual words, brought on by the actual exhaustion, are much more colorful.)

I would like to give young parents hope that sleep and a state of restedness will return to your home.  It will, to a degree, but not like the glory days of no children, when you could sleep in or go to bed early or frankly do whatever the heck (remember family blog…) you wanted.

Because you can’t anymore.

Sleep is not part of the parental program.

But the thing keeping me up now is not a crying baby or a toddler with a fever or a 3^rd grader with the flu. What’s keeping me up now is a piece of research I heard the other day.

Simply put it said, “Girls pick boys to marry based on their relationship with their fathers.”

I used to think that being a dad was graded on a curve. You know, I may not be “Father of the Year” material but I am certainly better than, well, a lot of other guys.

Turns it now, there is a final exam.

And it is pass/fail.

So what if one of the girls comes home with a guy who is perhaps not exactly what I had in mind. Too many tattoos or too little ambition. Too many warrants for his arrest or too few teeth.  Too much vegetarian or too little concern for my daughter’s well-being.

What if, in spite of all my efforts and hard work and commitment and late nights and early mornings and hairbrushes and milkshakes and “tuck me in” and “sing me a song” and “talk to me now” and  “am I pretty?”  she comes home with a knucklehead? Or a yahoo? Or a jack wagon? (again…family blog.)

If she comes home with a guy and says “This is the one” when I am certain “He is not the one,” does that invalidate the previous 25 or so years of work.  Does that mean that the relationship that I thought was so good, so solid, so impactful was just a trainwreck and it took me 25 years to figure it out?

That is the stuff that keeps me up at night now.

Frankly, fevers and crying babies and teething toddlers sound pretty good…