But at the same time that the experience is pulling you apart, it's also bonding you. You have this joint venture! You both made this baby. And that's the thing I still can't get over

We had the boy's name picked out, but we didn't have a girl's. When he turned out to be a boy, we were so relieved. Literally, in the middle of contracting and pushing, and with my wife being drugged - out and half - lucid, we were still coming up with names.

It's not like some movies where you're following a bunch of different stories you can cut around. There was nowhere to cut to. It's these guys. We're not cutting back to anybody else

The simple combination of letters and sounds you select as a name for your baby can result in a life of carefree coolness or decades of expensive therapy. Hi, I'm Jake versus Hi, I'm... Tapioca

Having a baby dragged me, kicking and screaming, from the world of self-absorption.

I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.

The most rewarding part about being a dad is just looking at children who didn't exist at some point. The first time you saw them, they were the size of a quarter, in a sonogram, and now they can pour orange juice and yell at each other.