A brief treatise on the myriad ways I will be failing my kids.

Back during the housing bubble, some birds built this nest on our garage. After the bust, it sat vacant for a couple years. This little guy bought it at auction and is fixing it up.

I don't know birds, and this worries me. This fact made itself known to me when attempting to write a caption for the picture above. Oh, I'm familiar with the marquee names that most people know: cardinals, bluejays, seagulls, roadrunners, bigbirds, etc. After that, my grasp of avian naming is non-existent.

This sort of thing puts me in a panic. What will happen in a few years when the twins and I are strolling through the woods and they start asking nosy questions? Surely I don't have the time now to become proficient at birding. Am I the only person to worry about this sort of thing?

Of course, it's not just the birds that bother me (although birds do scare me to a certain degree). Here's a partial list of subjects I am miserably deficient in, subjects that I think any parent should know a little about:

Geology
Astronomy
Femininity
Fishing
Finance or anything related to money or the stock market
Philosophy
"Lost"
Pulmonology (this has already come up! I'm already failing..)
Politics (that might be a good thing)
Insurance
Mormonism
How to reproduce without assistance from medical science
Rugby, or, to a lesser extent, Australian Rules Football
Fascism
All the Q words you can use in scrabble
Parenting
The collective works of Michael Bay
Knitting
HVAC
Coasters and when they are or are not necessary
Mining
String theory
Joan Rivers
and...finally....
Generation X, of which I am supposedly a member

I know practically nothing about any of these topics. What if it comes up? How can I even hope to be a good father if I can't opine knowingly on these very basic subjects? I am a sham, and it is only a matter of time before my kids abruptly lose all confidence in me. This will likely happen during bathtime, when I reach in to pick them up and they'll say, "Uh, no Dad, I'll just let myself out, thanks. Maybe you should go study." I can already imagine it.

When the day comes that they need to know about the effect of thrust reversers and timely braking action reports while factoring operational landing distance...I'll be ready.

Day sixty nine.

repeat pictures today..

ps. I exaggerated in my list above; I do know one great Q word for scrabble. "Qi". Pass it on.

Olly noses over the edge of the bed, defying gravity.

Sure, she looks like her Mommy, but she got some of my mannerisms. "Duh."

Why do I always get pictures of Abby where it looks like she's judging me?