Conan, What Is Best In Life?

Lillian asked me the other day what I thought was the best part of being a parent. This is a tricky question, so I quickly ran through the list of things that had changed since I'd become a parent to figure out which was the best:

Lack of sleep
Lack of sex
Losing my hearing
Changing dirty diapers
Even fewer movie-watching excursions
Tied to the homestead
Hours of burping, without any burps
Sore back from the aforementioned attempts to burp
Expense in diapers, wipes, clothes, laundry and bathing soaps, lotions, creams, and powders

Let's face it, Porter will certainly be a really cool kid some day, and with luck, he'll mature into a wonderful human being, perhaps be a father in his own right and then win a Pulitzer soon after. But right now, he's pretty much limited to eating, sleeping and screaming.

Except when he smiles. Yeah, they're few and far-between. After all, he's a blue-stater under red-state oppression, so what's to smile about. Still, when he does smile, that's when I know what's great about being a parent.