This month I am proud to introduce Briana Bucks, our first ever stepmom POM. Brianna and her family live in San Angelo, Texas. Forget those fairy tales about wicked stepmothers. Brianna is the most loving parent in the world. And she’s not a pushover either.  Just try faking a stomach ache in her house and see how far it’ll get ya.

Let’s get to know a little more about Brianna and her family:

An important test of where you are in your parenting maturity is if you’re able to make love with a baby monitor on in the background. I’m not saying to ignore your child just for the sake a re-connecting with your spouse. By all means, if you hear crying and screaming through the monitor, go attend to your child. But the real question is: Can you get busy if child chatter is blasting through the baby monitor?  

If I’ve ever needed another reason to hate travelling now that I’ve got kids, I have it. This past weekend, my wife had family in town. Normally, when one of my travel weeks coincides with a week that her family’s around, I consider it a bit of blessed synchronicity. I like my wife’s family, but it’s just that they’re better than my family. Most of my wife’s relatives are doctors, and most of mine are on prescription medication. You’d think that’d make for a nice balance, but every time I see them, I feel like I’m constantly being diagnosed.

This time my wife’s cousin, who is actually a cool dude and a good father in his own right was in attendance. And apparently my kids glommed onto him, repeatedly asking this other dad for “super” (our family’s term for tossing a toddler in the air and then catching him).

I’m happy my kids were having fun at a family event. Given my lineage, that’s real progress. I want my kids to be happy, and to receive attention if I can’t provide it myself because I’m away on business. But I must also admit that I was very jealous to learn that my kids were being tossed in the air by another dad. I thought that “super” was our thing.

Although, it’s probably good for me to realize that at some point my kids will stop thinking that I’m the most amazing human being on the planet.  No doubt as they grow up, my kids will have friends whose dads are “cooler” than me (though I can’t imagine how).  I know that when I was a kid, I thought my dad was awesome because he’d yell at the waiters when we went out to breakfast. But my friend’s dad drove a sports car, which blew my mind, and was way cooler than verbally abusing service employees—at least in the eyes of a child.

More than anything, I just need to be happy that my kids were happy, and don’t take it personally. Oh, and I’m also coming home with brand new footballs for the kids (that I purchased twenty minutes after my wife relayed the “super” story to me). Let’s see who they think is cooler now. I don’t see that other dad buying them any footballs.

If you were to think of parents as corporate managers, I would be the equivalent of the boss who isn’t the real boss. I might have the corner office (i.e. the head of the table), but my kids know that while they might report to me, my wife is the real decision maker. They probably assume I got the job as dad because I’m related to someone.

I don’t know about other parents, but I have to believe there’s meaning in all things that happen to me. If your kid tosses an entire roll of toilet paper in the toilet, you either accept that there’s a greater lesson to be learned (other than to hide the toilet paper in a safe until it’s needed), or you conclude that parenting is just a series of random acts meant to drive you insane.

The other day one of my sons peed on a wall. Normally that’s not a noteworthy event. Any time you put a wall in the vicinity of a boy toddler, there’s a good chance of it being peed on. But it was the way in which my son achieved his goal that I was proud of. Although, I also felt like I shouldn’t be proud, because I’m essentially condoning bad behavior. Should a parent take pride in noticing a valuable personality trait or ability, even if it’s demonstrated while misbehaving?

If I envy anything about children, it’s their ability to constantly see the world in delightfully new ways. In fact children are the closest we can come to knowing what it would be like if cavemen still roamed the earth.  Imagine showing a caveman a modern bathroom. He’d probably run around pushing all the buttons to see what they do, and then would either be delighted or terrified by auto-sensor toilet flushers. My kids are the exact same way. They LOVE public restrooms. I wouldn’t be surprised if they ask for a hand-dryer for Christmas.

I love mantras and sayings. As parents, we often get run so ragged that it’s nice to have some little phrase that can help keep us on the straight-and-narrow.​ My favorite one the past few days has been, “Respond to challenges in life the way you’d want your kids to respond.” And judging by my recent altercation with the garage door, I apparently want my kids to throw cursing fits and slam their fists into Costco packs of toilet paper when things aren’t working.