For starters, us at-home dads have a new best advocate: Dave Barry, who wrote a nice, funny piece over the weekend about the realities of being a houseparent. Would that I could write like that.

In the serious news department, the New York Post takes note of the men behind some of NY's high powered women. It reads like a watered-down version of last fall's Fortune cover story, but it's a good thing all the same to see us put in such a flattering light. And I was thrilled to learn that there were new stats -- the lede of the story notes that 20 percent of preschooler primary care comes from dads -- up three percent from six years ago.

What I'm not so thrilled about is the fact that those numbers appear to have been botched. For starters, the 20 percent number (actually 19.3 percent) comes from 1999 figures, not 2003 figures, as best as the Census folks could tell. And an apples-to-apples comparison with the 1997 figures suggest that that percentage dipped slightly (other orange-to-orange calculations suggest there may have been a slight rise. I'll call it a wash). (You can do the math yourself with the data listed here on the Census site. This chart also suggests a certain stagnation in at-home dad rates, through 1999).

Why is this important? It goes back to one of my basic concerns about the reliability of the numbers. I happen to think -- largely from anecdotal evidence -- that the number of Rebel Dads is on the rise. But the fact that such numbers are so hard to sort through makes it difficult to make that determination. The bigger and better-documented the number of at-home dads are, the better we'll be able to make the argument that this is not a fringe lifestyle.