Michael over at Daddy Designs is quickly becoming one of my best sources. He e-mailed me this staggering piece from the St. Pete's Times about a journalist dad's first day home with his infant. In summary, he notes -- minute by minute -- that day and its attendant horrors.

Like Michael, I found it tough to make it through the blow-by-blow account of the whole day, so mundane is it for those of us who have lived through hundreds (if not thousands) of similar days. And it's made harder to read by the fact that the writer, Scott Barancik, is acting as if spending 11 hours alone with his own child is akin to scaling Everest or winning a mountain stage in the Tour de France.

The undercurrent -- and it runs through Austin Murphy's How Tough Could It Be (I'm halfway through), too -- is that taking care of kids is a tough, tough job that requires a special kind of person (mom) and specialized training (motherhood). This is, as almost every other at-home dad will attest, bunk. It's the single punch line behind Mr. Mom. In some ways, I'm softening to the stereotypes of Mr. Mom, which came out before a lot of painstaking research showing that dads are perfectly capable of raising children. We've come a long way, baby.

I keep harping on this same point, but articles like this one are the reason that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations I wrote about last week are so important. Guys like Barancik and Murphy shouldn't be clueless about parenting when they finally do pick up the childrearing slack. Just because they aren't the primary caretaker is no excuse. I have yet to read a single word by the wife of an at-home dad suggesting that she felt clueless or incapable. The reason: I've yet to meet the spouse of an at-home dad who wasn't totally involved in parenting whenever she had the chance. I'd love to see more dads take the same initiative.

Update: Daddy Types takes on this subject, too. Well worth the read.