Labor Day is over, school has started and it is time to start getting serious about posting. I'd like to start by throwing out a link to a story you certainly didn't see in your local paper: this fine first-person piece by a New Zealand dad. I felt like the guy got it. There was no real belly-aching, just a real solid understanding of what he was doing and who he was doing it for:

When I had been in the workforce I heard mothers say, "At home I just get into doing something, and the kids come and interrupt me". Well it's true. All those hours at your disposal get nibbled away. I thought the only thing I needed was better time management. But that was missing the main point: those kids are the reason I came home, not an interruption.

It seems oh-so-obvious when you read it out loud, but slowing down to your child's pace is incredibly difficult and incredibly rewarding. I have to consciously do it -- my instinct is to rush through Target as quickly as possible, rather than to crawl inside the circular clothing racks and pretend I'm a penguin. But if I can get myself to switch viewpoint, I rarely regret it.

Also worth checking out from the New Zealand piece: the 10 Commandments of The At-Home Dad. Very nicely done.

This has been quite a summer for stay-at-home dad blog creation. I have a couple of additional ones to post in the coming days. And following up on a suggestion from Keith Tipton, I plan to begin (slowly) making available an OPML file of all of the RSS feeds for at-home dad blogs. If none of this makes any sense to you, it will (someday). Suffice it to say that if you read more than a half-dozen blogs on a daily basis, you should be using RSS feeds and a newsreader (my preference is Bloglines) as a simple time-saving device (you *are* a time-starved parent, right?). I hope to have the OPML file up in a week or so with some core feeds, updating as I am able.