Six years ago, I wrote a Thanksgiving post on this blog that was exactly two sentences long. It called 2020 a "difficult, challenging but eye-opening" year and said that if you stepped back, you'd find plenty to be thankful for. I stand by every word. But two sentences don't help much when you've got a house full of relatives and a turkey that's still frozen on Wednesday night. My boys are grown now, or close to it, so I've had a lot of Novembers to see which family Thanksgiv

I started looking last December. It is September now. That puts me about nine months in. A recruiter told me at the start it would take six to nine months. I remember thinking that number sounded insane. It was not insane. It was accurate. I am writing this the way I would say it to a friend across a lunch table, because I have had that lunch a few times now, usually with another dad who just got the news that his role was eliminated and is trying to figure out where the floo

Some links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through one, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend gear I would tell a friend to buy. The best camera for family photos is the one you will actually carry out the door. That is the whole thing. It took me two years and one expensive mistake to work that out. I am not a photographer. I am a dad with a full week and kids who do not hold still for anything. What I wanted was something th

I took thousands of photos when my boys were little. Today, I can’t find the one picture I want. It becomes an adventure to find that one photo. I find all the other photos but rarely find the one I started looking for in the first place. If I do find the photo, it’s in the last place I look. When younger dads ask me how to capture family memories, I don't start with cameras or scrapbooks. I begin with a system small enough that a tired dad will still be doing it six months

Work life balance for dads is not a 50/50 split. It is deciding, on purpose, what gets less of you this season, so the thing that matters most gets your attention instead of your leftovers. For about six years, I did it the hard way: replaying the day on the drive home, deciding I had fallen short, promising tomorrow would be different, then doing it all again. One evening at work, it hit me that staying later would not finish everything. There would always be more work than