One night when my boy was a newborn, and I was bouncing him to sleep, it dawned on me that a kid should be brought up having a stable of classics that he or she can sing by heart. The epiphany was spurred by my inability to recall any song at all in its entirety….

“Can I put the marshmallows in myself?” my son asks and my daughter echoes, “and could I have a spoon?” He sips from a cup with a little cubby at the bottom for cookies. A prized piece of food paraphernalia, he painted it himself. The intense care with which they deposit marshmallows is bittersweet: I…

I confess: I’ve taken pride in food I’ve gotten my kids to eat. When I recognized, in my daughter, my fondness for cheese, I took it to the limit. She’ll bite at Bucheron, but she tapped at a second smear of Teleggio. My son craved spicy stuff since the womb –the wife regularly had me…