December 2016 brought about my 31st birthday. Or, if you followed the dog-parent mathematical correlation I established in the last chapter, my 38th year of existence. The latter age would probably be a better fit for the number of grey hairs I came to possess during my first year of parenthood. So yes, the transformation into an older dog had begun. There was still hope that fatherhood would bestow some new tricks on how to continuously survive the experience.

Birthdays after my son were different. My first post-baby celebration occurred eight days after the little guy arrived. A lot of the time was spent trying to get sleep in between bouts of newborn colic and daydreams of inventing a mute button for children. It was still a great, somewhat quiet day. The kind of day that gave me a little time to start de...

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