Anne and I ate at Central Market yesterday afternoon. After eating there regularly for years, it probably had been actual years since we had eaten lunch at Central Market. It used to be a favorite place of ours before Parker and Logan came around and we started associating grocery stores with endless toddler wrangling.

Since Anne and I work about 50 yards apart from one another, we're very lucky to get to spend some quality time with each other almost every day while the kids are in daycare. I've had moments like this before, but it really hit me at Central Market yesterday just how much our lives have changed since those little kids entered our lives.

I love my kids and would go to the ends of the earth for them... being their father has been the greatest thing I've ever done by a factor of several hundred trillion. But I do have to say that parenting really does, sometimes, suck.

It's a very hard life that just goes on and on and on and on. I read an interview with Bill Murray recently where he remarked that all he wanted for Father's Day was the same thing his dad wanted; peace and quiet.To say it's both mentally and physically draining is kind of an insult to drains. It's more like some kind of vast mental and physical exhaustion desert that I'm wondering around in most of the time, only instead of "water," I'm searching for an oasis of quiet and deep rest.

One of the shitty things about death is that after a while, no matter how much you loved someone, you kind of forget what their face looked like. I think the same is true of parenting and the official death of what was once the more laid back side of your nature. I can't even begin to tell you what it felt like to sleep until 10:00am. I don't have a clue. Or what it feels like to have literally nothing to do all day. To go see a movie on a whim and then spend the rest of the evening at Barton Springs. Lying around the house now carried with it the guilt that your kids are just kind of left to their own devices, which is never really possible for long. Going swimming now involves bags packed with snacks and sunscreen and swim diapers, never mind the fact that the pool itself is this place where your main objective is to make sure your kids don't drown.

Maybe it's not a death after all but is instead a kind of coma that parenting brings about, because I'd imagine things really change once your kids become self-sufficient. I guess time will tell...