At the risk of sounding like a bitter, barren old shrew, your kids aren’t that cute. I can tell by the way you’re smiling and applauding them that this is their first time throwing their own garbage away in a public trashcan, but I don’t need to be a part of this milestone in your child’s life. Please save the lessons and the exercises for home or the classroom and keep them out of my local Panera.

Through Windex streaks in her bedroom alcove, I spy boys on skateboards careening, screeching axels off the coping of the curb below the house; boys hurling themselves, inverted, with spaghetti-like arms, macaroni torsos, profanities ripping the autumn air like a flock of hawk-chased crows drunk on ornamental plumbs…

Hello.

Like you, I was once an avid viewer of television and film, but due to the addition of small, loud, highly dependent mini-humans in my household, my viewing habits have changed these last few years. I may not see as much adult-oriented television these days, but I have become something of an expert in the often underappreciated field of children’s entertainment. The recent recall of Baby Einstein products prompted me to sing out in defense of an unrecognized classic in the video entertainment industry, that being Baby Einstein: World Animals.

You can’t have a cupcake shop in a coop in the backyard, but you can have chickens.

You know you’re getting old when you wake up one day and you have no hair on your feet. One of the very first signs of aging is when you come home and find fifty pink flamingoes on your lawn, and you’re not even Italian. When you go to write a singles ad, and all you can come up with is, “Man with no future seeks woman with no past.”

You are old.