Yesterday I took the kids to the mall to put a dent in Christmas shopping for my wife. We had a great time, and I saw a few other dads doing the same thing with their kids. It's easy to spot them in the crowd - they'll have the wide, darting eyes looking for any tell-tale signs of trouble, with beads of perspiration on their foreheads... or they'll just have the glazed over eyes with the pleading looks on their faces that screams "HELP - Get me out of here already!"

But inevitably the moment of truth came as we passed the Victoria Secret store. I saw a few dads in front of me take the "sideways glance while keeping the head pointed straight ahead" at the mostly-naked mannequins. And as I looked to see what they could possibly be looking at () I noticed that Victoria's Secret sadly was not much of a secret anymore.

How can they get away with displaying soft porn in full public view??! And what affect will that have on my children when they start to notice?

Fortunately, they're still pretty young and at least my two youngest seem fairly oblivious.

Every year about this time the angst about where we go for Christmas and who we spend what time with begins. Everyone grows up with "traditions" and when you marry someone you're trying to weld two different traditions together into a solution that makes everyone happy. The problem with that is everyone can't be happy because traditions often overlap or conflict with each other. The end result -- someone isn't talking to someone else because "they" messed up the 50 years of tradition of doing "X" on the morning of "Y" -- and I walk around with a knot in my stomach because I know that someone is going to be unhappy -- removing the happiness from celebrating the birth of Christ and the gifts that He has bestowed on all of us. So the decision that I am faced with is when is enough -- enough? When do you say "its time for my own little family to have their own traditions, and we'll fit into other peoples schedules as we can?" And the follow-up question -- how do you communicate that decision to everyone else so that you don't become "the bad guy" -- the one that ruined Christmas for everyone else because I'm so selfish and want things my way?

Today I felt like Superman.

I woke up at 5:00 to do some website work, and met up with my riding buddy at 7:00 for a 36 mile ride in near-freezing, windy weather. Forty five minutes after the ride ended, I was on my way to the tree farm to cut not one, but two Christmas trees - one for my family and another for a friend of ours who recently went through a divorce and her ex had made other plans.

My 5-year old son and I cut them together, with his hand on the saw holding on for dear life while I muscled it back and forth until the tree toppled. It was a total father-son moment where he was absolutely determined to be part of the action all the way through.

Then it was setting up one tree at our friends house, and then again at our house, and then of course putting on the lights and ornaments. And that's when I turned into Mr. Hyde!

I hate putting up ornaments and decorating trees. I really do. I mean, I like the end result a lot, and I like to take pictures of the kids putting up their annual ornament gift we give them. But I'm a complete sour-puss when it comes to helping along the way.

My oldest daughter -- through her friends at school -- has discovered MySpace. Her mom told her that she would be monitoring what was going on her site and checked it out the other night. She found that my daughter had accepted invitations from two guys who said they were teenagers (my daughter is 13) and they convinced my daughter to give them her phone number. Now she's getting phone calls from these guys during all hours. I received a "dad come and get me" phone call on Sunday night (after driving 5 hours in the snow back from Sunriver). When I asked why she said that she didn't want to be at her moms house right now. The issue is that her mom told her about all the dangers of mySpace and she just didn't want to hear it from her mom. I did pick her up and took her out to dinner to talk and we discussed the risks. My daughter was more mad at herself than mad at her mom. One thing to know about my oldest daughter is that she's an A student at Cornerstone Christian Church and is a model student and child. In her entire life I think I've only had to discipline her maybe once -- she's just a the nicest and most kind person on the planet.

So my question to my dad peers -- should I:

Usually when someone asks this, they really mean "Is it ok to fight in front of your kids?"... but they don't want to admit that they actually fight, so they use the PC term "argue".

So now that you know what I'm really asking , let me paint the picture a bit. It's Thanksgiving morning, and my family is coming over in a few hours. The house needs to be cleaned, the kids need to be fed breakfast, my wife is scurrying around the kitchen cooking up a storm (she's an amazing gourmet chef), and somehow we started talking about finances.

I don't even remember how it came up, but the issue was my attitude towards money I make on my side business and whether or not I consider it truly our money after I earn it and before I take some of the profit and invest it back into the business. Sounds like a fun topic eh?

This morning my oldest daughter Bridgett played her indoor soccer game, which they won in the last 2 minutes with an adrenalin-pumping comeback. While she was celebrating with her team, I asked my middle child Delany if she'd like to come with me to the bike shop (I needed to to exchange some AmFIB shoe covers for the right size).

She agreed, but as we were climbing into my truck she nonchalantly asked me if I was ever going to start taking her and her siblings out on dates "ever again". Doh! There are times as a dad when my kids' innocent, honest questions completely knock the wind out of me .

I live in the Pacific Northwest, where it rains almost year-round with a few weeks of sun in the summer. In fact, it's raining right now - not exactly great camping weather.

I've discovered however that my two-man tent fits nicely in our family room, and it made the perfect set up for my son and I to pretend we were out camping. We had a great time wrestling in the tent, and brought his entire HotWheels car collection in the tent to play with. Even the dog had fun

I am not a pet person. I never have been, and I never will be. My wife, on the other hand, loves pets, cats in particular. She works for a vet clinic, so she gets to be around them all the time. She had three cats when we got married. Never having lived with cats before, I was not aware of the havoc they would wreak in my life once we got married and I had to share an apartment with them. For instance, one of them was a cranky old witch who shed white hair all over the place and howled at you and scratched you (or at least tried - she had no claws any more) when you just walked by her.

It rains almost continually here in Oregon this time of year, but today was crystal clear. I finished raking the leaves, mowed the lawn, and fed the kids lunch while my wife was out doing some grocery shopping.

I was thinking an after-lunch snooze would be so nice, and just like clockwork my wife called me from the road with a suggestion: "Honey, why don't you put up the lights since the weather is so nice?". AARRGGHHH!!

One thing that my wife and I have always been very careful to do is to separate the person from the job. What I mean by that is when one of my kids do something well, whether it is one of their assigned jobs or coloring a picture, we tell them "good job" instead of "good boy" or "good girl". This way, their worth is not tied to the job they do. Saying "good boy" may be fine when they do a good job, but what about the time where they do a bad job (and we all do that)? Does that mean they are a bad boy or bad girl? Not at all.