As an adult, I’ve long since been robbed of my innocence. So I’m really not one who should be listening too closely to the children’s music we play for our kid. Last weekend, I was clearly not in the mood to accept the kind of fantasies the musicians offered up to my son’s pristine ears. Because kids, despite what people tell you, not everything in your imagination is possible. Nor should it be.

Case in point, Laura Doherty’s Wiggleworm tune:”If All of the Raindrops.” Ready? Let’s play:

If all of the raindrops were lemondrops and gumdrops

Oh what a rain that would be.

I’d stand outside with my mouth open wide,

singing ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah (etc.)

If rain were replaced by lemondrops and gumdrops and our children opened their mouths to catch all that corn syrupy sweetness, they’d be more obese than we already are. Not to mention a sweeping epidemic of sewer rat obesity. After all, where do you think that sweet rain goes after it falls to the ground? Sewers, that’s where. And if water was replaced with candy, just imagine trying to flush a toilet filled with gumdrops.

In the second verse, the song gets even more treacly, if that was even possible:

If all of the snowflakes were chocolate bars and milkshakes

Oh what a snow that would be.

I’d stand outside with my mouth open wide,

singing ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah (etc.)

Not only would chocolate bars and milkshakes make piss-poor substitutes for snow, they would be damn near impossible to ski on. So long winter sports! Sorry future winter Olympians, your dreams of sporting glory have been dashed by Ms. Doherty’s imagination. Not only that, but can you imagine what the spring run-off would look like? Streams and rivers made of dirty chocolate and spoiled milkshakes. Disgusting.

If all of the sunbeams were lemonade and ice cream

Oh what a sun that would be.

Because I’d stand outside with my mouth open wide,

singing ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah (etc.)

If sunbeams were lemonade and ice cream, every bit of plant life would cease to exist. Try photosynthesis with a scoop of Chunky Monkey. Not going to work. So nice job, Ms. Doherty: now that you’re done with your song, our entire world is dead. And obese.

I ranted all of the above Dennis Miller-style to my 11 month old. Good thing he didn’t understand any of it.

What children’s song lyrics drive you around the bend?

by regular contributor Chris Belden

I’ve been a vegetarian for 20 years. I don’t eat meat of any kind—no beef, pork, poultry or fish. No lobster, no chicken soup, no turkey at Thanksgiving—nothing with a face, nothing with a mother. I don’t do this for health reasons. If I were interested in health I would exercise more and drink less. I do it for ethical reasons. This is not the forum to discuss this topic, but suffice it to say that I don’t feel it’s necessary to kill animals to survive. Anyone interested in my reasons for not eating meat can read books such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent Eating Animals, or just Google “slaughterhouse video.”

My 4 ½ year-old daughter, Frankie, is also a vegetarian. The flesh of an animal has never passed her lips. When she was born, I asked my wife to honor my wish to bring Frankie up this way, knowing full well that, some day, she will probably be out with a friend at the mall and eat a slice of pepperoni pizza, and that will be the end of her vegetarianism. But I wanted to try. (My wife, by the way, is not a veggie. She eats poultry on occasion, though she never cooks it at home.)

When people learn that I’m a vegetarian, they always ask the same question: How do you get your protein? My answer is simple: I eat what my body craves, trusting my system to know what it needs. If I’m low on protein, I crave beans, or peanut butter, or tofu. And so I eat it. I don’t keep track of what I eat, or how much. My health is as good as it can be at my age (50, God help me). My cholesterol is perfect, my blood pressure is on the money, all my blood levels are where they need to be. I’m not low on anything.

When people learn that Frankie is also a vegetarian, they sometimes freak out. She’s a kid! She needs her protein! But according to the American Diatetic Association, which was established in 1917, “well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence.” Most people are more aware of the recommendations of the USDA, which every once in a while comes up with a new version of the food pyramid. What people don’t realize is that the USDA is not only charged with providing eating guidelines, but also with promoting the food industry. So the recommendations to eat a certain amount of meat, to drink a certain amount of milk, etc.—it’s all tied in to promoting big business.

Frankie loves cheese, yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, and meatless “chicken nuggets,” all jam-packed with protein. Her favorite food in the world is lentil soup, which my wife makes from scratch, and is as good for you as almost anything. Like all kids, she also loves junk—gummy bears, ice cream, anything sweet. We fight the usual battles about this stuff; we just don’t tell her to please eat her bacon at breakfast.

Other than a lingering cold and allergies inherited from my side of the family, my daughter is as healthy as any of her meat-eating pals, and more so than most of them. When we recently had a strep throat scare, her pediatrician noted, with some surprise, that Frankie had not been in to see her since her annual check up, last August. And while I can’t possibly be objective about this, I really think she’s smarter than the average bear. Her teachers concur. If a lack of animal protein has stunted her mental capacity, we see no sign of it.

How does Frankie feel about being a vegetarian? I’ve been continually surprised that she has never requested a chicken finger, or a hamburger, or a hot dog—the products so often foisted on kids at parties, fairs and picnics. When a friend munches on one of those strips of processed chicken, Frankie casually mentions that she doesn’t eat animals and continues to eat her grilled cheese sandwich. No big deal.

I’m not sure how long this will last. That slice of pepperoni pizza is waiting out there for the kid who wants to rebel against her daddy. So are cigarettes, bad boys, beers and tattoos. I can only hope that, when the rebelling is over, she remembers what Albert Einstein once said: “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

What are your thoughts on raising kids vegetarian? Do you think it sets them back? Should they be allowed to choose?

by regular contributor Brian Hoover

I got a cryptic e-mail from a college friend the other day saying he wanted to talk. We didn’t really have a talk-on-the-phone kind of friendship, so I wrote him back and told him to give me a call. After catching each other up on our day-to-day stuff, he finally told me why he wanted to get in touch.

As a first-time father of a eighteen-month-old, I’ve been on the advice-seeking end of this kind of conversation more than the advice-dispensing (I can talk a decent game, but I’m as clueless as anyone). But my friend’s question had less to do with any specific act of fatherhood than it did a common but chiefly modern concern: When is the best time to start a family?

Once upon a time, it seems, this question was a nonfactor in our cultural experience. The best time to start a family followed hard upon exchanging vows: You got married, you had kids, you lived in happy pursuit of the American Dream ever after. There are many more paths to parenthood now that we have begun to recognize that the capacity to raise kids does not sit squarely with the white bread nuclear model of generations past.

We have more freedom now to plan our families than we’ve ever had before. With more control over our reproductive destiny, in terms of conception and contraception alike, we can wait until that ultimate state of Readiness arrives. We can wait until we’ve finished that graduate degree, wait until we’ve ditched town for a lawn in the ’burbs. We can wait until our careers are on bedrock and there’s money to burn in the bank. The inclination to say, “We’ll wait to start a family until we’re totally ready” is easy to understand. It’s what my wife and I did; we knew we wanted to expand our family some day, but that some day wasn’t even discussed until we were five years in.

At that point, she and I were 30 and 29, respectively. My wife had finished her master’s and ascended to the chair of her department at school; I had worked my way into the stage actors’ union and had steady income from a variety of performing and teaching gigs. We owned a home—not the house on the cul-de-sac of our wildest fancy, but a decent condo in a respectable school district. We’d scratched out a little bit of a savings, somehow. We were in a good place. We were Ready.

So we decided to go live without a net, so to speak. And it was good. We got pregnancy tests, and when they didn’t show us little blue plusses or whatever they were supposed to do, we kept at it. And it was good. Maybe a little more like work than we’d expected, but good all the same.

All around us, our friends were growing their families. The wedding boom we’d experienced post-college segued into a baby shower boom. We held our old roommates’ infants and imagined what our own would look like, hoping that it would happen for us soon so our kids could all grow up together. Some of our friends were getting pregnant with their seconds, and we remained the couple with the spoiled cat. We started to wonder about ourselves. Was she barren? Was I sterile? Had we screwed up the process by our chemical meddling? Or had we just waited too long after all?

We believed we were Ready, but we hadn’t accounted for difficulties conceiving. We hadn’t accounted for miscarriage once we did conceive. So we took stock, decided to be less aggressive in our pursuit, to let come what may. For every story about the couple who’d gotten pregnant as soon as they’d started trying, there was one about the couple who’d had no luck. Usually, the tales had it, they’d try and try, become stressed and obsessed, and it was only when they eased up or even gave up that they magically conceived. Perhaps that would be our story.

It wasn’t. We fell into a more natural rhythm, and we stayed as childless as we’d always been. We considered getting ourselves tested. We considered alternative fertilization methods, we considered adoption. We considered whether this was all a sign that the Universe had good reason to deprive us of offspring and that we ought not to push it if we had any sense of what was good for us.

When the housing market tanked, we were saddled with a mortgage far in excess of what our condo was worth; our savings meant a lot less in light of that. Acting work was harder to get, and the teaching was starting to wear me down. The future at large started to feel as infertile as the present and so, a bit restless, I applied and was accepted to grad school. It would be a rough couple of years and there would be lots of loans to repay, but we’d survived my wife’s grad days and we’d survive mine. The Readiness of a year or two before had been almost completely compromised, but it was all in the spirit of letting come what may.

We found out we were pregnant just exactly as all this was going on. Obviously.

And so I told my friend, in reply to his question about when’s a good time to start a family, that there is no such earthly thing. You can be Ready, and nature could have other plans. You could be completely Unready, and then it happens. Strike that: No matter when it happens, you will be Unready. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no amount of preparing you can do that will ever adequately equip you for the indescribable extremes of parenting. You are charged with making sure this tiny, helpless thing survives, because without you, it cannot. You love this tiny, helpless thing more than you thought yourself capable, even though it pukes and cries and never lets you get three hours of sleep and lays utter waste to your social life. At 3:30 in the morning, when your infant has a high fever or an erupting incisor, you’re not so much going to care about your 401(k) or how many more payments you have on your Nissan as you will about tending to this tiny, helpless thing so that everybody can get some rest.

Get your ducks in a row, if you like, or don’t—it doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as the perfect time to start a family. No matter when you decide to start a family, parenthood is going to be the most glorious and god-awful hardest job you’ve ever had, and it will take precedence over everything else. You will do what you have to in order to ensure survival, The End.

I asked my friend on the phone several times, “Am I making any sense?” He assured me I was, but I’m not sure I agree. I talked in circles for forty minutes and I couldn’t seem to put my finger on the right thing to tell him about when to have a family. Frankly, I was worried that I was scaring the shit out of him.

When I told my wife later on about the conversation, she was able to distill it in a way that I couldn’t. “The only requirement for starting a family,” she said, “is wanting to have a family. Everything else will work itself out.”  She didn’t mean that you’ll have to do nothing. No, sir. But if you want to have a family, have a family. There will always be challenges—financial, reproductive, you name it—and you will have a lot of figuring to do along the way.

Just know that Ready is a myth.

This is a bedtime story the likes of which you’ve never seen before, but can definitely relate to. It’s by the brilliant Adam Mansbach. Never has a book hit so close to a parent’s heart. And now, you can see it read by the one, the only, Samuel L. Snakes On a Plane Jackson.

Here’s a sample of the story:

The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dear.
Please go the fuck to sleep.

Buy your copy today.