Today marks 12 years since my dad passed and I had some thoughts. 1. Take a lot of videos. Pictures are fantastic, and smartphones have made taking them so easy. But videos—where you can hear voices, see mannerisms, and watch smiles widen—well, they can’t be matched. I cherish those videos of my dad from Christmas mornings now. He was always the one stuck using scissors and screwdrivers to open boxes and free toys from their impossible packaging. Meanwhile, my kids had torn o

Okay. Third college drop-off in six days. I promise next week we’ll get back to a medical topic. This one is the hardest. Why? Because it’s the last one. I am about to come home to a house that is decidedly emptier. And how do I feel? Old. That’s the word I keep coming back to. Old. I don’t know why, but I keep picturing the couple from the movie Up. And we all know how well that turned out for the wife. (If you don’t know, go watch the movie—but know that the first five minu

What does soiling the nest mean? Well—just what it sounds like. Shitting in your house. It's that period before a kid leaves home when the bickering seems to increase, the eye rolling becomes Olympic level, the nagging reaches new heights, and everyone suddenly finds everyone else incredibly annoying. And why do we soil our nests?

This week, I prepare to drop off all three of my kids at their respective colleges for the first time. Which, I guess, makes me what people call an empty nester. But why do they call it an empty nest? When baby birds grow up and fly away, the mama bird also abandons the nest. Yet in my case—and maybe yours—you have to return to the nest. So what exactly are you returning to?