Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast. During the week, we bring you a daily meditation of the best parenting wisdom you can find drawing on history and philosophy and psychology and literature to inspire you to be a little bit better at the most important job you have.

And then on the weekends, I have sort of a wrap-up conversation with my friend, fellow dad,

and writing partner, Nealz Parker.

We just explore what's going on in our lives, what we're struggling with as parents,

what we're doing well, what we want to do better, and what we've learned along the way,

and what we've learned in the way, and what we've learned in

the last week. So let's go.

It's crazy to me to think that here we are two years into this Daily Dad email website podcast. We launched it on Father's Day 2019. And I wasn't sure

how it was going to go, whether people would like it, whether I was even qualified to write it.

And now here we are two years later. I've done an email

every day for two years in addition to the Daily Stoic email every day for the last going on five

years. But this has just become my absolute favorite thing to do. And it's crazy to me to think that

when I started, I only had one kid. Now I've got two. I've got Clark, who's turning five this year, and Jones, who just turned two. It's crazy to me to think, not only would I be challenged in all the ways that I've been challenged as a parent and as a human being, but that we'd be parenting through a pandemic, through civil unrest, through an insurrection here in the United

States, and just, and then a freezing storm. I mean, to think that in February of this year,

I had to go in my son's room and sleep in his bed with him because we'd lost power and the temperature was

dropping and dropping and dropping. And we were worried that it would get too cold in the house.

I don't even want to say what we thought would happen. But tragically, it even did happen to some people here in Texas.

So having kids is tough. Having kids in this period has been incredibly challenging.

And then I also look back on the last 15 or so months and see it as this strangely sweet,

almost wonderful experience, the amount of time that we've had

together, the experiences that we've had together, and we drove across the country two, two and a half

times, we went for a walk every night for, you know, 400 plus days in a row.

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