Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you

with your most important job being a dad. These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy,

by practical wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

You have to keep track.

This whole thing can go by so fast because you have so much going on because you feel like

you're barely keeping your head above water. It's understandable, but if you don't slow down

and wrap your head around this parenting thing, you can end up missing so much that matters.

One way to do this is to look at the numbers. For instance, you're probably only going to get

18 summers at home with your kids.

After they're born, you'll get roughly 420 days before they start talking, 400 days before they

can walk. There will be only 13 first days of school, maybe four or five graduations.

They learn to drive at 16 and you let them drive themselves to school. That means you only get to

drive them to school approximately 2,000 times. Some of these numbers are big. Some of these numbers are

surprisingly small, but they'll zip by if you're not careful. You can also track things in the other

direction. If you take a mile walk in the morning and a mile walk in the evening as a family, that's 600 miles a year you'll travel. Just five years of that is enough to traverse

the entire United States together. If you read three kids' books a night before bed from age

birth to age 10, that's almost 11,000 books. If you write a postcard to them each time you go out of town, think about

how many they'll have to remember when they're older. If you visit two national parks a year as

a family by the time they're in their 30s, you'll have been to every single one in America

together. How you do this math is up to you. What you choose to track is up to you, but you've got to do

it because what you're tracking

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