poop in our sofa. But we cannot have both of these things. Because small children have no concept whatsoever of cleanliness. A small child’s concept of housekeeping is to lick spilled pudding off the living room carpet. And it does not get better as they get older. For example, my son, now age seven, is in the phase where he likes to play with educational “construction” toys, designed by escaped Nazis, that consist of 363,000,000,000,000 tiny plastic pieces in a box. The way you play with these toys is, you strew the pieces all over the living room floor, and then you go outside to play. And when your mother yells: “Robert! Come in here and pick up your construction set!” you yell back: “I’m still using them!” And then late that night, you lie awake in bed, waiting for the moment when your father, heading for the kitchen to get a glass of orange juice, wanders out into the darkened living room and steps, barefooted, on the plastic pieces, which is the cue for him to perform the comically entertaining Midnight Dance of the Bozo Father, a rapid series of hopping, skating movements across the floor accompanied by whimpering, followed by very bad words. This is a good time for you to look like you are Sound Asleep.

Also your children will gradually cause your brain to become damaged in such a way that you deliberately engage in acts of antihousekeeping. For example, I once, at my son’s insistence, spent perfectly good U.S. dollars at Toys Backwards “R” Us for a can of something called “Slime,” which I naturally assumed was a toy but which in fact turned out to be exactly what its name suggests, namely, slime. Of course my son got it all over everything, and of course it wouldn’t come off. My point being that, here we are living in a house that already seems to have a lifetime inexhaustible supply of natural dirt, and yet for some bone-headed parental reason I felt the need to go out and purchase more dirt.

An even worse example was the time my wife went out