Jim Anderson surrounded by his adoring family. Umm, not quite me. I walked down the hall as I'd done thousands of times before. As always I'm on a mission. Most of them are trivial: take the trash to the kitchen, transpose a novel from my backpack to my nightstand, or talk to my wife about something or other. This time as I walked out our bedroom door I turned my head, just for a second, to glance at my older daughter's bedroom. And in that moment I felt the culmination of my life to that point. These fleeting events can never...

Notice: Seasonal and youthful spoilers below. If you are under 13, ask your parents to read this first.

My daughter's tooth- and toothbrush-shaped note to the Tooth Fairy. Is this the work of a true believer?

Parents are constantly assessing their children's progress towards independence. It starts early: are they eating too little, too much? Getting too little sleep, too much? Pooping too little or too much? Some times maturity can't come fast enough (ask my wife at the end of a hard day) and sometimes we want childhood to last forever. Our expectations, based on facts, figures and the less empirical parental feeling, are constantly being adjusted.

And so this time of the year parents all over the world conduct the Annual Fictitious Character Assessment: do they or don't they still believe in Santa Claus (and by extension, the Tooth Fairy). The AFCA metric is the first wink towards adulthood. And this week we had to test for both characters.

Unlike other measurements we must work in stealth. Different from charting our children's height and weight, we cannot use a wall or a scale to mark their progress towards the truth about Claus and the Fairy. And unlike, um, talking about the facts of life, we cannot just blurt out those facts. This must be handled with finesse and sensitivity for this is their first jolt of real world reality.

Family vacations are so much fun. At least that's how I remembered them from my youth. The night before we left for "parts unknown" was full of hustle and bustle as my parents scurried about while my sister and I relaxed in front of the TV. Getting to bed early so we'd be in the car at 4 am, we'd traverse the desert in the coolness of the early morning dawn. All I had to do to prepare was be excited.

However, as a parent I now know the truth. Getting ready for a family vacation is hell. It's one thing to literally stuff the family minivan with every conceivable item you may ever need --in fact, everything you own. It's another to pack for a trip by air. For, of course, the airlines have consistently refused to allow us to stuff their cargo bay to the gills.

So two weeks ago when we finally deposit our luggage at airport check-in and wind our way through airport security, suddenly we are light-headed with the relatively little we are lugging around. That is when the vacation truly begins. We are on our way back to my ancestral home: Hollywood, USA.

After one week of being the sole resident parent to a 5 and 6 year old I can faithfully state: THE GOOD: Childrearing is a science. THE BAD: It’s not an exact science. Yesterday morning I had our “get-out-of-the-house” routine down so pat we found ourselves ready to go 24 minutes early! I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Of course, I secretly attributed it to my patented “daddy efficiency.” Be careful. Hubris will get you nowhere, Jeff. I delivered my five year old to her ride and then proceeded to my 6 year old’s drop off point, our good friend C. I knocked...