Welcome to A Father’s Voice for October 2006. This month’s column is called, Twinkle Twinkle Our Little Star. I think all parents have a moment that was so profound, so impacting that they know they will never forget. This was mine, an emotional roller coaster of an evening, with Elijah. Sometimes the things we do to comfort our children has a delayed impact, but that doesn’t mean it has any less meaning for them.

It has been an exciting four weeks since I’ve started working with Mulberry Street, my new PR agency. We’ve developed a comprehensive article inventory of my writing, which consists of over 75 articles (how crazy is that?) – not including the 250 posts I’ve written on Two Okapis, my Digital Daddy Diary. We also prepared a list of media we’re going to target over the next several months. But even before we’ve really gotten started, it appears I am already going to be quoted in two parenting publications, with a combined readership easily over 150,000 people, thanks to Mulberry. In September, ByronChild, an Australian parenting magazine, published Mommy Do It! Mommy Do It! and the number of articles I have written that have been accepted for publication at various magazines has increased to five. Two Okapis also received some good news. It was reviewed by Bloggy Award and received a 9 out of 10 with some incredibly positive comments.

I am proud to announce this column marks one complete year of A Father’s Voice. I want to say “thank you” to all of you who have been reading and hearing my voice from the very beginning. If you’ve only just found my voice, please feel free to listen to what you’ve missed.

A Father’s Voice is my chance to share my voice with you about the challenges and rewards I experience trying to be a very involved father while overcoming my childhood, and having to work full-time away from our home. I write during the only disposable time of my day – my train ride to and from home.

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Twinkle Twinkle Our Little Star
“Twinkle, twinkle?” our almost two-and-a-half year old son, Elijah, asked.

“You want to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Elijah?” his mother asked.

“Yeah,” he responded in his soft voice.

It was dinner time at the Schneider family household and as soon as Elijah started to sing, we stopped talking, straining to listen to his quiet, high-pitched singing voice.

“Twinkle twinkle little star.”

He wasn’t looking up at us, but down at the table where the food he wasn’t eating sat on his plate, abandoned.

“How I wonder what you are.”

My son loves music. He loves singing and he loves dancing. Music seems to have a healing affect on him, the way it has always had on his Dad. Last week he had to spend a terrible night in the hospital emergency room, a victim of a nasty stomach virus that had been making the rounds leaving him terribly dehydrated. On the way home the next morning, sitting limply in his car seat, as if all of the air had been expelled from him, he asked for “Soul Sister?”