Lions and Tigers and Bears ... and Penguins

Apparently, penguin daddies are the scariest of all God's creatures. Their story is the most banned, boycotted and controversial in libraries today.

** Nothing scares like real-life daddies. **

Bootie Camp

If the title is misleading, then your head is in the wrong place. We're talking newborns here!

Women have nine months of internal preparation and presumably a lifetime before that of chickchat to get ready for the baby. Men need less time. Programs vary, but the experts who set up the program seem to feel real hombres may need as little as one day in Daddy Boot Camp to prepare for feet that aren't yet ready to pitter or patter. But if you can't find time for one day, you can always live as the bad dad and just have faith it will work out all right.

** Bootie camp or not, people can tell you everything about having children, but nobody can really tell you anything — you just have to muddle through like the generations upon generations of dads who precede you. **

Father's Day

WHY the Mother's Day brunch, but nothing equally iconic for dads?

Barbecue? Letting him out for a non-complained-about round of golf? A tie? Not reminding him of the "honey-do" list? A bottle of scotch? Freud never got the answer on woman. Maybe his time would have been better served discovering "what do dad's want?"

Maybe the happiest Father's Day would be one free from worry. As if .... There is the romantic worrier archtyped by Rogers and Hammerstein in Carousel's "My Boy Bill," and there's the bigger worry — for dads of girls, at least — of not being able to communicate, to losing your daughter and to a new generation of worries from your own "madonna."

HFD.

** WD frets that the dad who does his job well worries. And the worrier probably whines. **