In the hungover fog that was yesterday, I completely forgot to acknowledge the wonderfulness that is this whole Thinking Blogger Award thingie. I mentioned it the other week, when I thanked OTJ, Mom-NOS and Kyla for their awesometasticness in naming me a Thinking Blogger. But then came the ever-fabulous Punditmom and my good friend Mad Momma with more thinky-linky love, and I realized that I have been woefully, unforgivably remiss in not paying this forward.

For this, I apologize. To the entire parent blogosphere, and beyond, because the whole damn thing – the whole damn lot of you – make me think. Which is saying something, because after more than a decade of studying philosophy, a few years teaching philosophy, and two and half years practicing the mostly (mostly) unphilosophic art of wrangling a WonderBaby, you’d think that I’d be pretty much mind-numbed. But no, far from it: every evening, after the nightly post-structuralist deconstruction of the works of Margaret Wise Brown, and after setting aside my dog-eared copies of Machiavelli’s la Mandragola, Rousseau’s Emile and Vanity Fair (Graydon Carter, not Thackeray), I turn not to the sweet oblivion of reality television – I turn to you. (Okay, most nights I turn to you.) And you always, unfailingly, make me think.

I’ve lost track of who has or hasn’t been tagged with one of these awards. You all deserve one, and so I hate narrowing it down. But it seems to me that the men of the mom’n’poposphere have been seriously under-represented in these awards, and so I’m going to direct my attentions to them: AdventureDad, MetroDad, DadGoneMad (whose original post at the Blogfathers about his daughter’s turbo-shit started me thinking early and often about the joy that is the shit of our offspring and remains, for me, the gold standard of potty philosophy), Laid-Off Dad and, of course, Dutch of Sweet Juniper. These were the first dad-bloggers on my bloggy reading list, and they remain on that (ever-growing, ever-crowded) reading list, because they never fail to make me laugh or think or – best – both.

Thanks, guys. WonderBaby salutes you: