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It’s that time of year again. Birds are chirping, bees buzzing, animals at the zoo are doing inappropriate things to each other, flowers are blooming... and those darn neighborhood kids are on my lawn again. Ah yes, springtime.

Spring is the time of year when I get to remind all the neighborhood kiddies exactly how things operate around Old Man Simple’s house. Here are a few easy to understand guidelines (keep in mind my 2 girls are about the only girls on the block):

Like many other days, we sat down for dinner and began to reflect back on the day. Much to my horror Princess P said that one of her friends kept saying the dreaded “s word.”

She continued by saying that this friend shouldn’t be saying “adult words.” At this point, my wife and I tried to drive home the point that the “s word” wasn’t an “adult word,” but rather a word that just shouldn’t be said, as it wasn’t a pleasant word in the first place. After all, she didn’t hear that word around our house!

Then it happened, Princess P exclaimed that she had heard the “s word” around our house. Of course I immediately blamed my wife and asked her what in the world she was teaching the kids while I was at work.

I recently read that you should not withhold good from those who deserve it, when it is well within your power to do so, and I started unpacking the ramifications behind such a seemingly simple idea.

What is good? Reading a bedtime story while snuggled up under the covers? Enjoying a bowl of ice cream? Playing hop-scotch? Looking for bugs? Making ridiculous faces and laughing so hard you pee a little? Discipline? Chores?

When you don’t take time to slow down, you are withholding good from your children. In this day and age where kids get everything, often the things we don’t give our kids are the ‘good’ things in life.

I enjoy a good plumbing challenge just as much as the next guy. I view it as one of the more finesse areas of home improvement. Much like a woman, you have to be gentle and take care of the pipes, or they can make your life miserable. I also think that after working in the hardware business for around 6 years that I have a clue, albeit a small one, about fixing the minor stuff around the house. Well... I nearly met my match.

This item may start as a fragrant, moist, small square, designed to cleanse the dirtiest of regions, but ends in an unholy nightmare. That’s right, the flushable wipe.

It's time once again for the world of computer programming to prove it's usefulness by teaching us a thing or two about parenting.

How many times have you found yourself repeating something to your children over and over again. Programming has a simple, yet effective solution for this problem. It’s called a “do while loop.” The idea behind a do while loop is fairly straightforward. You do an action, say scrub the floor, while it is dirty. This translates nicely to many parenting situations. For example: