At some point after I married and before I had a child, my competitive juices disappeared. I used to chase down every tennis ball, even the ones easily lobbed over my gigantic 5'8" stature when I tried to approach the net. I used to run a mile in under 8 minutes. Then I convinced myself that walk-running was still quality exercise. I chose tennis partners that were at least in their 40s, and I started growing man boobs.

My son Matthew changed that. My competitive juices returned, as I aimed to make Matthew the best child ever. I did this all for the sake of the children, which by the way is the most popular cliched phrase used by politicians aside from "You're sure this won't be traced back to me?"

Parenting has become the new cutthroat sport, even moreso than Ultimate Fighting. Joe Rogan should start broadcasting from Gymborees in the greater Chicago area. I'm serious. There might not be as much blood, but there's plenty more saliva and other bodily fluids.

What I'm getting at is that parents think their kid is the best, and everyone else's kid is, well, OK. Cute, even. But certainly not as much as their child. This mindset starts early, weeks after the baby exits the womb. One of our first doctor's appointments went kind of like this:

Doctor: He's very alert. That's good.

Me: Yes, we know. We already sent his Mensa application in the mail.

Doctor: He has good mobility in his legs.

Me: Michael Phelps ain't got nothing on this kid, except when it comes to killer bong hits.

Doctor: He looks to be a healthy weight and height.

Me: Shall we slather him in oil, dress him in a toga and start calling him Zeus?

The comparisons start soon after. My son smiled at me at four weeks! (Are you sure he didn't just have some gas?) Then the subject goes to and hinders on mobility. Parents state proudly that their child rolled over on their stomach all by themselves last week, not realizing that newborn calves start walking as soon as they drop out of their mother, so big freaking deal.

Then the children start crawling, and it's a question of if they crawl as fast as the other child, or if they're crawling on their hands and knees, which is wayyy more advanced than Army crawling. If your son or daughter misses these milestones by a couple weeks, you're bound to hear the following: "Oh, every child has their own schedule. All in due time." That statement is accompanied by sad, pitying looks from the parents of children who walked at 9 months and apparently learned trigonometry during television commercials for Dora the Explorer.

If you think this competition ends with personal accomplishments, you’re sorely mistaken. Clothes is the next battle arena. Some parents apparently think it’s worth spending $75 for a pair of shoes that their kid will outgrow in 15 days. And then on to the toys. Oh, the toys! You know what the big toy is now for kids Matthew’s age? It’s called a sand-and-water table. You put sand on one side, and water on the other, and the kids can stand there, create mud, and throw it at each other. Sounds great! Though I have a secret about sand-and-water tables. I know the best one you could ever have, in fact. It’s called North Beach. Check it out.

Of course, all these parents are missing something. Sure, your one-year-old might have walked early, and my one-year-old might be able to go up AND down the stairs. But they all have one thing in common, at least at the moment: They still crap themselves. So go ahead and think about how athletic and intelligent your child is while you change his diaper and breathe through your mouth. Go ahead and do it, for the sake of the children.

Before Matthew was born, my wife and I decided that we were going to raise him Catholic. Though I would like to tell you that we chose that religion for him because we believe it to be the only true religion, the real reason is that we're both Catholics. We haven't exactly been keeping up on the Koran or the Qu'ran or its various other spellings, and by not keeping up, we mean we have never read it. We also aren't familiar with whatever text the Buddhists and the rest of all those other religions study and whatnot. Hell, we're not even that familiar with the Bible. We don’t have to be – we’re Catholics.

That's beside the point. As good Catholics, it is our sworn duty to raise Matthew right, and by right, we mean raise him so that he knows he can do whatever he wants whenever he wants, but if he goes to church once a week then all his sins will be forgiven at confession. Except Catholics don't really go to confession regularly anymore anyway. So I guess our philosophy with Matthew should be that he can do whatever he wants, and as long as he eats an unleavened wafer every Sunday, it's all good. If it's yeasty at all, though, forget it.

I tease, and I shouldn't, because Christianity is often a punching bag for the media. Our intention is to raise Matthew to be good and charitable, and despite the many failings of the Catholic Church, it has done a lot of good in this world.

So how do you raise a child into the religion you've chosen for him? Well, right now I don't really know. All I know is that when we go to church (which is about twice a year), Matthew enjoys looking around at all the people and smiling at them because he's a nosy little kid. And it's kind of funny to see him grinning and swaying back and forth as if he's dancing while we're all singing songs and trying to be solemn and holy.

It's important if you have a young child to arrive early enough so you can secure a coveted seat on the end of the aisle. That way, when Matthew decides he's going to have a fit of laughing or crying or just plain yelling for no reason whatsoever, we can sweep him away outside. This is a job I choose. You see, normally Matthew starts getting bored about a half-hour into the Mass, which is just after the Bible readings and the homily, which are my favorite parts anyway.

Shortly after this, the Catholic Mass proceeds into a variety of rituals, of which only the Pope and three Italian nuns know the historical significance. It includes a lot of monk-like chants such as the Profession of Faith (which should just be one line: "Dear Lord, I'm here in church, so obviously I have faith."), the Our Father, and other songs based off the Letters of St. Paul to the Crustaceans (thanks Dad). This is when Matthew loses his patience. Sometimes he’ll cry out in boredom. Sometimes he’ll let out an inadvertent burp. Sometimes I just pretend he made the noise, or anticipate that he’s about to. This is when I leap into action, scooping Matthew in my arms and whispering to my wife, "He's being way too disturbing," to which my wife smiles and nods. She knows what's up.

And what’s up is a nice, lazy stroll for Matthew and me around the church grounds for the rest of Mass. Maybe we hang out in a grassy area of the church property or take a nap under an oak tree. Maybe we have a snack, and maybe that snack is leavened bread. Will the Lord forgive us? I think probably.

Recently my son Matthew turned 1, and we invited just about everyone we knew to celebrate the fact that we had survived this child for 365 full days, and look how healthy he is, and uninjured, and cute, too, and yes, we did that, so really you should be singing for us.

We sent out invitations more elaborate than some wedding invites, complete with a picture of Matthew at the playground, standing at the slide, smiling and waving at the camera.

It's a cropped picture. We decided not to get the whole view in there, because it would have involved an unflattering look of yours truly, with an unshaven face, ragged hair and bags under my eyes.

It was during a time in Matthew's life where he decided he no longer felt like sleeping through the night. He liked getting up around 2 or 3 in the morning, just to say hi to his folks. Oftentimes, he had a present for us. It's not the kind of present I would ever ask for, unless I was really into composting.

A child turning one is a monumental event, apparently so monumental that we had to buy Matthew a T-shirt with a big "1" on the front of it. I won't reveal how much it cost, because it might make you have to go Number 3 (Number 3, I just decided, is vomit).

Apparently, the number on the shirt stood for how many times it could go in the washer before the number started fading considerably. As in, after one wash, it looked like a semi-colon. Fortunately we were able to return it, get our money back, and then with that money buy a healthy stake in General Motors.

We had quite an extended invite list. It didn't start that way. At first we were just going to invite a few family members. Then we decided to invite more family members. Then we were inviting our neighbors, neighbors we hadn't yet met before inviting them to our son's birthday party so that they could celebrate the joys of turning one.

Before you knew it, I was at Walgreens and the guy next to me was buying the same kind of deodorant, and so I said, "Hey, want to come to my kid's birthday party?" We were planning on having the party at our house, but due to the invite list, moved the location to the high school auditorium.

My wife Bea had been planning this party for, I swear to God, at least six months. Every once in a while, she would come up with another idea for what she wanted to do.

"We should try to get that beanbag toss game from the church and have it on the front lawn."

"We need to try out cakes at So-and-So Place and So-and-So Place to decide what kind we're going to order for Matthew."

"At precisely 1:32, we will light the birthday candles and all the children, especially Matthew, will suddenly refuse to look at any cameras for the next 10 to 15 minutes."

The menu was complicated. My wife wanted to set up a prix fixe menu complete with hors d'ouevres, three different kinds of dips, five kinds of potato salad, eight kinds of other salads, and 15 artistic variations on cole slaw.

We ended up having burgers and dogs on the grill, with a half-full bottle of ketchup as the only condiment, and if you don't like it, then the door's over there. Just make sure you leave Matthew's gift by the fireplace. Thanks for coming.

No, no, of course it wasn't like that. We had stuffed mushrooms, rice salad, potato salad, regular salad, burgers, turkey burgers, hot dogs, and God knows what else. I can't remember everything, but it was all delicious.

Meanwhile, the kids at the birthday party ate string cheese and Cheerios and sat around making constipated-looking faces at each other while they crapped in their diapers.

Yes, it would be nice to think that when you throw your one-year-old a birthday party, that the party is for them. But in reality, Matthew would be plenty happy with a handful of kids his age, half a banana, his sippy cup, a few tennis balls and a couple toy trucks.

The rest of our guests, however, were very impressed.

It’s hard to know what to feed your kid. Well, I shouldn’t say that. When they’re really young, you can just stick a boob in their face, and they’re good to go. But once they get to be about 4 months old, every parent is faced with the question about what to feed their kid.

For us, nutrition is on par with proper sleep as two major priorities for Matthew’s health. It’s safe to say that we don’t want Matthew’s favorite vegetables to be French fries and high fructose corn syrup.

At the same time, we don’t want to be too over the top. Once Matthew gets older, we want him to be able to go to birthday parties and eat cake and ice cream without us worrying about whether the chocolate in the frosting is made from single-origin Ecuadorean cacao beans, or whether the cream used for the ice cream came from cows that were milked with velvet gloves and sung sweet lullabies. We don’t want Matthew to be the one kid in the corner wearing hemp clothing, smelling like B.O. and patchouli, drinking wheatgrass and playing hacky sack by himself.

But we want him to eat right which, in this day and age, means reading the ingredient list like it was the fine print on your subprime mortgage. Even food marketed for the sub-1-year-old demographic oftentimes has a lot of junk in it. Our basic rule is that if one of the ingredients is something we can’t pronounce (such as ioplolycarbonite bisulfuphate, and no, that’s not a real ingredient, I don’t think) then we go ahead and pass on feeding it to him.

On the plus side, this has led us to eat healthier ourselves. When Bea or I cook up a batch of zucchini or pasta for Matthew, we make extra for us. It beats having spoonfuls of peanut butter and jelly straight from the jar for dinner. Kind of. Though I must admit, this healthy food habit hasn’t eliminated my occasional need for PB&J straight from the jar. And by “occasional need,” I mean once or twice a day. And when Matthew gets a little older, every once in a while I’ll tell him to dump the wheatgrass in the sink, put away the hacky sack, and join me at the kitchen table for some PB&J, straight from the jar.

I don't remember the first time my wife and I talked about kids, but it was long before we got married. It definitely wasn't on the first date, because if she did that, I'm not sure there would have been a second date. First dates are for shallow niceties like what television shows you watch. Unless you met each other beforehand on eHarmony, I guess.

So my wife and I agreed a while ago that we would like three kids. Our eight-month-old Matthew is the first. Then we'll try to have a second in the next year or so. And then maybe after that we might try adopting, mainly because that's what all the celebrities are doing, and they're the coolest.

But it's good we talked about it early in our relationship. What would happen if I decided I just wanted to raise an only child, some boy or girl genius who would be lonely and way too mature for his age because all he did was hang out with adults? And what if my wife decided that she wanted to have a set of octuplets, after already having six kids under the age of 7?

Yes, yes. That's where I'm going with this. Nadya Suleman, the woman from Los Angeles who recently did just that. Six apparently wasn't enough, so Suleman decided to have eight more. It's unclear whether she used fertility drugs or in vitro fertilization, but either way, she now has the ability to field an entire football team with immediate blood relatives.

Now Suleman is a single mother. Her decisions are her own, and I'm not going to judge her. If she wanted her placenta to look like the back of a desktop PC, all the power to her (power, ha ha). She's just lucky her delivery doctor wasn't looking for the USB outlet to plug in his Webcam.

But that is neither here nor there, and yes, it's true that I was just looking for a good spot to insert the phrase "neither here nor there." The bottom line is that if you're not married, or you're newly married, or hell, you've been married a couple years but don't have kids yet, it might be a good idea to discuss with your significant other how many kids you want to have. That way you won't be so aghast when your partner's AOL search logs come up with searches for "Clomid," "how to have octuplets," and finally, "Human Chorionic Gonadotropin," which I just looked up.

Because if you have too many kids early on, there won't be room to adopt, and all the celebrities will be disappointed in you.