This time of the year, my wife perks her ears up and starts thinking about what gift I might want for Father’s Day. My four year old son doesn’t, bless him. I never want anything, but this year I’d like something very specific for Father’s Day: fewer dads.

Sure, there’s tons of stuff I could conjure up on a selfish little Father’s Day wishlist. I could – much to the chagrin of ad wizards and marketers everywhere – use a new tie. Or, if my son can muster up enough gusto to crank out “DAD” in crayon on a piece of construction paper, it’d be great. But I’m a simple man; I just want guys to stop having kids if they’re not fully committed to the idea of fatherhood.

When my son is pretending to be a superhero, or playing with superhero action figures, his imagination is at its best. And when he’s engaging in superhero play around his friends, or even just a washed-up old dog like me, creativities collide and create something even better.

Let’s get this out of the way; a couple of weeks ago, Hasbro sent me some Iron Man 3 toys to play with: a bigger, motion-activated, talking Arc Strike Iron Man figure, and a couple of Iron Man Assemblers – little action figures whose arms and legs come off so you can mix-and-match them. Also, an Arc FX Gauntlet, which shoots foam discs and will leave a welt at point blank range.

So one day, my son came home from preschool and handed me his Iron Man action figure that he’d brought in for share time. As he handed it over, he told me plainly that there’s no “Iron Man stuff allowed at school.” There had to be a story behind it, I thought. The statement evolved into a shrug and “no superhero stuff,” but we didn’t have much else to go by.

With one hand, my son is smacking the kid next to him on the top of the head, and with the other hand, he’s forking salad off of my wife’s plate.

Before I can say “stop” for the sixty-third time today, I look over at the boy’s father and he gives me the universal sign for “don’t worry about it,” and says “he eats salad, that’s great!”

The other mother is talking to my wife. Other Mom says “you guys are lucky. If it’s anything healthy, Joey won’t eat it.”

Other Dad mouths “watch this” and turns to Joey. “I’ll give you a dollar if you eat that watermelon.”

My son is eating their other son’s watermelon right from under his nose. Joey’s negotiating fractions of a slice to cents on the dollar.

I don’t know how we went four years without having to sit at a family table at an event. I suppose we’d just left our son home with a babysitter for the weddings, baptisms and other shirt-and-tie stuff we’d been to since he was born. This Saturday event, a baptism brunch at a country club, was the first time we had an assigned table and had our son with us. Even at my sister-in-law’s wedding, there was a kid’s only table in another room. So this was new to us.

When my wife texted me a photo of the box I’d received from Hasbro, I was hardly able to make it through my work day. I knew it had G.I. Joe toys in it, so I knew I’d be reliving my childhood that night alongside my son.

These G.I. Joe toys were sent to me by Hasbro because of the new G.I. Joe Retaliation movie that I’m honestly not at all interested in. But toys and nostalgia do it for me. After ripping open the cardboard box, I found a press release and all I read was “blah blah blah G.I. Joe blah blah blah.” And of course, as I skimmed the press materials, I sing-songed “G.I. JOEEEEEEEEEEEEE” a quarter million times, which annoyed my wife and thrilled my son.

What I love about playing with my son the most is that although I often act like a kid myself, I now lack the simple sensibilities that my son has. I get bent out of shape about adult things, like using toys “correctly” or risking breaking something. My son constantly reminds me how to play, and these G.I. Joe toys have helped me get back to my toy-playing roots.

I’m nerdy. And I’m a hoarder. This was bad enough news for my wife, who made the mistake of telling me when we met that she had a box of old Nintendo and Super Nintendo games in her parents’ garage. Most of them corroded beyond repair, I still kept them. She may not know this fact.

But my nerd hoarding is worse news for my son. Now, most nerds love to share their wares with their children; true, no one’s teaching their kids to read with collectible comics, nor are they donning their potty-training toddlers in “rare” shirts they picked up at Comic-Con. But many nerdy dads are more than happy to peel off a page of video game themed stickers they got somewhere, or make their kid the envy of his class by passing along a Super Mario Bros. rubber bracelet to them or a Nintendo hat. Not this guy.

My Second Boyhood

I’m a modern, open-minded man-of-all-seasons who likes both sports and musical theater, both beer and fruity cocktails, and both Family Guy and Downton Abbey.

Despite this, when my wife was pregnant, I must admit I was somewhat terrified about having a girl. I know boy stuff (camping, baseball, puberty) really well but didn’t know if I’d come to like and be good at girl stuff (tea parties, dress-up, puberty).

As it turns out, we had a son, who at age seven and a half is the joy of my life, as I get to relive a second boyhood through him. He’s our only child, and as my wife says, that store has closed. So, whew, no princess stuff for me.

If there’s one thing parents can do to raise a truly good-natured child, it’s to teach them to not look down on others. In an age where the unemployment is uncomfortably high and those with jobs are feeling unenthusiastic about the amount of bacon they’re bringing home, it’s important to teach your children the importance of every job out there.

A point of pride right now for me is that when asked what my four year old son wants to be when he grows up, my son has a large bank of answers – and it almost always includes being a garbage man or a gardener.

Okay, sure, he also says he wants to be a police man, a fireman, or Batman. But to me, it’s more a measure of his manhood that he includes garbage man, gardener, or even UPS man in his answers.

I attended my first-ever Daddy-Daughter Dance this past weekend. I know some fathers love these kinds of events, but I was fairly apprehensive about going.

Why? Because aside from perhaps family weddings, when does a father ever get dressed up, buy his date flowers, and go dancing without there being some kind of romantic agenda on the table?

I almost have panic attacks whenever I think back to all of those poor, unfortunate girls who danced with me at high school proms, tolerating my sweaty awkwardness as we lumbered through the long version of “The Lady in Red”.