Simon Rose - Be the Coolest Dad on the Block: All of the Tricks, Games, Puzzles and Jokes You Need to Impress Your Kids (and keep them entertained for years to come!)

WHEN STEVES FIRST CHILD was born, a friend gave him a mug inscribed Anyone can be a FATHER, but it takes someone special to be a DAD. This slushy, saccharine sentiment mystified him at the time. When youre up to your armpits in a sea of disposable nappies, strollers, and bottle sterilizers, and everything reeks of baby oil and vomit, its hard enough just to keep goinglet alone contemplate the forthcoming joys of fatherhood.

But as your children evolve from babies into kids, they cease seeing you merely as a supplier of powdered milk and poopless Pampers and acquire an interest in your bottomless fund of knowledge and experience. Almost from the moment they begin to talk, kids are asking questions. Questions to which you, no longer just their father but now their Dad, are expected to have instant, accurate, relevant, and entertaining answers.

And this is the problem. When our kids expect us to know everything, we really cant disappoint them. That can wait until their late teenage years, when theyll come to believe that everything we ever told them was either misguided nonsense or a cunningly constructed hodgepodge of mistruths calculated to repress their freedom of expression.

Until that fateful day, we have their full attention. We owe it to them, as well as to the whole of Dad kind, to preserve the myth that Dads are infallible, all-knowing, and as near omnipotent as a mortal can be.

We need to be able to fix their toys when they break, cheer them up when theyre down, entertain them when theyre bored, educate them when theyre curious, and enlighten them when theyre confused. We need to be able to juggle, to tie knots, to identify trees, and to do magic. We need to know why the sky is blue, why you cant dig a hole right through the earth, and what to do in a thunderstorm.

Above all, Dads need to be able to make childhood fun. Whether its keeping them going on car journeys or organizing games to play in the park, a Dad should be an endless resource of ideas and inspiration.

None of us are perfect Dads, much as wed like to be. And while Mums have an established tradition of comparing notes, medical histories, and intimate details of their relationships, Dadsby nature reserved and tight-lippedhave no such support group. We need a book to help us become the paragons to which we all aspire. Until we find it, this one will have to do.

Simon Rose and Steve Caplin, London, 2005