Our home was on a dirt road with vertiginous grades and no-code drainage; we liked to think of it as the worst road in Putnam County. One quickly learned the meaning of item 4 and the importance of snow tires and four-wheel drive. Initially we had an older Volvo station wagon that got left at the bottom of the hill once or twice in ice-storms. We put heavy bags of cat-litter in the back to give the thing more weight, but the front-wheel drive was still terrible on the slick and very steep uphill stretches. Within a couple years I became religious about studded Pirelli snow tires.

I liked the sense of isolation during these events (though we often lost power and water, drawn as it was from a well by an electric pump). We had neighbors all around us, but the trees and rocks gave us a lot of cover: the illusion of seclusion. After many years in the East Village it felt wonderful. It was a good place to raise the kid.

I’m not telling anyone what they haven’t heard or experienced: taking care of a baby is hard. Some babies require more care than others, but there is a minimum with any kid. There are a lot of diapers to change, and this is the task that separates those who talk about helping from those who actually help. I tried hard to be in the former but I often failed, becoming what I hated: the man who left it to the women. Carolyn was the one who heard her on the baby monitor and went downstairs in the middle of the night.

In one famous incident my daughter was crying because of a movie she’d seen earlier that same evening: The Poseidon Adventure. We had cable then and I was just flipping through the channels; I saw Leslie Nielsen in a captain’s outfit and I stopped. This is a good one, I probably said, and we watched the rest of it. If you haven’t seen it the ship flips over, capsized by a rogue wave, just after a performance of that Oscar-winning piece of schmaltz “There’s Got To Be A Morning After.” (I love the tune and have the single.) This set-piece occurs in the ship’s huge dining-room and many extras fall from the former floor to the former ceiling. There’s a piano involved.

I was telling her how all the pieces were put together, the practical effects one sees in a 70s disaster flick. I was stressing that no one died, that it was all stunt work, and I thought she understood. Maybe she did at the time but not later, not in the middle of the night. So Carolyn went downstairs to clean up my mess. No one in my family has any intention of letting me forget this.

Poseidon came up again when she saw footage of 9/11: But nobody really died, right?

We took the infant to France. It wasn’t the disaster I feared but then I always fear disaster when I travel. I’m not sure why we thought it was a good idea, though. We travelled with Nancy, Carolyn’s mom, and found Paris as waterlogged as the NYC we’d left behind. The Seine was overflowing its banks; no romantic walks along the river with or without grandma and the baby stroller.

There was an impromptu strike at the Louvre the day we planned to attend, so I’ll never know what reaction the child might have had to the Winged Victory at Samothrace. Even on a rainy day in Paris there are still plenty of things to do with a kid: she loved the slide in the Jardin du Luxembourg, for instance. I shot pre-digital video that contained a favorite sequence: she's scared at the top then takes the plunge. “Again!” she cries, when she gets to the bottom.

We attempted a dinner at the Bistro d’Henri—zinc-lined bar, etc.—but the baby didn’t care about ambience and our idealized memories of the place. It was the first time she seriously cried in a restaurant. Numerous outings back in Putnam County had been without incident, and we had become overconfident. I walked her around the block while mom and grandma shared the extraordinary foi gras and a carafe of the local wine; the fit lasted long enough for each of us to take a shift.

Parisians of that period did not take their babies to dinner with them; we felt acutely self-conscious. At one point we discovered a flourishing industry of by-the-hour babysitting in the phone book, far too late for our bistro outing.

Finally ensconced in a charming hotel on the Rue du Dragon, we rebuilt our Pack-n-Play—basically a cushioned, transportable cell—imprisoned the baby, and fell into jet-lagged sleep. The P-n-P is a travel essential for anyone who can afford it, and like most kid-devices, there are plenty of used ones around. (They outgrow everything, after all.)

After Paris we’d planned a stay in Avignon at a guest-house, followed by a rental chateau in the Dordogne. The open stairs at the chateau would later prompt parental nightmares, as would the unsecured kitchen cabinets in the guest-house. Nothing was baby-proofed; an American neurosis, perhaps? We were counting on that Pack-n-Play.

Later that night, the first night we were in Paris, she crawled out of the P-n-P and became a mobile threat for the very first time.

Two large prints of Carcassone hung on the walls of my grandfather's country cottage near Columbus. Here is one of them.

Having a child is death to a photographer (or at least to amateurs like me). Every nuance of expression from this new being seems important to capture; one has to record every smile. All these unique photos, of course, end up looking exactly alike. That being said, I like this one very much:

The limestone formations of Hocking Hills in the south of Ohio make it one of the most gorgeous parts of the state. These karst lanscapes extend into Kentucky and make the Mammoth Cave System possible. Old Man's Cave was a favorite destination for the family as it isn't far from Columbus; we probably went at least once or twice a year. My brother led winter walks there when he worked as a park ranger.