At least I’m saying so up front, which has to count for something.

Anyway, I did indeed steal this blog entry from one of my favorite single-parent bloggers, Rachel Sarah, who does the singlemomseeking blog. In a recent post, Rachel spoke with former Top Chef contestant Camille Becerra, a single mom who was bounced from the hit cooking show during last season.

Rachel’s blog post reveals that Becerra had to give up all contact with her daughter throughout her time on the show, including the little girl’s birthday. That’s an interesting proposition. So, as Rachel asks, is that something you’d be willing to do?

The more I search, the more I find.

As in more single-parenting websites. This is a particularly good one from David Mott, a West Coast dad who runs the Dad’s House blog. David is a divorced dad with half-time custody, and addresses everything from solo parenting to the single-parent dating scene and all the issues in between.

He tells me that his goal is to tell the world “that single fathers are perfectly capable of caring for children and running a household solo.” He concedes that his half-custody situation puts him in a different role than solo moms or single parents with full-time custody. But there is plenty of common ground in terms of dating, relationships and parenting concerns. He hits on all those and posts regularly.

“I’m sharing stories and opinions on online dating,” he said. “Also how to deal with things like the general lack of acceptance of a single dad by married couples, and things to do with your alone time. Interestingly enough, my blog has already opened some eyes to married readers who are now re-evaluating the father’s role in a household that has both parents. I’m all for men being more present with their children.”

I’m trying to be selective in the sites I add to my blogroll, and didn’t hesitate adding Dad’s House. The stories are always honest, often funny and consistently useful. And if you noticed, David has already begun providing his input on my posts here, which is valuable to the discussions we engage in.

As I like to say, check it out.

Somebody’s got to stay home with the kid, right? That’s logical enough. But who misses a day of work?

A study last year by sociologist David Maume at the University of Cincinnati determined that moms are still significantly more likely to stay home than dads. Maume surveyed more than 1,400 parents and determined that 78% of women reported taking time off to stay home with a sick kid, compared to 28% for men. You can read more about the study in Science Daily.

The thing is that the study seems to have looked only at traditional homes, with mom and dad in the house. How does one handle the situation when they’re a single or divorced parent? Needless to say, this is a major problem if you solo parent. Unless there’s family nearby or a support group of some sort, you’re in a bind. And what are the rules on this in a blended family?

This has been on my mind this week because my girlfriend’s little boy has been battling the flu and hasn’t been able to go to his day care. She missed a couple of days, and her ex missed a couple and took him to his sister’s house for the day. Statistically, she ultimately takes more of those days on than her ex does, which seems to fit Maume’s study.

But at some point I wonder what my role is. I normally save my days off for when my son is sick, and juggle those with my ex. Is it my role as a stepparent figure to take off as well when my girlfriend’s son is sick? Or is that a responsibility that falls squarely  — and exclusively — on the little guy’s parents?

In the end I’m thinking gender isn’t all we should be looking at. Frankly, I’m thinking we need a new study.

Sometimes dad needs a helping hand. Well, here it comes, thanks to the United Way of Westchester and Putnam, and Family Services of Westchester. They’re sponsoring the New York Father’s Conference in White Plains on April 26th. It’s long overdue, I say.

The idea is to bring together dads from all walks of life — be they happily married, divorced, single, etc. — for a day-long program to provide advice, guidance and referrals. It features guest speakers that include Hugh Price, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former president of the National Urban League, as well as former NY Jet offensive back Bruce Harper, who is the co-founding director of the youth program “Heroes and Cool Kids.”

Russell Ross, senior vice president of community initiatives for the United Way, told me they’ve had similar conferences elsewhere in the past, including in Rockland County. But this is the first in Westchester County — and he hopes not the last.

“One of the things that we’ve seen in our research and talking to a lot of folks that are working with families is that dads don’t really have an opportunity to interact with each other and learn and kind of share,” he said. “Women and moms, they have their groups.”

Scheduled workshops are to address a number of issues, including wise discipline, balancing work, helping kids succeed in school, and staying connected as a non-custodial parent. You can check out the entire list and get more details on the United Way link for the program.

If you can’t get to a computer, call the United Way at 914-997-6700, ext. 702. But think about checking it out.

How could you forget about your kid? Well, that’s what cops are saying happened in White Plains this weekend.

According to the story filed by my colleague Rich Liebson, city officers spotted a 2-year-old boy sitting alone in the back seat of car on Sunday, then waited. And waited. Ten minutes later, the boy’s 25-year-old dad came back and, when questioned, told officers that “he forgot his son was in the car.”

The guy was charged with endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor, and the kid was turned over to his mom. You can read Rich’s entire story in The Journal News or on LoHud.com tomorrow.

Obviously, your heart goes out to the kid if the charge is proven to be true. If this is any indication of the father he’s going to have, there’s just some painful times coming for him. To paraphrase the old saying, you need to apply for a license to go fishing, but any screw-up can have a kid for free.

You can only hope the boy’s mom is more on the ball.

My son wants to make it to a Yankee game this year before they shut down the historic Bronx stadium for good and move next door. No problem there. I’m a longtime and avid fan, and took him to his first game there years ago. I myself have been going to games since 1970, when my dad and uncle took us to the old stadium to see the Bombers get demolished by the Orioles. I also had partial season tickets for years, when I worked out of the Bronx County Courthouse during my stint at the Daily News.

Here’s the catch: My son wants to go with just me and his mom — the former family unit.

I have some mixed feelings on this, and it makes for some awkwardness. I’ve always felt fortunate that my ex and I were able to maintain a friendship, and that we are all able to get along. My girlfriend and I had my ex and her husband over for Christmas Eve dinner (it’s a feast we call Noche Buena in Cuban culture, and it’s a big deal for us), and I had Easter brunch with my ex, her family and her husband last month. As I’ve blogged before, we all went trick-or-treating together last year as well.

To be fair, I can see how my son might simply view an outing to a Yankee game as an extension of the friendship his mom and I maintain. But at the same time, I feel like excluding his mom’s husband and his dad’s new partner is a sign that he may be clinging to something. Obviously, he wouldn’t be the first child to want his parents together, even if it is just for a baseball game.

But are we letting him mislead himself if we go along? Or is it just his wish to have an outing with his parents?

Or am I just making too much out of it?

The opening days for New York’s new baseball parks are still a year off, but one thing is obvious when you get past the gorgeous renderings – the stadiums are too small. For the sake of all New York baseball fans, construction needs to stop and new plans drawn up for bigger stadiums.

The people who run the Yankees and the Mets are smart people, so how they came up with these schemes is beyond me. Baseball draws more people every year, while New York City and its suburbs are growing. So what do our baseball teams (with the approval of New York City and state officials) do? They shrink the size of the ball parks.

The new Yankee Stadium will hold about 52,000, down from the current 57,500. The Mets’ new Citi Field will hold 44,000 people compared with Shea Stadium’s 55,700. This is a bad for baseball fans and terrible for parents, kids and grandparents, too.

A baseball stadium is a place where lasting family memories are made. I won’t forget the first time my father took me to the stadium in the Bronx one sweltering August night when I was seven. The Yankees beat the Kansas City Athletics 4-0 in a game that didn’t last two hours. And then there was the first game I took my oldest son to: He chanted “Let’s Go Mets” so loud I feared he had been permanently imprinted a fan of the city’s National League team rather than the Yankees.

Not only will these ball parks have fewer seats, but the ticket prices will be shocking. If you are planning a game or two next year, start saving up by skipping lunch now. A low-cost ticket will go for about  the price of Broadway show ticket.  A top-priced field-level seat at Yankee Stadium will cost $2,500,  about the price of a used car. Ouch.

Don’t get me wrong. The new ball parks look beautiful, especially Citi Field. They will be better places to watch games – much better than the upper deck seats at Shea. Pilots landing at LaGuardia are closer to home plate than my seat near the foul pole a few years ago.

Yankees Chief Operating Officer Lonn Trost recently told our sport writer Sam Borden that the new stadium could have had more seats, but they would have been further from the field. “We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to make sure that each fan had a great view and could truly enjoy the new park as much as possible.”

No disrespect meant, Mr. Trost, but Yankees fans – and Mets fans, too – won’t be able to enjoy their new stadiums if there are too few seats and if the tickets are priced far beyond their means.

Do you think you’ll take your kids to see the Yankees or the Mets as often in their new stadiums? Do you remember first game with a parent, or with your own child? If so, tell us about your memories.

Heck, everybody’s got stress. It’s just that the most stressed people I know happen to be parents in single-parent or blended family situations. So, I figured I would share this story that I came across on the newswire from Woman’s Day magazine.

I added the emphasis in the text below for effect. I mean, we certainly don’t have a monopoly on stress. My colleague and friend, Noreen O’Donnell, says she’s written on this, and that there’s a direct correlation between stress and the amount of control you have in your life — not necessarily the number of stressors you have to grapple with.

Fair enough. But it seems to me that parents have additional worries — and are more likely to feel less in control — than your average citizen. More so for single or divorced parents, who have that and more stressors to boot. That’s just me.

But see what you think:

From the editors of Woman’s Day magazine
According to the annual Stress in America report from the American Psychological Association, extreme stress strikes a third of Americans regularly, with one in five getting hit a whopping 15 days out of the month.
Of course, there’s the everyday anxiety that’s caused by a looming work deadline or too-busy schedule, and then there’s the big-time stress that comes with a major life-changing event — like divorce or dealing with a chronic illness. Coping with both requires similar techniques and habits. Woman’s Day magazine outlines a plan that will reduce stress in your life now — and help you prep for the big stuff later.
• Pinpoint your biggest stressor: Go through a day or two with a pen and paper handy, and jot down everything that stresses you out as it happens. OR sit back (when you’re relaxed) and visualize your typical day; make a list of all the things you dread doing. Part of what gets people about stress is that it feels uncontrollable. When you get specific and have a concrete list, life starts to feel manageable. Decide what really gets your adrenaline going, and focus on changing that first.
• Cut back on one thing: If your issue is that you’ve got too much to do around the house between the cooking, cleaning, taking caring of the dog, and shuttling kids to school and activities, choose one night (or two or three) that you’ll order dinner out or pick up a prepared meal at the grocery store. In many cases, being overscheduled is the culprit so figure out what you can say no to.
• Prioritize: Make a list of what has to be done by this morning, the end of the day and the end of the week. Focus on what needs to be finished fist, then move down the list. Often what makes us panic is the big picture – not the three things we have to get done by today, but the 17 things we have to do by the end of the week.
With four steps down you can make these anti-stress moves part of your everyday schedule.
• Move: Regular daily exercise can lower levels of stress hormones
• Pop on headphones: Any music lover knows that listening to your favorite tunes can make you less tense almost immediately
• Chat on the phone with a friend: It keeps your social bonds strong, which gives you an overall feeling of support and belonging.
• Take a deep belly breath: Abdominal breathing increases the amount of oxygen in your blood, triggering the brain to decrease the concentration of stress hormones.

I knew it would start sooner or later. It still stinks.

On Wednesday, I drove my son to school and, as is our norm, I parked in the lot and we walked into the building together. This has been something of a routine when he’s with me that we’ve done since pre-K, through various school buildings. In past, we’ve chatted a bit, joked with each other and I’ve waited with him until the bell rang and he had to get to class.

This time, he walked in ahead of me, and started talking to some friends, seemingly oblivious to my presence. I called out to him, he looked, I said, “bye?” He replied by sheepishly giving an unenthusiastic wave, clearly embarrassed. So I left, heart wounded.

I’ve always known there would come a time when he’d not want to have his dad there when he was with friends. I figured it out early on, in kindergarten, when he first asked me not to hug him goodbye in front of his classmates. I understood.

But somehow this got to me a bit. Probably that’s because it’s an indication of things to come, the years ahead when he will spend more and more time out with friends than at home playing X-Box or watching a movie with is dad, or out at the park playing ball or sled riding in the winter with his old man.

Obviously, it has to be that way, and it should be that way.

But for now, it just stinks.

When I started writing here I thought that blogging as a single parent would offer a needed voice on our parenting blog. I hope I’ve been right. But something’s changed.

Several people have asked me if I am truly a single parent — my girlfriend among them. Well, yes and no. I am divorced and therefore unmarried. And I am a parent. But am I single? In one sense, yes. In another, no, as in, I’m spoken for. So it sent me on a quest for a more accurate label. It didn’t take much thought to figure out that my girlfriend and I have a blended family, as I’ve blogged about before: We live together with our children from prior relationships.

But do I have a right to the single-parent tag? I share some issues with truly single parents, and not others. I seem to share all the issues with parents in blended families.

Ultimately, I’m not so sure it matters. My point in joining this blog was that there were many of us out here living with children in non-traditional homes, and that continues to be the case. That also seems to be the issue — and the point. I also have several years of experience as a truly single parent, which led me to this point.

Hopefully, all of us who find ourselves single with kids will make the same journey from single parent to blended family. With any luck, that transition will lead us to a traditional blended family of onetime single parents.

But perhaps that’s a blog for another day.

The video was striking: Four teenagers beating up a fifth teen during a violent encounter at a church parking lot in Ossining. At some point local cops said the kid taking the beating got a seven-inch gash across his neck. A 16-year-old girl is also punched in the face, and is threatened with more, at which point she walks away.

This was from a story we ran in recent days. Police said neither of the teens were seriously injured: The gash was apparently not very deep. The video itself, which was posted on YouTube by one of the kids later charged in the incident, has since been pulled off the Internet.

So, why is this on a parenting blog? Well, my very first thought when I saw it was, ‘Oh my God. What if that was my kid?’ It’s a horrifying thought. And what if it was one of our children doing the beating, since peer pressure can be a powerful draw?

To be fair, here’s what doesn’t worry me about this incident: It seems to be a “gang assault” in circumstance only. That is to say, it was a group, or “gang” of kids who are charged. They weren’t Bloods, or Latin Kings, or Hell’s Angels. They weren’t a real gang in the most frightening sense. It was just a group of kids seemingly beating another.

But that’s enough for me. It should be enough for all parents. Because regardless of how the criminal justice system deals with it, it is unacceptable, frightening and brutally dangerous. And it scares the heck out of me.

It doesn’t help when the act is downplayed, as seemed to be the case with a New York Times column on this in yesterday’s papers. Was too much made of the incident by my own newspaper? Some might think so, but I don’t. Should the Times have spoken to the Ossining police and not just one of the arrested teens, his parents and his lawyer? Some might think not, but I do.

Because while I know that schoolyard fights are going to happen, it shouldn’t happen this way. We, as parents, should care about it.

I was listening to one of the presidential primary debates recently and someone threw out a reference to child care costs, and how some Americans had trouble managing the $1,000 monthly cost. $1,000? Talk about low end. Move to Westchester, then we’ll talk child care costs.

I’m sure someone out there can point to one or two pre-K placements in the region that comes in at $1,000, whether it’s through subsidized care programs or otherwise. Personally, I don’t know of any under $1,200, and that’s being generous.

Either way, the point is well taken: Child care costs a small fortune, and it’s a serious issue in the nation right now. For a divorced or single parent, it could be a huge fortune.

Greater minds than mine have delved into this, and here we still are. What I was able to find was an article on this at the Child Care Aware website. Perhaps it’s not the definitive help list on this, but it does offer some suggestions on managing child care costs.

So, while we wait for the presidential hopefuls to find a way to deliver the goods, let’s get a little proactive.

I can’t say I’m a numbers geek, but I do like to look at the figures now and again to see how things play out demographically. With that in mind, this is new data from the U.S. Census that found that 94 percent of kids in the nation live with at least one biological parent.

Of course, that covers a wide range of scenarios, from traditional mom-dad-kids homes to blended families to single-parent homes. Perhaps more telling is another statistic: That 61 percent of kids lived with both biological parents, whether they’re married or not. This might be one of those glass half-full or half-empty questions. Is that a positive statistic? Or is the number not high enough?

Raising kids isn’t easy. It’s even harder when they’re not yours.

And there are two distinct sides to the dynamic: Your child and your partner’s child.

Yours: You have to learn to relinquish control, and allow that your partner is going to be in a parenting role with your child — regardless of how subtly you introduce them to the role. This has admittedly been hard for me, only because my son and I had been alone for so many years and established, not only a strong bond, but a set of rules that revolved around the two of us. I’m learning.

Partner’s: This is not your biological child, and he has a father. Yet, you are in a parenting role, again, regardless of how slowly you enter into it. This is a tough balancing act for me, because I want my girlfriend’s son to continue to like me and accept me. But I also have to adhere to the rules set out for him, and correct misconduct when it’s necessary. I’m trying to find that balance.

Well, here are some things to keep in mind, from a link that was forwarded to me. But it’s also a “gut” thing, and you have to work with your partner to ensure all the kids in the home — biological kids and stepkids alike — feel that the rules apply evenly to them. We’re working on that balance as well.

Because if you’re trying to build a blended family, you have to accept that they really are yours after all.

With so many unmarried couples moving in together, it was only a matter of time before lawyers figured out a way to make some cash from the situation. So now there’s an increase in cohabitation agreements, which lay out the rules for out-of-wedlock couples. This doesn’t apply just to single parent blended families, but having kids in the mix ups the stakes a bit for single parents.

I’m not pushing for the agreements, but think it’s a good idea to have some questions addressed and some issues ironed out in those situations. This is something we’ve addressed piecemeal in our home, and something we need to go back and address in more detail.

With that in mind, I found this checklist for couples who are sharing a home but not a marriage. It’s another one of those tip sheets I love to put out there, as I think they lay the groundwork for serious discussion in single-parent and blended-family households. At least it’s a start.