A sum up of the last six months of my life: Max was born. And yesterday he celebrated his 1/2 birthday. I'm pretty sure some other stuff happened, but don't ask me what. The job of taking care of a baby is pretty much all-consuming.

It's not like I didn't know that beforehand. As I prepared to be a stay-at-home dad, I was quite sure that tending to a child in the first year of its life is perhaps the most demanding job on the planet. With the possible exception of taking care of a child in the second year of its life.

In any case, I expected to be overwhelmed, exhausted and generally pooped most of the time. That prediction has borne itself out. Nonetheless. I did expect the rewards to be a bit more constant.

For example, around the third month, babies start to mellow out, smile and generally interact with their surroundings. In practical terms, this means they start sleeping longer (and possibly all through the night), quit crying for no apparent reason and might, on very rare occasions, present their parents with an unbidden smile.

Until you've had the joy of dealing with an unresponsive, unhappy baby for any period of time (much less a couple months), you have no idea how much a simple smile can mean. And giggles, well, giggles can send parents into delirium.

So after about three months or so, your child has arrived at the golden age, right? Colic and other crankiness issues are receding and your child is now obviously becoming a person, someone with whom you can talk and play and all that. That's all true. But there's some fine print you might have missed.

Teething. The difference between colic crying and teething whining is a matter of texture, not consistency. Max's first two teeth (bottom front) showed up right at five months (after two months of sometimes pitiful whining and truly prodigious drooling). He had one day free of teething issues after cutting his bottom choppers, and then his two top front teeth began their inexorable descent. Every day, I keep thinking one has broken through. Every day, my wife Barbara tells me I'm engaging in wishful thinking.

I'm operating on the Marc theory here. Marc was a guy who reviewed records (among other things) at the college radio station where I worked. About once a month, he proclaimed one act or another "the future of music." I'd bore you with a list, but you wouldn't know any of the bands. Except one. Back in 1988, he slapped that appellation on Nirvana's Bleach. Thus the Marc theory: If you say something earnestly enough often enough, that something will happen someday. And it's true: Someday all of Max's teeth, and not just his two top front ones, will arrive.

Still, even with teething and the eating of solid foods (and, by way of elimination, solid food poop), the last three months have been great. I've been home alone with Max for the past two months, and that's been fun. Tiring, often frustrating, but fun. The boy likes to talk (even though his "discussions" tend to be monologues focusing on a single syllable repeated endlessly), and most of the time he smiles when he looks at me, even if he is also whining or crying. A couple times a day, he giggles and laughs. Which is the best sound in the world.

For some reason or another, I've managed to spend the last six months enjoying my son without projecting a specific future on him. Sure, I think it would be great if he turned out to be the star center midfielder on the third U.S. team to win the World Cup (this thought did pass through my mind once or twice during the month of June), but I don't have plans to force soccer on to him. Of course, spending his formative years kicking a ball with his parents and attending a multitude of games (such as yesterday's thrilling Carolina-Atlanta WUSA semifinal, won by the home side a minute into overtime) will probably foster an appreciation, if not an outright love for the game.

Thing is, I don't really care if he plays soccer. I want him to play many things; active kids are happy kids. I'm not talking about "so after school, I've got to go to soccer, and then hockey, and then painting class, and then special Latin class, and then stained glass making and then go to bed" kinda active. I mean simply playing baseball in the summer, soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter and so on. You know, like a normal kid. A happy kid.

More than anything else, I want him to be that happy kid. And through the teething whining and general frustration with not being able to do everything he wants to do right then and there (someday he'll figure out that that frustration exists until the day you die), I think he's a happy guy. He smiles at the people in the grocery store. Actually, he smiles at most everybody. And sometimes he laughs when Barbara and I play with him.

Which, like I said, is the best sound in the whole world.

Max Worley will not be making the trip next Saturday to Atlanta to watch the Courage play Washington for the WUSA title. His mommy and daddy don't think he'll sit still for a 10-hour round-trip drive and a two-hour soccer game. Like any true fan, however, he predicts a stirring Carolina victory, with Birgit Prinz blasting the game winner through a flailing Siri Mullinix.