MARK MY WORD: QUALITY OF LIFE FOR PARENTS MEASURED BY HUGS AND KISSES

It's tough to measure quality of life when you're changing dirty diapers.

A Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce committee spent the past year ferreting out facts about the quality of life in our city.

The result: A report that focuses on job growth, high school graduation rates and other statistical stuff that looks good on bar charts.

But they left out some important quality indicators as far as parenting is concerned.

As a dad, with two young children, I know a thing or two about what counts with parents.

High on our quality indicator list is disposable diapers.

You can't live without them. It's a tribute to technology that we no longer have to wash a bunch of dirty diapers.

This makes parents a whole lot happier.

Some people say cloth diapers are more environmentally friendly. Maybe to trees. But for most parents, it's their homes that they want to be environmentally friendly, along with their diaper pails.

Another quality indicator is childhood deafness. This occurs anytime you ask your children to clean up their rooms.

Parents often have to repeat themselves over and over again before the message is received by children.

In many cases, moms and dads end up saying only a few sentences a day to their children. They just repeat the same phrases over and over again like a practicing parrot.

The less repetition, the better the quality of life.

Sleep or more accurately the lack of it is a major quality indicator for parents.

The idea that adults will get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep is a fairy tale to parents.

Our 5-year-old, Becca, fights going to bed. But once asleep, she is out until morning.

But 17-month-old Bailey is a different matter. She goes to bed at a decent hour, but often wakes up during the night.

This means that either I have to get up and go into the nursery or my wife Joni has to do so.

In cases like this, it is important to master one of the major, parenting survival skills: Pretend you are sleeping.

The spouse who does a better job of pretending to be sound asleep is the one who doesn't have to get out of bed to deal with the midnight crying.

Unfortunately, for me, Joni is much better at pretending to be comatose than I am.

Of course, she points out that even if she is pretending to be asleep, she really is awake, so her quality of life is affected too.

Childhood illnesses are another quality indicator. The fewer illnesses, the better.

Unfortunately, illness is part of growing up.

You can't grow up in Swampeast Missouri without getting ear infections.

Over the years, our children have become regular hosts to ear infections.

I'm beginning to wonder if ears serve any real purpose for children except to help boost the medical industry.

Maybe it would be better if they didn't grow ears until later in life. That way they would avoid all those visits to the doctor. And by the time they got their ears, they would be ready to listen to what mom and dad had to say.

Fortunately for families, quality of life doesn't hinge on ear infections and life's messy, spilled-milk moments.

It hinges on that feeling you get when you see your children smile at you for no reason or when they give you one of those on-the-run hugs.

That's a quality of life that can't be charted by a committee.

Parenting isn't something you can do by the numbers. But that's fine with me.

I'll take the hugs and kisses any day and leave the calculations to others.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.