Still Life with Children: True Tales of Love, Laughter and Laundry

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Richard Scrimger is a writer who also happens to be a stay-at-home
father of four children under the age of nine. In Still Life with
Children, he reflects on what it is like to be surrounded by four
disparate and sometimes desperate offspring who tend to get lost at
malls, balk at swimming lessons, request four separate dinner menus, and
collectively drive their sire none too gently. His narrative takes
readers through one year in the Scrimger household, describing such
events as birthday parties, winter outings, spring rites, and a trip to
the cottage.

The result is highly entertaining. Scrimger can turn the weekly laundry
pile into a doomed expedition up Mount Everest. His writing style might
be described as parental gallows humor. He begins each morning with the
foreknowledge of failure, but does not rail against the inequity of a
fourfold father’s lot. Instead, readers get a hilarious commentary on
the spectacular view he has from the top of the scaffold.