When I woke up on Father’s Day I figured we had an easy morning ahead, with pancakes and bacon to fuel the mellow. Not 15 minutes in to our meal, however, I was taking a not-so-victorious lap around the outside of a restaurant with my 4-year old son, Ray, whom I had just hauled out of the place.

He left wailing, having decided to be miserable about the type of cup in which his orange juice had arrived. Amazingly, as if to prove it has a sense of humor, the universe chose this moment to serve up the syrupy strains of The Carpenters’ “Top of the World” over the exterior PA system. We listened as we walked, and a question formed in my own mind and stuck, so I put it aloud to him: Why make something so hard out of something so easy?

Why so difficult indeed, this morning I thought would be the week’s simplest? It’s Father’s Day, we’re all healthy, and I’ve got money in my pocket. But we’re in the IHOP parking lot, not on the top of the world, and it feels more like all of creation is looking down on us.

Dan Coleman's daughter Zia holds a natural delight — a toad — in the Colemans' Lawrence yard.

In fact, my nearly five years as a parent have provided an ample list of monumentally difficult “easy” things. For starters, the raw human drama of life’s fundamental tasks: Who knew eating, sleeping, communicating, and going to the bathroom in an actual bathroom every time could be so difficult? And the kids have a hard time getting that stuff done, too. I’m at least pretty good at dressing myself, even when one of them is beating on my head like a drum. But I don’t know how many times I’ve tiptoed out of their darkened rooms, trying not to cough or kick an errant toy on the floor, feeling like a soldier in an old war movie desperate to remain undetected by the enemy. War is supposed to be that hard, though. I’m just trying to get my kids to take a nap.

I never saw the flip side until the other day, when I took them to an arcade. Ray, something of a skee ball prodigy, had the machine spitting out tickets within moments, while my daughter Zia, at age 2 and a half, struggled to get a ball all the way up the ramp. When we finished, she had won a mere four tickets, with much assistance from me. We headed to the prize counter to see what she could purchase with them, but to my horror the cheapest item — an unimpressive-looking temporary tattoo, at that — cost five. Hoping I had counted wrong, I reached for her tickets, only to realize there was a miracle in her hostile glare and vise grip: The tickets themselves were the prize!

Here at last, something that should have been hard had turned out easy. All the next day I held onto the memory of Zia’s tickets, like my own version of Zu Zu’s petals, a talisman to remind me of all the many other ways my kids are easily delighted: a swing, a snail, a popsicle, a balloon. A single Dum Dum sucker after a haircut at Larry’s. A free pool table at the East Lawrence Rec Center. Billy Idol’s cover of “Mony Mony” (I didn’t say it had to be pleasant to me). Ceiling fans, mud, macaroni and cheese, backyard toads, Harry the Dirty Dog, again. I’ve seen Zia seated on the floor of an otherwise empty room, beholding the heavens in a swirl of sunlit dust: “Look at my stars, Daddy!” And she was once pulled from the brink of a total meltdown by the sudden appearance of a barber shop quartet on an ancient rerun of the Lawrence Welk Show. So much for the banality of evil; here was a toddler saved from doing evil by banality itself.

Then there are the simple things I do that impress them so much. I can count to 100, draw a stickman, give a piggyback ride, swish a 3-pointer (rarely, but that’s good enough). Before Ray ever visited an art museum or saw a basketball game, I was the closest thing to Michael Jordan or Michelangelo he had experienced. Remarkably, I could also break wind on command when he pulled my finger.

These days, he is less easy to please. For example, he gets on my case frequently for the way I write the number 2 (with a loop, instead of flat). Then again, in the grocery store when he sees the number printed on a sign the way he likes it (“Look, there’s my kind of 2!”), a euphoric smile replaces his edgy frown, and buys us a few more functional minutes in the shopping cart.

Is that easy or hard? I can’t make it out, but maybe I’m just tired. Last night, as my head hit the pillow, I heard Zia puke unexpectedly and begin crying in the next room. What a pain. I groaned and went in, turned on her light and saw right away how much she needed me. That old parental adrenalin kicked in, and when I picked her up from the crib, wet and stinking, she looked at me with such gratitude I almost cried. In other words, it was a piece of cake.

— Dan Coleman is secretary on the board of Dads of Douglas County. He is a part-time stay at home dad with a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, but in his other life he is a librarian at the Lawrence Public Library, where he selects children’s and parenting books for the Children’s Room. He can be reached at danielfcoleman@yahoo.com.