I'm not a perfect dad, I know that. But I'm proud of my parenting these past seven years.

I read in Sports Illustrated this week how Joe Flacco - who missed the birth of his second child a couple of Sundays ago because he was quarterbacking the Baltimore Ravens - said he hadn't changed very many diapers for his two kids. That seems foreign to me. (Though perhaps signing million-dollar contracts would change the expectations around the house. But that's not in the cards.)

Anyway, I'm very involved with my kids. So I have that over Flacco.

Except in one area: My children's hair.

Saturday morning my wife left for work earlier than usual. We thought we had everything set for Saturday's dance class - I knew where the tights and leotard were, I knew where the tap and ballet shoes were - except for one thing:

I remembered shortly before it was time to leave that my daughter was supposed to wear her hair up for dance class.

Once before I had tried to do the hair of one of my daughters. My oldest asked for side ponytails - kind of like pigtails, I guess. It did not turn out well. And it was a school day, if I remember correctly. The hair was falling out of the elastics before we even got out of the car at school.

So I know my limitations. I let my wife handle the hair on a day-to-day basis.

I've never had long hair. I don't know how to handle long hair. And I'm kind of afraid of messing it up even worse by trying to ponytail it.

But on Saturday we had no choice. So, camera ready to document my success (or lack thereof), I brushed out the hair. Then I kind of grabbed the part that looked like it might become a ponytail. That's what you see in the picture above. It also kind of looked like the way my wife does it at that point, so I had a good feeling.

I got the elastic and put the hair through - that went fine. It's always the second pass through the elastic that's tricky for me.

It wasn't the most perfect hair-through-elastic performance in history, but it worked. We had hair in a ponytail. And it only had to last an hour.

It did.