Is tearing up at old Raffi songs a symptom of man-o-pause?

Elissa & me, 1994

When my now-31-year-old daughter Elissa was born, Terry was working a 9-to-5 job at Lincoln Electric while I worked nights as a sports writer at The News-Herald.

This was an ideal arrangement from the standpoint of child care in that, once Terry went back to work following her maternity leave, I was there every day to take care of Elissa.

When Terry got home around 5:30pm, I would eat some dinner then head out to cover a game or go right to the newspaper office for a shift on the copy desk.

Elissa, a champion sleeper almost from birth, thankfully slept until about 9:00am every day, which was a good thing for someone like me who didn't get home from work until 1:00 or 2:00am.

Many weekday mornings, I would awaken to the sound of Elissa on the baby monitor quietly playing in her crib or babbling the way infants do.

I would get out of bed and go into the nursery, and Elissa and I would greet each other with smiles and hugs.

I would then put her on the changing table, take off her onesie or whatever jammies she was wearing, give her a fresh diaper, and dress her for the day.

Usually I would pop a cassette into Elissa's little Fisher-Price tape player to give us some music as we went about this morning routine. We had a lot of kid-oriented cassettes, but the ones I remember most were from Canadian musician Raffi.

Raffi put out a string of smash hit children's songs in the 70s, 80s and 90s, my favorite of which included "Baby Beluga," "Morningtown Ride," "Bananaphone" and "The Changing Garden of Mr. Bell." These songs and many others of Mr. Raffi's take me back to those mid-90s glory days of new parenthood like nothing else.

Elissa, of course, remembers none of this. She was too little. But I think back to the way I would sing to her and she would smile, and suddenly the room gets very, very dusty.

This wave of nostalgia is perhaps unsurprising for someone like me whose kids are mostly grown and who is 2 1/2 months away from becoming a grandfather.

I also wonder whether it's a byproduct of the tongue-in-cheekily named "man-o-pause," which medically speaking is more about the gradual loss of testosterone in men and its related physical effects.

In my reading about male menopause, I don't see anything about hormone-related emotional swings, so either I'm just making this up or else I haven't read the right sources.

Either way, I wouldn't mind going back for just one hour to 1994 and listening to some Raffi tunes while changing and holding a smiling baby who was as happy to see me as I was to see her.

What a time that was in our lives.