I am a hard-core San Diego Chargers fan, so when the playoffs rolled around and the Bolts hosted the Patriots in the second round, I decided to have a little get-together with some friends from the office. Being a family-friendly house, spouses and keiki were also invited.

Our house is a gathering place for family and friends, so we are used to hosting parties. In most cases, the children are usually around the same age as my daughter. It is unusual to have children under 3 years old, but that is exactly what we had on Playoff Sunday.

I watched the game intently but during the commercials noticed that my friend passed his infant daughter from one family member to another, never putting her down on the floor. When the baby finally dozed off in his arms, I offered the pune'e in the back room, but he politely refused. About halfway through the game I pieced it all together. My one-time family friendly home had grown up along with my daughter.

The carpet is gone, replaced with slate tile. There is a microfiber sofa where the overstuffed couch once rested, and none of the beds have safety rails. Our little hale was no longer "little kid"-friendly.

Crawling is out of the question unless a baby's idea of fun is bloodied knees. A nap can lead to head injury. And the toddler toys that once littered the house have been replaced by iPods, DVDs and young-reader novels.

Years ago, when my wife and I decided that we would have a child, we reaffirmed the commitment to our marriage. Don't get me wrong, there's no hierarchy of love and no one person is put before the other. Still, we knew that sacrificing our marriage in the name of our child would help neither our marriage nor our child.

Still, it is amazing how child-centric family life can become. Sometimes the centricity is by choice. My wife and I decided long ago that we would only attend parties at which the entire family was invited. We are a unit and we function as such. If our daughter was not invited to a party, we often politely declined. We understood and respected the decision of the host(s) to delimit the list. We assumed that the host(s) would also understand and respect our decision not to attend. No offense assumed nor intended.

Sometimes child centricity is more subtle. When you are committed to the development of your child, you encourage them to try new things — in our case, hula and soccer. As you might imagine, weekends can get a bit crazy.

Finally, some child centricity is undetectable except in hindsight. Our home is the classic example. We purposely kept the nasty blue wall-to-wall carpet until our daughter outgrew "the spills." There were nail- polish spills, juice spills, saimin spills and the obligatory permanent marker marks. As the years have passed and our confidence has grown, we have slowly updated our house to match the needs (and skills) of our family.

Our home is still family-friendly, but it is based on the needs and wants of our family and that may not work for others.

A part of me is lamenting the loss, because accommodating family and friends is important to me; but another part of me marvels at the development of our family. We each have grown so much over the years; you can see it written all over the house.

I am just glad it is no longer written all over the carpet.