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What: “How Tough Could It Be? The Trials and Errors of a Sportswriter Turned Stay-at-Home Dad.”

Author: Austin Murphy.

List price: $21.

After 19 years as a writer for Sports Illustrated, Austin Murphy took a six-month break from a life of covering Super Bowls and swimsuit shoots to temporarily switch places with his wife, Laura, who gave up her writing career to raise their two children.

In his clever and heartwarming style, Murphy tells the funny and poignant tale of his metamorphosis from typical husband to a man blessed -- cursed? -- with The Sight.

“Unlike Haley Joel Osment in ‘The Sixth Sense,’ ” he wrote, “I do not see dead people. But I see rude people.... I see people sulking because they can’t watch a baseball game at the dinner table. I see people sitting at the table, the meal long since over, letting others handle the cleanup. I see unfolded laundry and kitchen garbage bags so full as to be approaching infinite density. I see layers of detritus in the backseat of the Volvo, burrs in the poodle’s coat, unswept floors, unwatered plants, ungroomed children.”

From the beginning, Murphy’s goals sounded simple enough.

“I would be the world’s happiest SAHD (Stay-at-Home Dad),” he wrote. “I’d cook, carpool, fold laundry and find out how it feels to be, well, Laura. I would volunteer in the classroom and arrange play dates. I’d do the grocery shopping and pick up the dry cleaning.... And when she moved in close, late of a weekday evening, the better to express her gratitude, I would borrow a page from her playbook. Professing exhaustion, I’d withhold sex.”

This book isn’t entirely about letting a spouse grouse. Murphy says with a tinge of sadness that he would have liked to be Mr. Mom for a year, but it would have been “fiscally ruinous.” He had to take off his apron and go back to traveling around the country, watching sporting events from the best seat in the house.

Hey, life’s all about making sacrifices.

-- Sam Farmer