Besides the cliche issue, the problem with using the phrase "demon spawn" to describe your own kids is that it makes you the demon.

I am not the demon. I am the nice man with the two bottles of formula, nuked, respectively, for 10 seconds and 11 seconds to best accomodate your guzzling pleasure. My only wishes are your gas-free comfort and as quick a sating of your gluttony as is mechanically possible. I exist to serve you. I recall no sharp desires of my own, though wispy dreams of sleep thread through the thickened syrup of my existence like invented memories.

Also if you wouldn't mind letting your mother finish drying half her hair, that would be nice too.

Tea—most versatile beverage—it sharpens the wit of the waking or propels the paternal undead past night feeding... after night feeding... after night feeding... and then propels him to the couch to roll his eyeballs over the sentences in WOLVES EAT DOGS, a novel by Martin Cruz Smith that—so he believes—the author has lost control of in the last 5%. This novel has become so hopelessly disjointed and without logic that the letterforms themselves swim and roll like drowned worms. This is a shame, since it seemed to be an unusually excellent book when he read the first 95%.

How Mr. Smith managed to screw up the actual letterforms, he'll never know; and neither will he ever understand how words that look so like English can make so little sense. Another clear authorial problem. All he knows is it's time to quietly make more tea, quietly listen to the dark patter of cosmic rays bombarding New York (which sounds a lot like snow on a fire escape), and quietly kiss two evil little fiends on the tops of their little horned heads.

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