They have an uncanny sense of self-awareness.
When they get tired, they recognize the situation for what it is, and say things like, “Daddy, I’m melting. And I think I have crazy eyes.”
Reason Why Hanging with Preschoolers is Cool #3
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Category Archives: fatherhood
Daddy Drinks Does Britain
Today, I had the opportunity to take part in a discussion on BBC Radio about parents lying to their children. Apparently a study was recently published that “discovered” the vast majority of parents lie to their children. I put “discovered” in posts because, well, no shit parents lie to their kids.
Anyway, they had me and a couple of other parents on the show as well as the psychologists involved with the report. I’m not really sure how I did—let’s just say I have a face for radio and a voice for silent film—but I was amazed when a couple of parents called in and said they never lie to their children. Ever. About anything. Not about Santa, not about the quality of the art work their children produce in class…they don’t even create fictional monsters that eat children who don’t sit in their seats at dinner! Shocking, I know.
Obviously, I’m not that good of a parent.
Here’s the podcast if you’re interested. After the bit about parents who lie, they switched topics to Beyonce’s inaugural performance. Obviously, I’m honored and humbled that I got to share air-time with people who were even mentioning Beyonce.
Like Cinderella, God Damn It!
There’s a whole bunch of unreasonable going on in my house right now. Here’s a snippet of a real “conversation” I had with my daughter last night.
“Daddy. Daddy. Daddydaddydaddy. Watch me dance. Daddy, watch me dance. Are you watching me dance? Daddy STOP WATCHING ME DANCE!”
She went from zero to Bat-Shit within a single breath. That has to be some sort of a record.
My daughter will literally eat an entire hotdog while telling me how much she hates hotdogs. And my son is no better. He will only eat food cooked on the grill (not in the oven) and drink from a green cup. Sometimes I give him a blue cup just to watch him lose his shit.
I think there’s a clinical term for what my kids are. I read it in a parenting article once…what’s the phrase…oh yeah, it’s called FUCKING CRAZY!
One night, my daughter threw an unbelievable tantrum as she was going to bed. I kept trying to cover her up with a blanket, but she kept screaming, “No, like Cinderella!” then she’d kick the blanket off the bed and scream as if she was on fire. “Like Cinderella, like Cinderella, like Cinderella…!” After 45 minutes of her thrashing around my wife and I finally figured out that she wanted the blanket to be draped over her slowly by helpful little birds like in Cinderella.
Are you fucking kidding me? She wants me to train wild birds to tuck her in at night! Thanks Walt Disney. It wasn’t pretty when I explained the limitations of domesticating certain animals. She didn’t take it well.
A lot of people compare raising young children to hanging out with drug addicts, or alcoholics, or schizophrenics because of the irrational behavior and wild mood swings. I think those people aren’t giving drug addicts enough credit. Sure, they’ll take money from your purse when you’re not looking and often spread hepatitis, but not even Charlie Sheen on his worst bender would expect you to manipulate woodland creatures into becoming house servants. That’s a special kind of crazy reserved for three-year-olds.
People, please share the most unreasonable thing your child does so that I know I’m not alone in this world.
What happens in the doll house…
Barbie has seen that look in Woody’s eye before. It’s about to get weird.
Reason why hanging with preschoolers is cool: # 2
They try to put jewelry on the cat.
And get this: Cats don’t like to wear jewelry. Cartoonish antics ensue. I wish I could think of an appropriate metaphor that would describe the struggle between Murray the cat and my two kids as they try to dress him up with a necklace and bracelet, but the only thing I can come up with is it’s like watching a preschooler try to put jewelry on a cat.
Dear Santa, Let’s Get Real
Let’s be honest: I’m not sure which side of the your master list I fall on this year–naughty or nice? I’ve certainly had my share of indiscretions in 2012. The “great beer pong misadventure” probably tops the list (my apologies to the city of Atlanta for the trail of vomit and clothing I left on your sidewalks). But overall, I think I’m al alright guy. Case in point, I’m about to come clean to you. I’ve been lying to you for over 30 years now, sending you half-truth Christmas lists every December because I was too ashamed to be honest. Here’s an example: Remember when I was 12? I didn’t really want season tickets to the Braves. What I really wanted for Christmas was to see Tiffany Altman naked. But how do you write that in a Christmas letter? That your mom sends?
But I’m mailing my own letters now, and the letters of my children, so I figure it’s time to come clean and get straight to the point. Forget the Smart Wool socks I’ve previously asked for. Ditto World Peace—we’d just fuck it up anyway. Here’s my real Christmas List.
12 Things I Really Want For Christmas
1) I want my kids to eat all of their dinner, just once. Every chicken finger, every macaroni noodle, every sliced grape and green bean. And then, maybe after they clean their plate, they could look at me and say, “Hey Dad, thanks for cooking a delicious yet nutritious meal. We appreciate you.”
2) The next time I go away on a work trip, I want my wife to stop me as I get into the taxi and give me a naughty video that I “shouldn’t watch on the plane.” You know, like in that Samsung phone commercial. What a great wife that lady is! For any female readers out there, your husband wants you to make one of these videos too. Trust me.
3) Six hours of complete silence
4) A butler.
5) A golf cart.
6) I want couples with one kid to stop complaining about how difficult parenthood is, or how tired they are. Really? It’s tough to get one kid to sleep? To bathe one kid? To take one kid to the grocery store? People with mono-babies can suck it. You’re not allowed to talk to me until number two comes around. I don’t go around telling people with quadruplets how difficult raising twins is, now do I?
7) A babysitter that also mows the lawn.
8) A recording contract for Toots and the McGoots.
9) Let’s talk more about this video I want my wife to make me.
10) Two kids that wake up at 6am, look around and say, “let’s go back to bed until 8.” Or maybe one of them says, “I’m not that tired. I think I’ll just get up and vacuum and organize the playroom.”
11) Bombproof immune systems for the kids…or an antibiotic drip. Whichever is more practical for the elves.
12) A built-in vacuum system for the mini-van that sucks up goldfish the second the kids drop them.
Here’s Something the Other Tour Guides Won’t Tell You
When you have kids, people tell you a lot of things. Everyone tells you that you’re not going to sleep for at least a year. They tell you that kids are expensive, start saving for braces. They tell you that kids are finicky eaters. They tell you that tuition will cost $100,000 a year by the time your kid will be going to State. They tell you that you can kiss your hobbies goodbye. No more model trains or triathlons or furry porn…whatever you’re into, you won’t have time for it anymore. When you have kids, people tell you all kinds of things about how to get a baby to sleep, or how to transition from training wheels to a big boy bike.
But when you have kids, nobody bothers to tell you that one day, for no reason whatsoever, your kids will decide that they don’t want to look at doors anymore and will cover their eyes when approaching a door of any kind. The front door, the car door, the bathroom door at the mall… It will happen when you’re late for ballet. Or trying to get to church, or the bank before it closes. Maybe it’ll be a Tuesday or a Saturday, I don’t know, but it will happen and it will completely shut you down for 24 hours.
It’s tough enough to get my kids out the door on a good day, throw in “door-a-phobia” and suddenly, I’m operating way above my pay grade. My kids have a 70 percent success rate of walking through a door without suffering head trauma when they’re using all five senses. Take away sight and the success rate drops drastically. I can’t wait to try to explain this to DSS.
And forget trying to reason with your child. They’re three. There’s no reasoning with a three year old. You can bribe, but you can’t reason. And forget trying to ask your child why they suddenly can’t stand to look at a door anymore, because they’ll give an answer that goes something like this: “well, if I don’t want to look at doors anymore, then I don’t want to look at doors anymore.”
When you have kids, nobody tells you that those kids will do strange things, like try to lick you, or only eat orange food, or refuse to flush the toilet because they can’t bare to say goodbye to their poop, or suddenly decide that they don’t want to look at doors anymore.
When you have kids, nobody tells you that those kids will be weird.
Who’s the Boss?
Like most three year olds, my kids have become rather bossy. They’re getting older, more independent, and more worldly. They’ve seen a thing or two. They know what’s up. They’re pushing four for Christ’s sake, and they know how spaghetti and meatballs should be made! They know how their jacket should be zipped, and they’ve got no problem with telling me I’m not doing it properly.
It would be less annoying of they weren’t usually right.
The other night, I reached into the fridge for my third beer of the evening. My daughter cocked her head and, somehow channeling both my mother and my wife, said, “you’re having another beer, daddy?”
It wasn’t a question, it was an accusation.
Last week, we were headed to the park to meet some friends for soccer. It was one of those rare, warm winter days and everyone in the neighborhood was hell bent on making the most of it. We live less than a mile from the park, on low-traffic roads, so I loaded the kids into the bike trailer. It was a quick trip, so I didn’t think it was necessary for the kids to wear their helmets, but my son refused to leave the yard until I dug his helmet out of the back of the car. “Safety first, daddy.”
Addie has taken her bossiness to a whole new level, appointing herself to the role of my anger management coach. Like all stay at home dads, I’m prone to fits of rage. Someone, please tell me how you keep from seeing red when it takes an hour and fifty seven minutes to get a pair of shoes on a child? By the time I get that second shoe on, the kid has already taken the first shoe off and hidden the sock somewhere in the basement. Even Buddha would lose his shit, right?
Whenever I go into one of my tirades and threaten to melt every single toy the kids own in the chiminea my daughter looks me directly in the eye and says, “daddy, don’t be so angry. When you’re angry, you act like Captain Hook. I don’t like Captain Hook.”
Her logic is completely disarming. Not to mention those cute pigtails.
The whole situation has left me wondering who’s parenting who in my house.
I always thought that if my life was an ‘80s family sitcom, I’d be the unrefined but wise Tony Danza character: Unconventional, but good hearted and with a natural instinct for right and wrong. Tony Danza is the voice of reason in a topsy-turvy world. But it turns out, my kids are Tony Danza, which makes me what, Alyssa Milano? I’m certainly not the ambitious, work-focused mother. Wait, am I the oversexed grandma?
If my kids ever figure out how to turn on the TV by themselves, I’ll be completely out of a job.
Reason why raising kids in Awesomeville, N.C. is, well, awesome: #1
Because the soccer moms here have nose rings and “666” tattooed in their cleavage.
Sorry, I couldn’t get a photo without looking like a complete perv. That’s the trouble with boob tattoos: so alluring, but so hard to document.
Reason why hanging with preschoolers is cool: #1
They talk to their food.
Daughter: “Hey salad, get in my belly!”
Also, they make you question the standard serving sizes of condiments. Is one ounce of ketchup enough to make those mashed potatoes palatable?
Daddy Drinks 