This is blatant bragging on my part. The kids are 3.5 and totally skipped the training wheels phase. Awesome enough on its own, but then my boy discovered the pump track at the local park. The rest is history.
Preschool Pump Track
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Tag Archives: kids
Drink of the Week: Mother Earth Endless River
Brewed in tiny Kinston, N.C. at Mother Earth Brewing, Endless River is a super light German kolsch style ale. It’s tasty enough to get excited about, but light enough to drink all day long. Get a small cooler, ice, and a six pack of Endless River and spend your entire Saturday in your front yard, drinking the bottles slowly while you knock out last minute Fall home projects, like painting your brand new fence cliché white. Normally, painting a fence sucks, which is why you’ve put it off so long. But today, you’ve got beer, and more importantly, the kids aren’t your responsibility. Because you’re painting the fence. Getting shit done. You can hear them screaming inside the house (something about wanting the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into circles, not triangles), but that’s not your problem today. Your spouse is on tantrum duty. Because you’re painting the fence. Monotonous tasks never felt so relaxing. It’s like a little vacation. Put the headphones in. Have another Endless River.
Independence Day
How do you work Maxim magazine, public urination, and 3am donut runs into the same essay? You write about toddler independence–that golden period in a kid’s life when she figures out she can do things for herself, but has no idea about the consequences of eating carbs after 7pm…or public nudity.
Check out my latest blog at Breathe Magazine. And before you ask–no, my kids didn’t suddenly become two cute Asian girls. Although I think the new iPhone 5 has an app for that.
For the Ladies
The six scariest words you’ll hear from your three-year-old: Look daddy, I have glitter glue.
The six scariest words you’ll hear from a heavily bearded man who drinks too much and spends most of his time with two three-year-olds: I’m blogging for a women’s magazine.
What could possibly go wrong? Check it out.
Read Breathe, people. Read Breathe.
Five…no make that Eight…People I Hate Right Now
Ok, I know this is a negative topic and the world has enough negativity in it (See Fox News and MSNBC). But I’m stuck on a grounded airplane in 100-degree heat, so I feel like being negative right now. Tomorrow I’ll be in a better mood and I probably won’t hate any of these people. Except number 4. I’ll always hate number 4. So, here you go. People I hate right now.
1) People who read books in public. Fuck you and your free time. What, you have nothing better to do on a Tuesday at 2pm than sit in a coffee shop and read the Steve Jobs biography? Get a job.
2) People who close their eyes when they hug someone and hold on for longer than three seconds. A hug should be like taking a charge in basketball—contact should be brief and largely imagined. Better yet, why not just wave goodbye?
3) People who say, “I’m super picky about my falafel.”
4) Anyone wearing a scarf.
5) Parents who go to parenting workshops about conscious parenting. Stop trying so hard. I’m not even entirely sure what conscious parenting is, but I think it means being sober through the majority of your kid’s childhood, so count me out.
6) People who walk around the airport wearing their neck pillows. Is it really too heavy to carry in your hand?
7) Speaking of pillows, my wife hates people who insist on bringing their pillow from home when they travel. I totally agree with her, and I’ve never loved her more than when she’s bashing a complete stranger based on an insignificant detail like this.
8) People who upload Facebook photos of the vegetables they grew in their garden. Bravo, you planted a seed and watered it. I’m supposed to hit the “like” button for this? My toddlers can do this. And I’m not just bitter because everything I stick in the ground literally turns to dust. I’m not. I swear.
Please chime in. Tell me who you hate right now. And don’t say self-absorbed bloggers, because that’s too easy.
Father’s Day
The kids are working on a super-secret father’s day present in day care today. The teacher won’t tell me what it is and the kids aren’t talking either. We live in one of those alternative towns that’s always on the “Best Places to Live” lists, so I assume the present is something completely worthless, like a Tibetan prayer flag made from recycled restaurant napkins. Fucking hippies. Not that I ever gave my own dad anything worthwhile on Father’s Day. I leaned heavily on the standards (ties and grilling paraphernalia), because, like most kids, all I ever saw my dad do was go to work or operate the grill. He’s retired now and those are still his two favorite things to do.
I think it’s safe to assume the kids won’t be making me an ashtray. I wonder who was the last kid in America to make his dad a Father’s Day ashtray in school? Is there a name for that generational cutoff—the kids who were raised in an era where all dads smoked? The Second-Hand Generation?
Whatever the kids make me, I’m sure I’ll cherish it forever…or at least until they go to bed and I can safely throw it away without causing a tantrum. My wife keeps asking me what I want for Father’s Day, and I keep telling her that the kids have already given me the greatest gift ever. In reality, I want what all dads want: pornography and booze. But some stupid federal laws keep my kids from buying either of those things, so I’ll just smile and take the tie or grilling utensils, just like my dad did.
Besides, we all know Father’s Day isn’t really about fathers. It’s about mothers having a designated day to be nice to their husbands in order to assuage their guilt about incessantly nagging those husbands the other 364 days out of the year. A friend of mine suggested we take a guy’s trip over Father’s Day weekend. On paper, it looks like a good idea—if there’s one day out of the year a dad should get to do what he wants (drink beer on the beach and look at college chicks in bikinis), it’s Father’s Day. But I quickly declined and advised the other dads in the group to do the same. The delicate balance of our marriages would be disrupted if we deny our ladies that singular opportunity to repent for their year of sins.
As for Mother’s Day, that’s obviously a sham too, because as we all know, everyday is Mother’s Day. The entire institution of marriage depends on the husband doing exactly what the wife wants day in, day out. She chooses the restaurant, the movie, the weekend activities, the vacation, the car…Any dude who disagrees is either naïve or divorced. You may think you’re the master of your own universe, but peek behind the curtain and you’ll see your wife is really pulling all the strings.
Do I sound bitter? I’m not. Like all happily married men, I consider myself lucky to be in this situation. There are two good reasons why we’re happily subservient: 1) Our wives are pretty. They’ve agreed to hang out with us and let us see them naked for the rest of our lives. Awesome. 2) Our wives are smarter than we are. You can disagree with this all you want, but the fact is, if men truly called the shots in their family, the household would resort to something like Thunderdome. Nobody wants that. Long live Mother’s Day.
Five Things That Aren’t Awesome About Parenthood
Parenthood is magical, there’s no doubt about that. Sometimes, though, it’s more black magic than “kiss the frog” magic. Luckily, 87 percent of the time, being a dad is awesome. Here are a few things that inform that other 13 percent.
- Scraping poop out of big boy underwear…three times a day.
- The nasty looks that other parents at Mighty Might Gymnastics give you when your kid coughs on their kid. In my defense: I don’t care if my kid is patient zero with a wicked strain of chipmunk flu. We’re getting out of the house today!
- Fishing random objects out of the toilet with chopsticks. (Sidenote: chopsticks make excellent retrievers of floating cars, candy wrappers, credit cards…all the little things that end up in the toilet.)
- Suspecting your kid loves iPhone “Paint Sparkles” more than you.
- The constant fear that your two-year-old daughter is going to ask the waiter if he has a penis.
Injury Free Work Days: 0
Can we get through a single day without one of my kids throwing a toy truck at the other one? It’s amazing what my kids can turn into a weapon. You’d think a bubble maker would be pretty benign, but if I leave the kids alone on the porch with a small bubble maker, one of them will get water-boarded by the other. And my daughter thinks the only way her fairy princess wand will work is if she puts her entire body behind it. She’s like a ninja with that thing.
It reminds me of the intense “Chinese throwing star and nunchucks” phase I went through as a kid. I have no idea why my mother thought it would be a good idea to let a 10 year old have half a dozen pointy metal discs forged with the singular purpose of killing people from a distance. I didn’t question her decision at the time, but now that I have kids of my own, I’m a little suspect. Of course, this was before safety was a real concern. Apparently, kids raised in previous decades never got hurt. How else can you explain our lack of bicycle helmets and seat belts? And yet most of us survived somehow. It was probably all the hairspray we used back then. All that puffy, crusty hair was like walking around with an airbag on your head.
Looking back, it seems a little strange to go through a “throwing star” phase. I can’t imagine my kids getting into that sort of thing. But all Southern boys growing up in the ‘80s went through this phase. Like every other kid I knew, I spent a lot of time in the knife shop while my mom browsed the consignment store next door. It was inevitable that I’d come out of that shop with something sharp I could throw at other people.
Basically, childhood for me was just a series of weapons-based phases. A few other notable phases: bow and arrow phase. Homemade slingshot phase. Poison dart gun phase. Throwing pinecones at other people’s faces phase. Booby trap phase. The list goes on. It’s the result of the laissez faire parenting techniques of the time. A lot of people look back on the fact that our parents simply opened their back doors and made us go play outside as a sort of idyllic period in history. In a lot of ways it was—Last Child in the Woods and all that crap—but the truth is, we just spent most of that outside time trying to figure out different ways to maim each other with the tools at hand. We didn’t want to kill anyone, but if we could cause serious injury without getting into trouble, then we were game.
So maybe a nation full of video game children isn’t so bad after all. The first person shooter games may be disturbing, but at least they’re not literally playing war like we did, fastening makeshift bayonets to our toy guns and loading our backpacks with grenades (heavy rocks). You don’t know darkness until you trap your best friend in a ditch and pepper him with rocks and pinecones. But we weren’t fat, so we had that going for us.
Sesame Street Raised My Children
My better half, also heavily influenced by Elmo
I like to think I’m having some sort of positive impact on my kids. There has to be some advantage to having your dad hang out with you every day as opposed to your mom, perhaps a medical benefit to having a bit more testosterone around the house. Right?
We may not bake a lot of cookies, and my daughter may always look like a drunk homeless person because I have no idea how to braid her hair, but there are some advantages, right? Like, they’ll learn how to play poker at a shockingly young age. And they already have a rich knowledge of the Beastie Boys.
Even though I don’t know what I’m doing, I daydream about their inaugural address 40 years down the road (yes, the first twins ever to be elected President) where they thank their dad for teaching them how to tie their shoes and treat others with kindness (at least to their face).
But the older my kids get, the more I realize I’m not really doing much more than keeping the razor blades and liquor out of reach. And sometimes, I fail at that. Every now and then I’ll stand in awe of a new skill that my kids display and wonder, “where did they learn that?”
More often than not, the answer is Sesame Street. Seriously. Counting to 10, their colors, empathy…they picked all this up from The Street.
I taught them to jump over the couch cushions while yelling, “parkour!” but Elmo taught them that brushing their teeth is healthy. I showed them how to take tiny nibbles out of their cookie until it looks like a sail boat, but Abby taught them the importance of saying “please” and “thank you.”
So I guess it’s my turn. Thank you Elmo, Abby, the Grouch, Cookie Monster et al. Thank you for picking up my slack.
And people say TV is bad for you!
Daddy Drinks 