I was under the impression that the Terrible Twos started when the kid actually turns two. Hence the name.
But I think I was wrong.
Because my son is 19 months old, a good half-year away from being two, and things are already getting pretty darn terrible.
Before I became a parent, I made a lot of blanket statements about what I would and wouldn’t do should that day come.
At the top of the list? Putting a leash on my child.
A year and a half in, dealing with an unruly toddler who would like nothing more than to run into traffic or down a spiral staircase or into the maws of a giant piece of machinery, I am thisclose to putting the kid in a cat carrier.
And after the incident last weekend, a leash is starting to seem like the most reasonable thing in the world.
This blog has evolved.
It started as, and will always be, a blog about balancing the joy-sucking demands of fatherhood with the desire to actually have a life and a libido and a buzz once in a while. But faced with the emergence of an enemy that was heretofore hidden from my non-parent self, the blog has acquired a mission: keeping moms and dads free from the judgment of the Other Parent.
The Other Parent thinks they’ve cracked the parenting code; that they know what’s best for everyone else’s kids; that their way is the right way and yours is damaging your offspring. The problem with that is that there is no code; there is no “best”; there is no “right way.” There is only what works best for you.
The Other Parent doesn’t accept this. They are self-righteous and condescending and love to call you out, often passive-aggressively, for what they perceive as parenting violations. The Other Parent sucks.
So what happens when the Other Parent is your spouse?
Despite my best efforts, my son is turning me into a wuss.
My wife likes to “joke” (I use quotes because she’s never laughing when she says it and I’m pretty sure it tears her up inside) that I am a robot, or that I have no heart, because I never cry at commercials or movies or TV shows.
I like to think it’s because I’m not shallow and because my father raised me to believe that showing emotion was a sign of weakness (little-known fact: my father was John Wayne).
But having a child seems to be reducing my stoicism in ways I’m not quite comfortable with. Like the Grinch (from that terrible Jim Carrey movie), I seem to be beginning to care about people. Particularly little people (I don’t mean the Roloffs, though they are delightful!). And I don’t truck with that.
Recent circumstances are forcing me to consider explaining some of life’s most difficult truths to my young son.
He is still a few months away from his second birthday, but some conversations just can’t wait. The world just moves too darn fast to take any chances.
It’s time I talk to him about “the birds and the bees.”
This weekend – this gorgeous, unseasonably hot weekend – MomandBuried and I took Detective Munch to the park. We couldn’t keep him cooped up on such beautiful days, right? Plus, on Sunday, there was a Food Truck Rally happening and I needed me some food.
Of course we weren’t the only ones with this idea. The park was teeming with people, many of them waiting in long lines to sample some Kimchi Tacos or Sicilian slices or gourmet ice cream sandwiches. We went for the tacos and they – and the accompanying nachos – were fantastic.
The other thing that happened in which I fell down on the parenting job and everyone thought I was an asshole? Not so fantastic.
I like to read advice columns. They are often hilarious, sometimes due to the strangeness of the issue, sometimes because of the obliviousness of the advice seeker. Judging by their questions, these people have no clue how to conduct themselves socially. It can be fun to laugh at them.
And sometimes the funniest part is the so-called expert’s response. The idea of someone being an expert in all of these far-reaching, wide-ranging problems from other people’s lives is flagrantly absurd, and it’s almost as entertaining to judge this self-proclaimed expert’s answers as it is to judge the questions. Just look at the nonsense in this column. It comes at you from both sides!
The whole advice racket is just too much fun to pass up, so today I’m announcing my intention to join in.
Ah, tantrums. Even the word sucks. But it’s got nothing on the experience.
When you have a toddler, they are impossible to avoid. But, rumor has it there are ways to defuse them.
If you’ve got the balls.
Every Spring, for the past two years, I have been faced with a crippling bout of allergies. I never really had them before, so their onset is a tad confusing. I’ve lived in NYC for more than four years now, in the same neighborhood, so as much as this Red Sox fan would love to, I can’t blame the Big Apple.
I’d like to blame the trees, but Marky Mark made that seem too ridiculous. I’d also like to blame The Trees, but my days of listening to Rush were long gone well before the allergies set in.
So after a brief, slightly ill-considered, largely well-inebriated period of elimination, I’ve come to a startling conclusion: I’m allergic to my son.
Back when I was single, or even married without a kid, planning things wasn’t necessary. I’d get an impromptu phone call from a friend and just say “sure, I’ll be right there. Then I’d actually be right there, and we’d spend the next 11 hours sitting at a bar.
Nowadays if I don’t have something on the books at least a week in advance, I can’t even answer that phone call. That’s how slow things move when you have a kid.
Time itself flies, as we’ve discussed in the past, but everything you do seems to take forever.
Just getting yourself and your kid out of the house takes an eternity. As a parent, the concept of “spur of the moment” ceases to exist.
