I love animals. I love dogs and cats, because I’m not one of those psychos who thinks you can only appreciate one of the two and have to draw a line in the sand.

But I am not a fan of cat-sized dogs. When I get a dog (it’s gonna happen, honey!), I want a real dog. I’ve never seen the point of having one of those teacup things that you can carry around in your bag.

Of course, having lived with a toddler for the past year, I’m starting to see the point.

I don’t think toddlers and dogs are the same thing. No one could possibly think that. For one thing, dogs have fur. For another, dogs can be trained. They’ll actually listen to commands. You can use a leash without getting strange looks and, as mentioned above, your wife can even carry certain kinds of dogs in her purse. You can’t do that with toddlers.

But sometimes I wish you could.

This weekend, Mom and Buried and I visited a condo complex that was holding a “Margaritaville” party around the communal pool, in order to try and attract potential buyers. We just wanted to relax, ignore the insipid Jimmy Buffett cover band, and drink some free booze.

Unfortunately, we brought our two-year-old. Relaxation was not in the cards. Taking a toddler to a party or a pool or a beach or a bar or a friend’s house or a crack house is the least fun thing ever.

Imagine going to a party and having to carry around a bowling ball the entire time. Carrying something so heavy and unwieldy would make it really hard to relax and hold a drink or eat some food, right? Now imagine that the bowling ball can walk and talk and run and yell and trip and fall and break things and eat things and throw up and pee itself and drown.

Sounds like a blast, right?

It doesn’t have to be horrible. In fact, my wife keeps telling me that if I’d just relax and give him a little more leeway, Detective Munch would be totally fine. Sue me, I get a bit stressed in certain public situations when we’re around strangers and my kid is being hyper and there’s an open pool nearby. But I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to my son, I just love him so mu– GET AWAY FROM THE POOL YOU’RE GONNA FALL IN GODDAMMIT HOLD MY DRINK I’M GOING TO GET THE IDIOT.

It’s enough to make you want to skip right to the teen years.

I’m not crazy. I know teenagers come with their own unique sets of problems and complications. But at least by the time your kids are thirteen, they’ve acquired a certain level of independence. And at least the mistakes they’ll inevitably make aren’t always going to be mistakes that your supervision could have prevented.

The toddler years occupy a strange middle ground between completely helpless baby and actual independent adult. The scary thing is, most of your years as a parent are spent managing that middle ground, especially since, these days, it doesn’t seem to end until your kid hits thirty. You spend so much time waiting for them to get older – while simultaneously being sad about it – and yet when they do, their independence scares you. Every incremental little bit of it.

With toddlers, they are learning to be independent but they have a long way to go. And while it’s necessary to let them explore their limits, there are no excuses when your two- or three- or four-year-old gets hurt. In almost every case, they don’t know any better. They aren’t making educated choices. They’re essentially just saying “why not?” and doing something idiotic. Since they aren’t yet equipped to do it, it’s your responsibility to protect them from themselves. That’s what’s so exhausting and stressful.

So on one hand, my wife is right: I need to relax and let him spread his wings a bit and let him stumble and fall a little. But I also want to make sure he makes it to the part of his life when I can blame his mistakes on him, and him alone. It will still be nerve-wracking, but at least I won’t be carrying a bowling ball around anymore.

I’ll just be trailing after it, from a safe distance, hoping it stays out of the gutter.

The post The World’s Most Stressful Accessory appeared first on Dad and Buried.

A few weeks back, after abandoning potty training due to the onset of trauma, Mom and Buried and I took a quick run to Target.

While there, we decided to buy some off-brand diapers to get us through the next few weeks, enough time for Detective Munch to emerge from his PTSD (Potty Traumatic Stress Disorder) and get back on the potty train.

The cheapo diapers turned out to not be the best idea, as they were cheapo for a reason: they leaked worse than Julian Assange.

Which got me thinking. Maybe I shouldn’t shortchange my son.

I’ve written about trying not to spoil my son, but there’s a flipside to that coin: it doesn’t always pay to deprive him either.

I’m not one of those parents who thinks his kid is entitled to the best of everything. Not only is the entire idea of entitlement a load of bullshit, we also can’t afford the best of everything. So, like most parents, we occasionally cut corners.

Unfortunately, it’s becoming clear that the corners that are best cut are our corners, not our kid’s corners (and certainly not The Wire‘s corners because where’s Wallace at am I right?) While I’m perfectly fine with wearing off-brand diapers (Mom and Buried is into the baby fetish thing just kidding everyone sorry honey!), or eating questionable gas station sandwiches or even Food Lion’s weird brand of cheese puffs, partially because I can make that decision for myself and also because I am better equipped to deal with violent diarrhea, it’s probably not the best idea to shortchange your kid when it comes to certain things.

Especially when he gets violent diarrhea from his off-brand cheese puffs while wearing his off-brand diapers. That’s no fun for anybody (Mom and Buried).

Not everything that’s a little cheaper is necessarily of bad quality, but there are some areas where skimping probably doesn’t pay.

So while our son won’t grow up with the best of everything in an effort to ensure he doesn’t grow up to be as spoiled as the milk in our fridge (off-brand), he will grow up with the best of some things. Or, as best as we can get him without unduly limiting our enjoyment of our lives.

Which means caving, instead of scrimping, on the following five categories:

• Medicine – It’s tempting to use herbal remedies (marijuana) or prayers (nothing) to cure your own maladies, but it’s probably a good idea to have some actual medicine on hand in case your child gets a fever. I’m looking at you, Christian Scientists! If there’s one thing for which I’m happy to pay top dollar, it’s my son’s health care. I’m just glad rectal thermometers are cheap.
• Education – If he wants a top education, my son will need to pay his own way (I’m not paying through the nose for a “name” school when all he really needs to do to succeed is become friends with the people who go to them). But I will chip in to make sure he doesn’t have to go to the University of Phoenix, because if Twitter has taught me anything it’s that my computer is a liar.



• Clothing – see the aforementioned diaper-leakage story. From now on, we’re not taking that chance. High-end diapers all the way (well, as high end as they sell at Target, because why would I pay a fortune for a shit cocoon?).
• Food – the problem with fast food is that, while it’s disgusting and terrible for you, it’s super cheap. Which makes it both irresistible to college students and a necessity for many families. Personally I’d rather my kid starve than eat Taco Bell. So it’s nothing but high-end Chipotle for him. And some organic veggies from Trader Joe’s. BECAUSE WE CARE.
• Childcare – No need to compromise here: PBS is totally free. Regardless of what their terrible telethons want to make you believe!

It’s a fine line, providing your child with the things he needs to grow up happy and healthy without giving him so much that he grows up horrible and hateful. Hopefully, by spending big bucks on the aforementioned categories but otherwise spending next-to-nothing on his mooching ass, he’ll turn out okay.

And maybe I’ll still have a little something leftover for me to spend on my wife. God knows I never get anything for myself.

The post Scrimping and Caving appeared first on Dad and Buried.

I don’t consider myself the superstitious type. I occasionally knock some wood and usually try to say “rabbit rabbit” at the start of every month, but that’s about it.

Of course, that was before I became a dad.

These days I might as well be Shirley Maclaine for all the bullshit I find myself believing. There’s just NO WAY a filthy anarchist monkey like Curious George gets invited to that many parties, but I just keep playing along.

I’m not talking about the bullshit that the so-called “parenting experts” spew. My skepticism of that racket is well-known around these parts. I’m talking about other kinds of bullshit. The kind that doesn’t require any expertise to promote, self-professed or otherwise; it merely requires some suckers.

Of which I am apparently one.

Becoming a parent forces you to learn a ton of brand new information, to pay attention to loads of stuff you had no reason to before, and to worry about a lot of junk you’d never given a thought to in the past. Which is fine, and might even be somewhat advisable when you’re a new parent (it’s better to be safe than sorry, right?), so long as those things are real and actually exist.

A few months ago, I procured a pair of boxer shorts that are decorated with a skull-and-crossbones print. (Buy them at your own risk.) They came in a pack of three, and while I have no problem wearing the other two (which feature shamrocks and sailboats, respectively), I can’t bring myself to wear the pirate print on days when I know I’ll be with my son. Which is every single day.

As a result, I have this perfectly fine pair of boxers that I’m too scared to wear out of the house because WHAT IF Target is selling voodoo underwear? Never mind that I’ve worn the shamrock boxers countless times and STILL haven’t found a job or stumbled across so much as a double-rainbow, let alone a pot of gold.

There’s only one person to blame for my new superstitiousness, and it’s not whoever wrote the fortune cookie that told me “Everyone agrees you’re the best!”, despite its uncanny accuracy. It’s my son.

Detective Munch has already changed my life, my outlook, my Netflix queue and even, in some ways, my identity. He’s long been causing a softening of my previously hardboiled persona and now, suddenly, I’m gonna start falling prey to nonsense like pet psychics and lucky charms just because I have such a strong desire to protect him?

I know love makes you crazy, but I thought that was mostly in regards to getting excessively jealous or spending way too much money buying the childhood toy she’d always wanted off eBay just so she’d have sex with you have a good Christmas. I didn’t know it meant getting stupid and gullible and being afraid of underwear.

I’ve heard of “pregnancy brain” (nice excuse, ladies) but not “Daddy Dumbdown.” On top of losing my edge, am I going to start losing my mind as well?

I hope not. Maybe it’s because I’m a Virgo, but I’ve never believed in horoscopes and I’m not about to start. Becoming responsible for a tiny human life is no reason to abandon one’s common sense.

That said, I’m also not about to tempt fate (I don’t believe in fate) by wearing death-marked boxer shorts all around town. In fact, I’ve decided to only wear them when I’m in bed; if anything dies, it should just be my sperm.

The post Big Sad Voodoo Daddy appeared first on Dad and Buried.

On Twitter, it is possible to create lists into which you can group and categorize the people you follow. As I’ve grown my presence there, I’ve seen myself added to more and more lists (you get notified when it happens).

Yesterday, I was added to one that was simply called “parents.”

And it made me a little sad.

Being a parent doesn’t make me sad. It makes me tired and frustrated and often stressed and sometimes bored and sporadically grossed out and right now covered in food, but it doesn’t make me sad. What makes me sad is that my identity can be so easily reduced to “parent.”

It’s not Twitter’s fault. If you follow me there, you know that joking about the pitfalls of parenthood is a large part of my shtick, and I can’t blame the person who added me to her “Parents” list (though would it have killed her to title it “DILFs” or something?). But if you’ve been reading my blog, you probably know that one of the reasons I started writing it – and the meaning behind its sarcastic title – was to fight against the “dad” part of me from becoming the whole me.

I’m starting to worry that I’m losing that fight.

The worry is less that other people might define me by my dad-dom and more that, as a stay-at-home dad without much else to occupy my time, I’ll start to think of myself that way. Obviously, being a dad is not a bad thing. I love it, and it hasn’t changed who I am inside, not really; but it has begun to obscure (maybe even “bury”?) some other parts of me. And that’s no good.

I admit that when I started this blog, determined to hang onto as much of my pre-parent life and my pre-dad personality, I wasn’t totally aware of what I was getting into. I’d seen my friends lives become consumed by their children, their personalities neutered by by nesting, and their social lives suddenly limited to the point of nonexistence and I recognized a lifestyle I wanted to avoid. Mom and Buried and I had no illusions about how big of a change having a kid would be, but we may have been a tad ambushed by how easy it could be to succumb to the sweeter side of parenting.

I knew I’d love my kid, but didn’t know I’d love him so much that I’d barely think twice about digging through a dirty diaper to retrieve the penny he’d swallowed. I knew I’d like spending time with him, but I didn’t know that – due to a combination of enjoying that time and being exhausted by it – I’d often be happy to just stay in and hang out with him. I knew my life would be dominated by my son, but I didn’t know I’d enjoy it so much.

Of course, just because I enjoy parenting more than I might have expected doesn’t mean there aren’t negative side effects. Becoming a parent is like joining a cult: on the inside everything seems perfect and right but step outside and everyone thinks you’re a deluded weirdo whose personality has been erased and replaced by that of a children-obsessed robot.

It can become almost a little too easy to lose yourself to your new role, due to both your time and your thoughts being overwhelmed by kid-related responsibilities. Every decision starts getting put through the Parenting Prism, even some that don’t need to be (“I wonder if Detective Munch would like this beer?”), and that’s when your perspective, and often your personality, can get so clouded that some of your old friends no longer recognize you. It takes real self-awareness to maintain a balance between your parent-self and your other-self.

Now, thanks largely to the increased workload that comes with having a toddler (as opposed to a baby) and partially thanks to my inclusion on some random person’s list of parents who tweet, I’m really starting to realize that hanging onto my old life isn’t something I can just pay lip-service to; it takes actual effort. Effort to find babysitters you trust; effort to plan and pull yourself together for a date night; effort to drink enough beers to actually get drunk before passing out from exhaustion; effort to tweet about something besides my kid.

Not helping my identity crisis is the aforementioned fact that I’m a stay-at-home dad (HIRE ME!) in a new city without a lot of friends or colleagues with whom to interact on a daily basis. I’m at home with my son every day. If I spent most of my day away at a job, I guarantee you my Twitter feed would be a little more multi-dimensional (i.e., I’d probably bitch about my boss; I’d probably bitch about my coworkers; and I’d probably bitch about missing my kid) and my life might have a little more balance.

Having this outlet, where I can write about my feelings in the voice of someone who is not brainwashed (even while my non-blog self occasionally feels that way), has helped me immeasurably. Being a dad is a big part of who I am – maybe an even bigger part than I anticipated – but it is not the whole of me. I’ve been trying to use this blog to both illuminate my struggle for that balance and to facilitate it, and now, as my son gets older and demands even more of my time and energy, I might have to try a little harder.

I love it when my son calls me Daddy. I would just prefer everyone else call me by my actual name.

The post Iden-daddy Crisis appeared first on Dad and Buried.

I wrote the post I’ve resurrected below one year ago.

It’s a charming little trifle about my son’s increasingly bad behavior. Little did I know that what I thought, last May, was the onset of the terrible twos – though I even admit in the post that I might be a tad premature in that assessment – was nothing but a tiny preview of the hell to come, and of the abuse Mom and Buried and I were yet to face.

Now, a year later and a good three months into the real terrible deal, this post would probably make me laugh if I weren’t usually already crying.

I thought things were bad when I wrote this week’s Zombie Post, and today things are infinitely worse. And there’s no end in sight. Parenting FTW!

Original Post – Parent Abuse: Parenting’s Dirty Little Secret

The post Zombie Post: Little Did I Know appeared first on Dad and Buried.

Despite the fact that I could quote Cape Fear ALL DAY LONG and just pretend I’m having a conversation with my toddler –

“I can out-learn you. I can out-read you. I can out-think you. I can out-philosophize you. And I’m gonna outlast you! ”

– that’s not what the title of this post refers to.

This post is about Other Parents and the way they use their experiences to scare you.

I’ve complained about people without kids giving me advice about how to raise mine. And I’ve complained about parents who judge parents. But I haven’t yet complained about parents who use their negative experiences as a bludgeon.

Everybody knows parenting is hard. Some parents have more help than others and some children are more easygoing than others, but regardless of the specifics, every parent faces challenges. It’s the nature of the gig.

I have no doubt in my mind that despite how difficult my kid has been for the past three-plus months and despite all of my bitching about his terrible twos, Mom and Buried and I have had it easier than a lot of other parents out there. That doesn’t mean we’ve had it easy; just easier than parents with more than one kid, or than single parents, or than the parents of these kids. I’m also positive that we’ve had it harder than parents with nannies, or than parents with free babysitting or than parents who own a private jet. On the Objective Scale of Parenting Difficulty, we probably fall somewhere near the middle.

Of course, there is no objective scale of parenting difficulty. Because it’s all relative.

One of the ways your life changes when you become a parent is that you suddenly start mingling with and talking to a lot of other parents. It just happens, by virtue of the new landscape you have wandered into and a need to find like-minded people with whom to share, commiserate and bitch. You run into them at daycare, at doctor’s offices, at the playground and they all have kids at varying stages (newborn, toddler, tween, teen, living in their basement, etc.) and they all have advice or anecdotes or aspirin to offer.

God knows we do, even after less than three years.

But when Mom and Buried and I encounter younger parents, or new parents, or impending parents, we are usually very careful to avoid acting like our experiences are some kind of standard. And the one thing we never do? Warn them.

“Wait until he turns three!”
“Wait until he turns seven!”
“Wait until he turns thirteen!”

What is the point of such nonsense? We already have the kid; are you trying to make us trade him in?

The way I see it, if you’re threatening other parents with the struggles that are yet to come – and you’re not actually offering a solution or a tip beyond BE AFRAID! – you’re doing it for one of these reasons:

1) You’re just joking but don’t realize its obnoxious.
2) You think you’re being helpful by “preparing” them for something that’s utterly impossible to prepare for (everyone knows about the terrible twos; it doesn’t make it any easier to weather them).
3) You’re bragging about having made it through (like having a terrible kid is a badge of honor).
4) You’re pissed about your own experiences and spitefully want to make sure no one else has it any easier.

Unless you have something constructive to add, you’re clearly saying it for your own benefit. And even if you’re right, you’re just being a dick. Venting has its place (www.dadandburied.com), but this kind of talk amounts to little more than fear-mongering; most of us get quite enough of that from the nightly news.

I don’t want to know how bad things might get as my son gets older; I already have enough fears and anxieties in that department. I’d rather you keep your mouth shut, or maybe express a little empathy (“I know exactly how you feel; it was a tough time for us too.”), or maybe even lie to me and give me some hope (“I’m sorry it’s been so tough for you, but at least it can’t get much worse!”).

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T TELL ME HOW MUCH WORSE IT CAN GET.

I’ve got my own experiment in patience, frustration and “how much can I drink before it becomes a problem” sleeping in the room next to mine. The fact that right now he’s not actually sleeping and is instead screaming about gummy snacks is all the warning I need.

The post You Threatenin’ Me? appeared first on Dad and Buried.

The other day, I was awakened by my son yelling from his crib. This is not unusual. I would say this happens every day. Every. Single. Day. But this day was a little bit different. Because instead of merely calling for mommy or daddy, he was screaming, “I got poop in my butt!”

That doesn’t happen every day, neither the yelling of it nor the reality of it. People don’t normally shit in their sleep, not even little kids. So it was a bit strange that he had.

Except he hadn’t: he was lying.

And so it begins.

Everyone lies. A month ago I wrote about the lies I myself use on my son. And now he’s using lies on me.

I’m hesitant to blame this development on myself or Mom and Buried; he certainly doesn’t know when I’m not telling him the truth or not, so he hasn’t learned lying from me.

Maybe they’re teaching deception at preschool, but that’s unlikely; he came home singing “Jesus Loves Me” the other day (it’s not a lie if they believe it). Besides, learning to lie seems to be a normal part of human development. We learn to lie before we learn the value of honesty, before we know that lying is bad. So it seems that he picked this new habit up all by himself.

There have been other lies, mostly to do with whether or not Mommy said he could watch TV or Daddy said he could have his gummy snacks, but until recently it was easy to give him the benefit of the doubt and write those off to confusion and general stupidity. Not anymore.

The poop lie is downright sophisticated. Somewhere along the line, he figured out that changing his butt after he went to the bathroom was quite the priority for us. Maybe it was the time he pooped all over himself in his crib and we went into full-on quarantine mode. Maybe it’s how stressed out we are about potty training. We’ll never really know what clued him in to the power of poop, but he’s using it against us to get what he wants. Which, in this case, is us awake and him out of his crib.

And it’s effective! After all, only a monster would let their kid sit in a pouch of his own shit for an extended period of time – especially first thing in the morning, before he’s even had a chance to annoy us so much that he deserves to. You can’t really blame us for falling for it. So, unlike the typical morning, when I’d lay there half-asleep as he serenades the two of us with “open the door please!” and “I wan go udder woom!”, I woke up with a start and shot out of bed to clean his nether regions ASAP. Seriously, I was more awake that morning than I’d been in weeks. Shit’s better than coffee! I really mean that: shit is better than coffee.

Of course, there was nothing to clean. But I was awake, and he was in the other room, happy as a deceptive little clam. But now we’re on the lookout. We’re aware that he is aware, and we’re anticipating more bullshit.

We will try to nip it in the bud and explain why lying is wrong and honesty is right and maybe it will buy us some time. But there’s no way around it: he will lie again. And again. Best case scenario, he grows up lying less than most kids, and feels guilty when he does, and he’s terrible at it.

Unfortunately, if this first incident is anything to go by, he won’t be terrible. He will be great. And when he’s wielding this weapon as a teen, our lives will be pretty shitty as a result.

The post The Dishonest Toddler appeared first on Dad and Buried.

As you may or may not know, I tweet a lot. Most of my tweets are at my son’s expense, some are at my expense, and a handful are at my wife’s expense, much to her chagrin. Some are true, some are pure fiction, and some – perhaps most – are true-ish.

Like this one, which is among my most retweeted:

“The fact that I just angrily yelled ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ at my two-year-old is a pretty clear indication that he definitely is.”

I don’t believe I’ve ever yelled that at my son; at least not out loud. But it’s 100% true, just the same.

Among the many orders my son gives me throughout the day are:

“Don’t look at me!”

“Don’t say hi to me!”

“Go get my milk!”

“Go over there!”

“Don’t talk to Mommy!”

Sometimes they are accompanied by his hands on my legs, pushing me in the direction he wants me to go. Sometimes they are accompanied hy his hands on my head, turning it in the direction he wants me to look.

The balls on this guy! Sometimes parenting a two-year-old is like being abused by a vicious warden.

The last person to boss me around like this was my wife earlier today and last night and yesterday and the day before that and last week and last month and every day last year.

Nobody likes being bossed around, particularly by a person you actually created and who you can hold over your head with one arm. I mean, physically, there’s no way this kid should be getting away with this stuff. Emotionally, he’s a terrorist, and legally, I have little recourse. There are no vacations from being a parent, no raises for a job well done, and the only promotion comes in thirty years when you maybe get a grandkid or two. They don’t even let you spank a kid these days!

From what I understand, toddlers – particularly two-year-olds – often tend to be a bit bossy. From what I understand, he’s just testing his boundaries, and, unwittingly, testing our patience. From what I understand, I wish I’d actually understood all of this before I had a kid! I knew about the terrible twos, I just didn’t know how colorful the tapestry of shitty behavior could be.

It’s not all bad. Occasionally when my son barks orders at me or Mom and Buried, it makes us laugh. It’s cute! A pint-sized, curly-headed moppet yelling at my wife to stop talking? I can get behind that one! But it gets old fast, as does most of his behavior of late, and as a parent I’ve gone from trying to use his outbursts as “teaching moments” to simply biting my tongue and hoping that he will grow out of it sooner rather than later.

Nobody wants to raise a bossy, selfish kid. Especially when you see him telling other kids at the playground to stay off of his slide. We wonder sometimes if the fact that he’s an only child – the star of the family, without an understudy waiting in the wings to steal his lines – makes it harder to nip this behavior in the bud. But having another child just to stop the older one from being a pain in the ass seems like the worst – and most expensive – kind of logic, so he may stay that way.

I’m sure there are rules somewhere out there; guidelines for how to solve this problem without needing to spawn another soon-to-be CEO. But I don’t buy most of that junk. So we’re just gonna weather this storm – storm 342 in approximately 800,000 – attempting to hold our tempers and restrain ourselves from going off on our little baby boss man, much as we often must do when dealing with our actual bosses.

Unfortunately, this is one job we’re not able to quit. But if this keeps up I may ask for a transfer.

The post Meet the New Boss appeared first on Dad and Buried.

This post isn’t about uplift, as I have none to offer. It’s not about expertise, as I’m no expert. I’m merely a normal parent, a relatively new one at that, and it’s at times like this that I most feel the weight of that responsibility.

I have a two-year-old son. He isn’t yet able to comprehend an event like yesterday’s bombings, let alone formulate questions about it, but seeing the footage would undoubtedly scare him (especially since he’s too young to understand whatever explanation we might offer for the event). Which makes watching the news nearly impossible.

As with most everything else, a complicated situation is complicated even further by my responsibilities as a father.

I love Boston. I attended Boston College and lingered in the city for another decade after graduation, in Brookline, Southie and the South End – not more than a ten-minute walk from where the bombs exploded. It’s a great town, home to many close friends and the setting of some of my favorite memories, a handful of which were actually made on Marathon Mondays, watching the race from the Pizzeria Uno on Boylston Street – shocking close to the finish line – keeping track of the Red Sox game while cheering on the runners. It’s truly a shame that this tragedy will now be associated with what has always been one of the best days of Spring in New England.

Even without a personal connection, tragedies like this used to be easier – somehow – before I had a child.

Last week I wrote a jokey post about all the new stuff I’ve become afraid of now that I have a child to take care of. Jokey is my default mode; I don’t go for the sentimental stuff and I won’t do that here. But Boston was my home for a long time and I’m still very much connected to it, and as soon as I learned of what had happened, I wanted to know more. Unfortunately, my son made that difficult.

Our only TV is in the living room, which doubles as my son’s playroom much of the time. Watching the news would mean putting potentially graphic, definitely disturbing imagery right in his line of sight. It’s not imagery he would necessarily understand, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have an impact. My wife and I do our best to prevent him from seeing violent programs as much as possible, fictionalized or not; it’s not the kind of thing he needs to see at his age, even as it gets harder and harder to prevent.

We’re not naive; we know it’s impossible to avoid and that even without TV and the rest of pop culture, violence always finds a way to invade everyone’s lives, one way or another. But we feel it’s our role as parents to shield him from the darker aspects of human nature as long as possible.

Still, I wanted to know. I wanted to see where the explosions occurred, I wanted to know what had happened, I wanted to be sure my friends – and their friends – were okay. I wanted to know how close it was to that Pizzeria Uno. But the story broke late afternoon, on a day when my son decided not to take his customary nap and demanded, as always, to be entertained. So I was forced to keep the TV off, and wait until I could sneak away from helping build a LEGO bridge and glance at my iPhone.

It was fine; on a day like that, a thousand miles away, it was nothing. And it was worth it to keep my son as blissfully ignorant as possible for as long as possible. But it made me think – for the thousandth time, in the thousandth different way, how difficult – impossible, really – it is to protect our kids.

I’ve seen articles and blog posts and news pieces and interviews on morning talk shows, all detailing how to talk to your kids about tragedies. But my son is two. We won’t be talking to him about what happened yesterday. We’ll be keeping the TV off altogether. And if he does catch a glimpse of something or notice Mommy and Daddy are upset, we’ll simply distract him with an episode of “Yo Gabba Gabba!” or give him a cookie. We’re not at the point where we need to have a discussion. Not yet.

But we’re getting there. Unfortunately, we’ll have plenty of other terrible events like this to deal with when he’s older and is aware of the world and wants to know – deserves to know – in a real, meaningful way, exactly what happened and why. Eventually he’ll be able to find all the information he needs with or without our help, so we’ll need to figure out the best way to give that to him.

The scariest part? Despite this awareness, despite knowing I’ll soon be faced with the need to comfort my son in the aftermath of some future catastrophe, despite my acceptance of this responsibility, I’ll be no closer to answers then than I am today.

Some things simply can’t be explained.

The post The Devastation Will Not Be Televised appeared first on Dad and Buried.

When I was a kid, my biggest fear was being kidnapped. I mean, who wouldn’t want this little heartthrob cooling up their house?

As I grew up and that terrifying two-part episode of Diff’rent Strokes faded from my memory, the whole kidnapping fear evaporated. Other anxieties emerged and receded through the years until I became quite fearless… provided I’d had ten beers and you agreed to no punches to the face or groin.

Then I had a kid. And I became fearmore.

Like a lot of people, my wife has been freaking out about the whole North Korea situation lately, but not because she is worried for herself. She’s worried for our son. Which is one of the many negative side effects of having a child. You suddenly become aware of innumerable threats. It’s like smoking really strong weed except instead of getting high and laughing, you just get ultra-paranoid.

Suddenly stuff I’d never worried about, or had long since stopped worrying about, was causing me anxiety. And not just because I recently re-watched “Twin Peaks” (Bob is the scariest fictional character of all time).

Here is a (far-from-complete) list of stuff that – now that I have a child’s welfare and future to consider – has been harshing my buzz lately:

• Bees
• Dogs
• Aging
• Eggs
• Peanut butter
• Nuts
• North Korea
• The Shakeheads in Jacob’s Ladder
• Knives
• Penn State
• Guns
• Guns
• Guns
• Guns
• Juggalos
• Snakes
• Cars
• Peer Pressure
• Steubenville
• Accidental Racism
• Concrete
• Football
• Chat Roulette
• Guns
• Guns
• Guns
• Guns
• Disease
• Global Warming
• Heights
• “The Heights”
• Al-Qaeda
• Skrillex
• Religion
• Terrorism
• Gay People Getting Married
• Guns
• Guns
• Guns
• Guns
• Republicans
• Spiders
• The Bear Proposing (?) in The Shining
• Mosquitoes
• Bullies
• SkyNet
• Courtney Cox’s Face
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Money
• Concussions
• Jillian Michaels
• Aspartame
• Jellyfish
• Video games
• Go-gurt
• Rick Santorum
• Santorum
• Guns
• Guns
• Guns
• Guns
• Dogs with Bees in Their Mouths so When They Bark They Shoot Bees at You

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