I love my kids, I just hate parenting
I never thought I’d say this, but thank god for parenting! Sometimes, it can be a respite.
Regardless of where you stand on the Great Pumpkin President, these are some harrowing times. North Korea, neo-Nazis, Harvey Weinstein, geostorms (and also Geostorm). Things are fairly tumultuous.
We’re often told to not sweat the small stuff, but when the world serves as an enormous sauna, sometimes the small stuff is the only way to cool yourself down.
Kids are walking disasters.
This is nothing new. There’s nothing that they can’t/won’t/already have destroy(ed). Every parent already knows this. And we also know that it’s our job to protect them from themselves, as difficult as they can sometimes be, because we know better.
But just because we know better doesn’t always mean that we do better, which is why Mom and Buried and I keep insisting on having taco nights despite the fact that the aftermath looks like the front row of a Gallagher concert.
Mom and Buried can’t get enough of the seasons.
In winter, she’s all about snow angels and sledding and hot toddies. In summer she treats every sunny day like it’s her last one on earth, and when spring arrives she… mostly bitches about how terrible the weather is because spring is a hoax created by the Chinese to sell air conditioners!
But fall is the worst, because fall means foliage and pumpkin farms and apple-picking and other objectively boring and terrible things that get reclassified as “family traditions!” because without a little rationalizing, we’d all go insane.
I’ve been turning into my father for years now, probably since I was born, actually.
But nothing accelerates the transformation into your parents like becoming a parent yourself.
The best evidence that I’m becoming my dad, besides increasing back pain and deepening bags under my eyes, are the things I yell at my kids about. Like money.
Bored kids are the worst.
Kids hate being bored so much it makes them blind. Blind to the hundreds of toys staring them in the face, blind to the dozens of books within arms reach, blind to the open space and fresh air in the backyard.
They hate it so much it makes them deaf, too. Deaf to their parents reminders of all those toys and books. Deaf to their parents’ threats that if they don’t stop complaining about being bored, all those toys and books will be given to someone who will actually use them!
About the only thing it doesn’t make them is mute, because bored kids literally never stop telling you about it.