I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Stumbled across this Australian Public Service Announcement, and it reminded me of the Mirror Mirror post a few weeks ago. It basically shows what I told. Apparently the ad was banned, which is a shame, because I think it’s pretty effective. How about you?
My son is developing at an incredible rate.
He’s getting taller, his hair is getting longer, his vocabulary is increasing. But even more impressively, he’s already picking up skills most of us don’t use until later in life. Skills like arguing, sarcasm, and, most frustratingly, negotiation.
At the young age of not-even-three, my innocent child is becoming a slick little deal-maker. It’s enough to make me sick proud.
Do your kids ever surprise you by knowing something you haven’t taught them? Something you wish they didn’t know?
The other day, while we were driving home from somewhere, my son started pointing at signs for various buildings and asking about them. “Is that where we get coffee?” “Is that where we get fries?” “Is that Target?” And he was right every time. It was simultaneously impressive and unsettling.
It’s amazing to watch my son’s mind expand, but it’s disconcerting when the logos of fast food restaurants and department stores are what’s filling it.
On Friday, I wrote about how children absorb and reflect their parents’ behavior, often shining a light on Mommy and Daddy’s worst tendencies.
Some of those tendencies are more problematic than others, especially when my son starts doing unconscious impressions of his parents in public. Sometimes it’s cute, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s just plain embarrassing.
Because Detective Munch does bad impressions of me, and I don’t mean bad in a “he can’t pull it off” kind of way. He’s a gifted mimic. It’s my behavior that’s the problem.
Children are mirrors.
When I concentrate really hard, I do this thing with my face where my features get scrunched up all tight. My wife blames this expression for my increasing wrinkles and constantly attempts to stop me from doing it (despite the fact that I can still pass for 18!) I see her point, and I’d love to stop creating crow’s feet. But it’s impossible; it’s genetic.
I’ve seen my father make the same face, for the same reasons, and now I’m waiting to see it on Detective Munch’s chubby little visage. He already looks a lot like me, and it’s so gratifying to see him take on some of my characteristics that I’m okay with adding the wrinkle-maker to that collection.
Unfortunately, it has yet to happen. But I have seen him reflect back aspects of myself that are not quite as amusing.