I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Until you’re a parent (or a sports fan), it might be hard to understand how you can love something with all of your heart while, at the exact same time, it drives you so crazy you want to run away and live in a log cabin.
Kids have an infinite capacity for inspiring both your awe and your annoyance. Based on my son’s recent behavior and burgeoning intellectual development, five-year-olds are right smack in the sweet spot.
I don’t really understand why some parents dress their tiny children as monsters for Halloween.
Aren’t they terrifying enough already?
We ration our son’s screen time.
At this point, he only plays a handful of tablet games, so “screen time” is still mostly “TV watching time,” and we try to limit it. If he’s going to become a couch potato, it’s at least going to be when he’s old enough to watch legitimate programming. There’s no need to binge watch “Dinotrux”.
Of course, sometimes we need him to watch something, just to get him out of our hair. And one of the joys of TV in 2015 is the ability to stream shows whenever we want. We’re not slaves to the programming schedule. But we are slaves to our kid.
So if we need to get something done, we’ll throw on Netflix and let him go to town. (But not “The Town.” He’s too young for that much Affleck.)
Read more about Counter Programming …
If you follow my social accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), you may remember a photo shoot my son and I did with Dove Men+ Care back in February. We had a lot of fun that day, and despite the fact that in one of the photos I’m pretending to play a guitar that I wouldn’t be able to play even if it were actually plugged in, I’m not even being sarcastic!
How could I be, when Detective Munch looked so amazing in the resulting photos? We’re talking peak Andrew McCarthy, in the St. Elmo’s Pretty Mannequin at Bernie’s era.
I left that shoot thinking it might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and then they sent me a package of hair products. Ouch! Don’t they know the new baby stress is making me lose my hair?
Read more about Brand Awareness …
Over the weekend, I finally showed my son Return of the Jedi! What a tremendous father/son bonding experience it… almost kind of was.
He enjoyed it, I think. Mostly. The parts he paid attention to, at least.
Watching a movie with a five-year-old is not all it’s cracked up to be. Even one they’ve been begging to see for months. But that’s my fault.
His overconfidence was his weakness. My faith in his attention span was mine.
Read more about The Dark Side of Watching Movies with Kids …