I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Today’s Wordless Wednesday (with some words) revolves around my son’s current obsession: superheroes.
He’s constantly pretending to be one and frequently enlists me in exciting battles, during which he’s usually wearing a costume and always jumping on my private parts.
While I may occasionally sport a mask or two during these games, he almost always wears a cape.
He has a lot of capes.
My son is out to get me. And I’m not just talking about the time he ordered a Big Mac at KFC.
As a kid, you have a tendency to see the adults in your life as the bad guys, especially when you’re a teenager. When you become a parent, it’s obvious that it’s the children that are the problem; dastardly little beasts who materialize in the middle of your already-in-progress life and proceed to wreak havoc.
Maybe one day my son will write a blog about how I’m the Big Bad in his life, but in my version of the story, I’m the superhero and he’s my nemesis.
In fact, there are a few famous villains from the pop culture rogues gallery that my kid has lately been bringing to mind.
Every time a new Superman movie comes out – admittedly, not very often – I get very excited.
I worship Superman. I was super-psyched for Superman Returns. Superman Returns is not good. Too somber, too beholden to the Donner flicks, too much Superboy.
Too much boring.
Hopefully this new one won’t be. Let’s take a look at the new trailer.
“Little kids are sponges.”
You hear it all the time, and it’s true. My son’s vocabulary increases every day, and most of what he’s learning he gets right from Mom and Dad, such as his first “curse” word, the relatively innocuous “dammit!” Needless to say, we’ve had to become a lot more careful about the words we use. It’s a bit of a pain.
But there’s a flip side to that coin. Sure, he parrots a lot of stuff we don’t even realize we’ve said around him, or don’t necessarily want him to be saying, but we can also train him to provide some entertainment. For example…
My kid is a babbler. Always has been. Since the day he was born he’s been making noises with his mouth.
At the start there wasn’t much substance to the things he was “saying” – they were the typical ga-gas and wah-wahs and MMMBop sounds that all babies make. But, striver that he is, he has never rested; in his ongoing quest to master the English language, he makes great strides everyday.
Of course, as I said yesterday, children are stupid, and the strides our son has made are great only when compared to other people under two. They’re not all that impressive when compared with, say, Noam Chomsky.
At a year-and-a-half old, while his vocabulary has been growing exponentially, he hasn’t even reached the level of “darndest” yet.