I love my kids, I just hate parenting
My name is Dad and Buried, and I’m a No-aholic.
I tell Detective Munch “no” too much, I say “stop” too much, and I scold him too much, and I bark at him too much. Basically, I’m one big buzzkill for a normal five-year-old kid with energy to burn and a small space in which to burn it.
It’s no wonder he prefers Mom and Buried.
There comes a time in every parent’s life when they realize they have to sacrifice their dreams to help their children achieve theirs. If you’re lucky, your dreams overlap.
I never imagined such luck was in store for me, and then I learned about an amazing new gig. It’s kind of my dream job.
Now all I have to do is force my son to dream it too.
Like many parenting bloggers, I use nicknames when I write about my kids.
I employ these nicknames in a half-hearted attempt to protect the privacy of children that I already wholeheartedly exploit every single day. (And it would be even more wholehearted if someone would actually pay me to exploit them! My door is always open.
As you probably already know, when writing about them online, I refer to my five-year-old (he’ll be six in two weeks!) as Detective Munch and I refer to my baby as The Hammer. I get asked about the origins of those names fairly frequently, but I don’t think I’ve ever explained them (on my blog). So if you’re curious, today’s your lucky day.
But there’s a catch. I need your help!
As you may know, my son has a bad tree nut allergy. This means we need an epipen, and epipens recently increased in price by something like 400 percent. Even that scumbag Martin Shkreli is appalled. (That’s not even a joke; he really is.) The one time my son required the use of his epipen, we hesitated, unsure if it was necessary, and didn’t use it. He’s okay, but it was scary. (Turns out we should have used it, and we’d dodged a bullet.)
His allergy is scary. Needing an epipen is scary. The fact that we’ll probably be faced with that exact scenario again some day is scary. But what else is new? Everything about parenting is scary.
I’m always scared, and I bet you are too.
When I found out I was going to be a dad, I had a lot of plans.
Not “this will never happen” stuff or “I’m going to do things the right way! stuff – I knew even before he was born that my pre-parent ideas were unlikely to stand up to reality. But I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted to teach my son, especially when it comes to pop culture stuff I planned to pass down.
Some of them are still pending – I still can’t wait to show my kids The Karate Kid and introduce them to “The Wire” when they’re older – but a few of them have taken hold with Detective Munch already, particularly Star Wars, superheroes, and The Beatles.
So while I appreciate Netflix’s cool new show, I’m happy to say I beat “Beat Bugs” to the punch!