I love my kids, I just hate parenting
In a lot of ways, kids make Halloween more fun. But, like everything else, they also make it much, much worse.
For example, last night, as part of our month of scary movies, instead of watching something legit like Let The Right One In (the original FTW!) or The Conjuring, we watched Hocus Pocus. (Which was much scarier, for totally unintentional reasons.)
Because parenting.
Kids are dumb. Everyone knows that!
It’s not their fault, at least not at first. Everyone is born a blank slate. Kids don’t know anything. It’s our job as parents to clue them in to all of it. Even the obvious stuff.
This isn’t news. Not a single one of us has ever met a baby who could hold a conversation worth a damn.
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.