I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Today is my wedding anniversary.
This is a big year for Mom and Buried and me. Not necessarily because the eighth anniversary is a milestone, or that our eleventh year together is a milestone. No, it’s a big year because after surviving the newborn/baby/toddler gauntlet, we are about to re-enter the arena.
Something tells me that, come January, when we’re officially “married with children,” we’ll need to be more united than ever.
You know the made-up word “babymoon”?
I don’t like it. I don’t use it. I wish it didn’t exist.
By the way, this weekend, Mom and Buried and I are going on a babymoon.
The “dad bod” trend has been a boon to dads – and non-dads – everywhere. I was at the beach last week, and everywhere I looked, it was dad bod city.
Who can blame us? Men suddenly have validation for our laziness, and apparently there’s an entire subset of women who find our beer bellies attractive!
I admit that I have a dad bod of my own, but not on purpose. I go to the gym several times a week, and I try to eat healthy, give or take 100 beers a week. I don’t want a dad bod. I hate even saying dad bod. And I especially hate the people I blame for giving me one.
When it comes to getting your kids to do something they don’t want to do, there are basically three tactics you can employ: bribery, threats, and just giving up and doing it for them.
Doing it for them is obviously not the way to go. Detective Munch is lazy enough as it is; if I were to start waiting on him hand and foot (or waiting on him even more, which I guess would make it waiting on him hands and feet? COMEDY GOLD!), he’d probably end up with bed sores.
As most parents already know, bribery is a double-edged sword. It works, but you’re gonna pay for it down the line when the kid refuses to get out of bed without the promise of a new toy or some TV time, and eventually you’re buying him a new car just to get him to go to college.
Which leaves us with threats.
Recently, Target announced that they’d be doing away with gender-categorizations in their children’s sections. This made a lot of people happy and a lot of people angry.
I am torn between being baffled by the anger and totally understanding it. Not because I agree with it (most of the angry people seem to think Target has a nefarious agenda, which: CUCKOO!) but because I get where those people are coming from, at least on one level: human beings love labels.
Labels are comforting. Nothing scares us like stuff we don’t understand, and labels help us understand things.
My son is white. He is male. He is an American. He may be straight or gay, he may be religious or not, he may be liberal or conservative. But if I have my way, he’ll be none of those things.
He’ll just be a human being, like everyone else.