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.
When it comes to parenting, I don’t buy into gender stereotypes or biological imperatives or how they feel on “Mad Men”.
It’s 2015! Parenting tasks are no longer divided solely by gender, at least not in my house. It’s a team effort, a total 50/50 proposition, and moms and dads both have to go all-in to make it work.
That said, there are definitely some things my wife does better than me, and most of them aren’t gender-specific. (Unless you count being sick. Women totally dominate there.)
She had her birthday last week, so I thought I’d share a few of them. Better late than never!
Yesterday, in advance of Mom and Buried’s upcoming sprinkle, I wrote a list of things I want for baby number two.
Some of them are ridiculous, completely unattainable fantasies, but aside from the booze – and the vasectomy(!) – pretty much all of them were for the baby.
Now that that’s over with, today I’m focusing on what parents need.
My wife’s friends are throwing her a sprinkle, which is both the name of a smaller, not-your-first-kid baby shower and a word I will spend the rest of my life trying to avoid saying.
As one does when generous friends plan to ease the stress and expense of preparing for a major life-changing event, my wife has started a registry. I have not seen this registry, and I may never see it. I may even be fabricating the fact that she even started one. I haven’t been paying attention.
Regardless, I decided to write a baby item wish list of things I think we need for baby #2, some of which are obvious, some of which are outlandish, and a few of which don’t actually exist.
I’ve been a parent to an only child (single-child parent?) for five years now.
When I envisioned having kids, back in my salad days of youth and freedom, I always saw myself having at least two. I have siblings, and despite the occasional incident (like when one brother accidentally tore my hair up with an electric shoe shiner, or another brother accidentally almost cost me a finger with a pair of scissors), I enjoy having siblings. Ergo, I wanted my kids to have siblings. Case closed.
But life got in the way, circumstances demanded compromise, and for a while it seemed like Detective Munch would be it for us. As you probably know already, the times, they are a-changing.
This is my pledge not to change with them.