I love my kids, I just hate parenting
The kid loves puzzles.
Alphabet puzzles, number puzzles, animal puzzles, etc. If he’s not begging to watch Winnie the Pooh or read his Thomas the Tank Engine book, he’s carrying a puzzle over and sitting on my lap to do it.
Unfortunately for me, watching him do puzzles is excruciating.
When you become a parent, you suddenly need to learn a whole new set of skills.
You’ll be doing things you never thought possible, things for which your pre-baby life never prepared you. The good news is you’ll pick them up pretty quickly. The bad news is that this particular set of skills changes you. It’s impossible to be a halfway decent mom or dad without becoming a slightly lamer person. The evolution is both impressive and soul-crushing.
Many of the skills I’ve acquired are quite useful and, without them, I’d be adrift as a parent. Skills like diaper-changing and baby-holding and swaddling and so on.
Unfortunately, many more of them are skills I wish I hadn’t acquired. Because while they may make me a better parent, they also take me further and further away from my pre-parent self.
My son is learning fast and it’s both fun to watch and bittersweet to see, as it means he’s growing up. Soon he’ll have to shed some of the more immature behavior that comes with toddler territory. Like being shameless.
Going to the bathroom in your pants or throwing tantrums or smearing food all over your face at every meal; that stuff just won’t fly when he’s older. But there are some things kids learn that maybe they shouldn’t.
Right now, at two years old, my son knows no shame. And I’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible.
Read more about Kids Are Shameless And That’s A Good Thing …
A little while back I ran a series of posts about my son’s increasing vocabulary and my attempts to decipher his mangled pronunciations.
The series petered out; not because I’m lazy (maybe a little) but because my son’s language skills are developing too fast to make those posts sustainable.
The dude knows too many words. Even worse, he can now repeat back just about everything we say.
Gulp.