The Curse of Good Parents

The Curse of Good Parents

A friend of mine recently published a book about fatherhood. It’s called “Man v. Child” and it’s both the funniest dad book I’ve ever read and the only dad book I’ve ever read!

Relax, this isn’t a book review. I don’t do book reviews, because I don’t read parenting books and because I don’t feel qualified to review books and because I don’t need every yahoo out sending me their book. But very early in this one, the author, Doug something or other, raises an interesting question.

He asks the reader to consider what their dads were like as parents, and then asks the following question, based on their dad’s track record: “What can you fix?”

What if the answer is nothing?

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What Your Kids Don’t Know May Kill You

What Your Kids Don’t Know May Kill You

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.

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The Lying Game

The Lying Game

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.

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Dads Have a “Mental Load” Too

Dads Have a “Mental Load” Too

Over the summer, Meredith Ethington of Perfection Pending shared a list of the anxieties that plague her – and moms in general – every day, like having enough food in the house, cleaning messes, making it to appointments on time, etc. I stumbled across “Thoughts Moms Have After A Long Day of Work” again recently, and have some thoughts of my own.

The punch line to her post is that dads aren’t troubled by such things, and only think about naps. It’s all in good fun -in the comments she included a disclaimer that her husband is great and that the list was merely meant to showcase “the mental load” women have that men often don’t – but she’s not alone.

The idea that moms are the only ones who deal with this kind of anxiety is pretty common. I beg to differ.

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Is it Wrong To Call Your Kids ‘Buddy’?

Is it Wrong To Call Your Kids ‘Buddy’?

I call my kids all sorts of things.

For starters, they have the generic names everyone calls their kids: little guy, munchkin, monkey, etc. Mom and Buried uses various terms of affection, like pumpkin and cutie-pie and goofer. I often use weird names like “munch machine” and “cracker town” that I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain (I also don’t have an actual explanation).

Then there are their blog nicknames (which I rarely use anywhere but online), along with various terms of aggravation (which I never use to their faces), like jerk, and dick, and asshole.

People occasionally get angry at me for using those words, which is understandable. Getting angry about people who call their kid “buddy” is decidedly less so…

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