I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Every time a new Superman movie comes out – admittedly, not very often – I get very excited.
I worship Superman. I was super-psyched for Superman Returns. Superman Returns is not good. Too somber, too beholden to the Donner flicks, too much Superboy.
Too much boring.
Hopefully this new one won’t be. Let’s take a look at the new trailer.
Nobody wants their kids to run their lives.
Mom and Buried and I are doing a pretty good job of preventing our little tyrant from eliminating all of our free time (i.e., our drinking) and running roughshod all over our social lives (i.e., our drinking with friends), but, fantastic parents that we are, we still spend a lot of time with our son, doing what he wants. Or what we think he needs. Or what we think he’s saying he wants (he still doesn’t do English so good).
And while we do our best to have separate identities other than just “Mom” and “Dad,” there are still times he has control of our lives. And, in some cases, our bodies.
Read more about The Papa Master: Five Ways My Kid Controls Me …
Parenting isn’t a competition.
When it comes to raising kids, comparing how you’re doing to other parents or measuring your kid’s development against others their age is just not a good idea. Children are like snowflakes – annoying, loud, inconvenient, smelly snowflakes. They’re all annoying and loud and inconvenient and smelly in their own unique ways.
Every parent is unique too. We all have different styles, even compared to our spouses. Making it about who’s winning is poisonous to your relationship and potentially damaging to your offspring.
That said, when it comes to which parent Detective Munch takes after, I am totally crushing my wife.
The last time I wrote about my son’s penis, it ignited a firestorm in the comments.
(Seriously. The two most controversial posts I’ve written have been about circumcision and My Little Pony.)
This one isn’t about anything nearly as controversial as men who like cartoons that are made for little girls, but it does involve my son being naked. I also threw Return of the Jedi into it. So maybe the Bronies and the anti-circumcision crowd can find some common ground when I talk about…
BATH TIME!
“Little kids are sponges.”
You hear it all the time, and it’s true. My son’s vocabulary increases every day, and most of what he’s learning he gets right from Mom and Dad, such as his first “curse” word, the relatively innocuous “dammit!” Needless to say, we’ve had to become a lot more careful about the words we use. It’s a bit of a pain.
But there’s a flip side to that coin. Sure, he parrots a lot of stuff we don’t even realize we’ve said around him, or don’t necessarily want him to be saying, but we can also train him to provide some entertainment. For example…