I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Sleep. Money. Silence. Peace of mind. Snacks.
These are just a few of the things you sacrifice when you decide to become a parent. (Don’t worry, they are replaced – by exhaustion, debt, headaches, scraps, and stress! Yay!) A lot of that is a side-effect of getting older – most of us accrue responsibility with age, whether we have kids or not – but there’s one thing that having kids takes away from you that you can never get back:
Solitude.
Last spring, my wife’s sister and her boyfriend came to join us on our trip to the beach, and they brought their kids.
Except they aren’t *their* kids. Not yet, at least.
They’re foster kids.
They say opposites attract. Mom and Buried and I aren’t total opposites, but we do have some significant differences. And we definitely parent differently.
On good days, those differences complement each other. On bad days, they cause conflict. When you have a kid who is acting up, and acting out, the bad days become more frequent.
Especially when you don’t always see eye to eye on how to discipline that kid.
Stress isn’t a competition. Newsflash: We’re all stressed out of our minds!
Adulthood is stressful. Work is stressful. Marriage is stressful. The state of the world is stressful. Life is stressful!
And, of course, parenting is stressful too, in more ways than one. But parenting stress is a little different, because being a parent is both stressful in and of itself and because the presence of children adds an extra layer of stress on top of everything else. It’s fun!
Last week, The Hammer turned two!
The last two years have moved pretty quickly, but a lot of that is probably because I’ve spent most of that time sleepwalking half-awake through my life. The baby phase is over and the toddler phase is in full-swing, so if the terrible twos actually arrive on time (Detective Munch didn’t get terrible until he became a threenager), I’m about to be awoken very abruptly.
In order to save my sanity, I’ve started indulging in some second kid slacking.