I love my kids, I just hate parenting
For some reason I occasionally catch the parody bug, like a younger, better-looking Weird Al.
Today, I happened upon the classic “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” poem, and decided to give it the old Dad and Buried spin.
It’s a bit of a lark, but after a weekend of traveling, shopping, family and general holiday stress, I’m in the mood for a lark. I hope you are too. But I don’t blame you if you’re not.
Merry Christmas!
I guess I’m not the same as most dads. Or most dad-bloggers.
I’m a member of the Facebook Dadbloggers community (come and join us!), and through it I’ve met a lot of great dads, some with blogs big, some with blogs small, some with no blogs at all! (Seriously. There’s a guy.) I get along with all of them, give or take, but I’m not the most vocal member of the group.
I think that’s because my sensibility is a little bit different. For example, I enjoyed the following video.
I don’t think I became lazy until I was a teenager. My toddler, however, has mastered it at three.
It’s a very selective laziness. He’s off the wall with energy most of the time, i.e., when you’re trying to get through the security line at the airport and he decides he wants to pretend to be The Flash; but when it’s time for him to actually do something? He’s less active than most of the people who work security at the airport.
Of course, if I had someone willing to carry me around everywhere, I’m pretty sure I’d let my legs atrophy until they melted off, so who am I to talk?
As both a Miami Dolphins fan and a not-exactly-physically-imposing writer type, I am really torn on this whole bullying scandal.
Bullying is deplorable, and, despite being raised in an era (not all that long ago, really) when the default suggestion for dealing with bullies was to fight back and expose the bully as the coward he truly is, fighting fire with fire is no longer an acceptable tactic. But judging what goes on in a football locker rooms by the same standards with which we judge “the real world” is a little insane. I’m not defending Richie Incognito’s actions, but context is important, and I don’t think we have all of it. It’s impossible for non-football players to understand what it’s like in that environment, but I am relatively certain it’s less like your cubicle farm and more like The Hunger Games.
That said, I always find it obnoxious and condescending when someone tells me I can’t possibly know what something is like because I haven’t experienced it. And then I thought about parenting. And I realized most parents take the same attitude with non-parents, and it’s equally obnoxious and condescending.
But that doesn’t make it false. And the inability of outsiders to fully understand what the day-to-day is like is just one of the ways parenting a toddler is like being on the Miami Dolphins.