Tag: parenting

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Losing my religion…and my patience…and my “Best Dad” award

puke.jpgI’m going to start today’s blog with the statement that if you’re a single parent, and you got that way through no fault of your own, you have my deepest sympathies. I say that because as of today, I am officially NOT enjoying being a parent.

The kids have been on and off sick for nigh on 4 days now. While CareerMom was in Vegas last week, I had the boys and was lucky enough to only have to clean up puke one day. Since she’s returned home, we’ve had three days of puking, cranky 11 month old and whiney, pukey 3 year old. And I gotta tell ya…I’m over it.

To make it worse, when I got home yesterday to relieve CareerMom from her day of watching the sick kids (and BTW, I was feeling really sorry for her until our oldest spilled the beans that Mimi came over and watched them while CareerMom went to the grocery store and whatever else she needed to do. And let me also mention that all last week while CareerMom was gone, the best I could get out of Mimi was an invitation to dinner on Friday night.), our youngest was in bad need of a nap and didn’t want to go down. So I listened to him cry for about 30 minutes before interceding.

Asleep in my arms as I rocked him, the moment I tried to put him in his crib, he woke up screaming as if death itself was wrapping its boney arms about his little body and squeezing him. Knowing how badly he needed to sleep, I tried to leave him in his crib and TRIED to ignore his screaming.

Having survived that, we put him in his bed around 7:15 because he was just out of it. He awoke at 8:23 screaming again and nothing would calm him down. Now, this is where I officially lost it.

I got up out of bed, put on my clothes and left. I just left the house. I could not take it anymore, and this is where you single parents get all the kudos. You can’t do this. You can’t just leave. The best you can do is walk outside.

Luckily, good judgment got the best of me and I drove to the local drug store and picked up some earplugs. I returned home to find him still screaming and CareerMom giving him some Tylenol. At some point in the next hour he finally wore himself out and slept till 4:30 when he got a diaper change and a fresh bottle.

But frankly, I’d rather put in a 15 hour day than go home and deal with that again tonight. I’ll say again that it’s amazing that the human species exists at all. I honestly don’t know how people raise more than a couple of kids.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Baby Spit

It’s fairly rare, but every now and again my youngest son (of 10 months) takes a late afternoon nap at daycare. This means that he’s actually in a relatively good mood when he gets home rather than being a whiney, drooling sleepy head that we have to try to keep awake for another two hours. On those days that he naps past 4 p.m., he comes home laughing and crawling around and is the cute baby we all hope we get from the good Lord.

Last night was one of those nights and after I bathed him, I took him to his room where he promptly grabbed his toothbrush and started sucking on it. After it was good and wet he took it out of his mouth to study it like a cat might study a mouse right before it rips its head off and brings it to lay at your feet.

So he’s sitting there holding the toothbrush in one hand and he grabs the bristles with the other and flips it towards me like you’d do food on a spoon during a foodfight. Baby spit went flying all over my face and I let out an involuntary, “Oooh!”

For some reason, known only to babies, this cracked him up something tremendous and for the next five minutes he flung spit at me while I pretended to be disgusted (it wasn’t much of an acting stretch) and when that wore thin, I’d cry “oooh!” and then give him tummy noogies, much to his delight.

He has a memory like an elephant, so I foresee more of this in the coming evenings. I’m just going to add this to my list of “Things I can’t imagine myself ever doing….ever.” Now if I can just get my oldest son to give up his Spider Man costume, I’ll be golden.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Parenting Philosophies

Universal Laws

I think most parents come into parenting with a “Parenting Philosophy.” It is probably a mix of things that their parents did with them, as well as some personal observation tweaks on parenting skills they have gleamed by watching the successes and failures of other parents.

I am no different. My parenting philosophy goes something like this:

  • I am your father first, and your best friend second (or maybe 5th or 6th after your real friends and your mother)
  • I ate vegetables and so can you. If you don’t eat them tonight, when you get hungry enough, you WILL eat them
  • After the approximate age of 3, you’re old enough to clean up most of your own messes and get your own toys and blankets from wherever in the house you’ve left them. I’m not your maid
  • When you’ve tuned out my threats of taking away your favorite toys, a spanking usually will do the trick
  • Just because we have kids, it doesn’t mean the house should look like a pigsty
  •  You can entertain yourself sometimes
  • anything else that I make up along the way

The problem with a philosophy, is that it’s just that—a philosophy. A philosophy is “a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs” (thank you Dictionary.com). The quick among you will see the fallacy at work here—the fact that a philosophy comprises principles. And what is a principle exactly, but a, “personal or specific basis of conduct  or management.”

Plainly put, a philosophy consists of a bunch of generally unproven beliefs. Which means then, that a philosophy is not proven and therefore seldom holds true in the real world.

Take last night. I met CareerMom and the boys out for dinner at the local binge-n’-purge. Things went well for the first 20 minutes as our oldest contented himself with coloring the little menu thingy and our youngest donned a bib and commenced to eat pretty much whatever we put in front of him. But then all that wore off and we were left with, “I’m ready to go home” whining from our oldest and, “Hey, let’s see how many times I can make mommy and daddy pick this up off the floor” from our youngest.

Once dinner was over, I volunteered to take our youngest home while CareerMom and my oldest went shopping for a last-minute Christmas gift for her Administrative Assistant at work who had made a point of telling CareerMom as she walked out the door that, “I have a Christmas gift for you tomorrow.”

When we got home, I put our youngest on the floor with some plastic containers to play while I washed up bottles and generally cleaned up. Well, he didn’t like that and he decided to cry.

Now, I had two choices here. I could A) Stand by my philosophies and let him entertain himself (or continue to cry) while I cleaned, or I could B) Pick him up, leave the mess and keep him happy.

Have I mentioned I’m stubborn? Well, I am so I stuck by my philosophy and treated myself to pretty much a nonstop 40-minute cry-fest because once he got started, nothing would stop him. It finally got close enough to bedtime, so I bathed him, put his jammies on and put him to bed.

God Bless the quietness!

But I’m at an impasse here because I don’t think he “learned” anything, which is really the whole point of sticking to your philosophy when things go south. So I’m not sure I won anything here and I’m sure that the next time the situation arises, it’ll play out similarly.

The only question that remains is, “How strong is my resolve?” I don’t know the answer to that, but what I do know for sure is that I will be tested; Oh yes, I will be tested still.

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Dad Blogs Family Marriage

Things you’d say if you could to the ones that you love

I’m a sucker for a good sappy movie. Not the chick-flick kind where Hugh Grant plays some poor sot whose girlfriend dumped him and then comes running back. No, the kinds of movies I fall for are the ones that tug at the familial heartstrings. For instance, the movie Jerry McGuire always brings me to tears at the end. I know it’s the butt of many “you complete me” jokes, but there were some really great performances in that movie, once you quite seeing Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch in the back of your head.

Another one that I am a sucker for, is “The Family Man,” with Nicolas Cage and Téa Leoni. If you haven’t seen it (and shame on you), it’s about a successful financial whiz (Cage) who is given a “glimpse” of what life could have been like had he not moved to Europe and become a wealthy banker, and instead stayed home and married his college sweetheart (Leoni). In this glimpse, he lives in a typical suburban rancher with his two kids. He’s a moderately successful tire company executive and his wife is a pro-bono lawyer. By the end of the movie, he’s acclimated to his new life and when it comes time for him to resume his old life as a wealthy playboy, he doesn’t want to go back. Back in his real life, he meets Leoni at the airport and convinces her to stay and talk to him about “what might have been” and they spend the night in the hotel coffee shop reminiscing and catching up.

The obvious point here is that we never know what life would be like had we made different choices. And I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve made a lot of choices in my life that have dramatically affected the way it’s turned out. For one, I joined the military instead of going to college first, no doubt changing the direction of my career. Another big decision of mine was leaving a girl I was engaged to (OK, she actually broke off the engagement first, but we kept seeing each other until I finally walked away). And of course the big one all of us married couples made, is the decision to get married. In this regard, I’ve often wondered about the big “what if.”

What if I’d never gotten married? What if I didn’t have these children that I complain about so much? This is where the movie “The Family Man” comes in. In it I see the possibilities of my life. Not that I would be even remotely as successful as Cage is in the movie, but I wonder where I would be and more importantly, if I’d be happy.

But then even as I watch it, I remember CareerMom and my first date. I remember how much I couldn’t wait to see her again. I remember the times that I’ve been sick or in the hospital and she’s been there to take care of me when none of my family could be bothered. Then I remember our children. I remember how, just when I didn’t think I could take any more crying or dirty diapers, my son looked up at me and smiled and snuggled his head against my chest. I remember how when he fell down the stairs under my watchful eye, I moved faster than any human could possibly move under his own power (actually beating him down the stairs), catching him just as his head would have hit the wood floor and I remember how, panicked, I held and rocked him until he stopped crying.

I remember all of these things and I realize that this is my glimpse. My real life is the life I used to dream of before I had it. Sure, I didn’t have a few of the facts down, like the lack of sleep or how my free time would suffer, but overall it’s just as I dreamt it.

And I wouldn’t trade it for all the Quan in the world.