Tag: parenting

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

The $400 Health Club

There are things that I love about the holidays; the cool weather, the food, the jolly mood everyone is in, and then there are things that I really don’t like; sweating over what to get the nine (yes, nine) people/couples in my life (not including the Secret Santa gift and the sibling gift on my wife’s side). With kids now, there are even more things to love and/or hate about the holidays.

For instance, our kids’ daycare is closed for all major holidays. In the case of Thanksgiving, they were closed understandably on Thursday and Friday, but of course we still have to pay for a full week. Regardless, this means that instead of the kids playing for nine hours with their friends at daycare, they are either strapped in a car on a long trip or stuck in a boring house with people they don’t know and only a handful of toys carefully selected for both portability and creativity, and unable to generally get out and burn off all that energy that keeps them the sane lovable children we all hope they are come the weekend.

As my friend pointed out over at Pantsfreesia, by Sunday afternoon I’ve got that twitchy eye thing going and if the weather is nice, my wife is urging me to get out-of-doors and go do something that doesn’t involve kids. So, long holiday weekends, such as what we just had for Thanksgiving, are especially trying for me even though I love my children with all my heart.

I love em; I just don’t wanna play with them for 96 hours. And it’s not just the playing either. When my oldest son doesn’t go to daycare and burn off steam, he’s a different person. He talks back, he whines over piddly stuff and he just generally isn’t as well behaved as he is when he gets tons of exercise. And for whatever reason, riding bicycles and hitting the ball are poor substitutes for chasing each other around the playground pretending you’re Spider Man trying to knock down the Red Power Ranger. I know this because I played it for ten minutes and I was done, both because it’s physically demanding, and because it’s a tad humiliating for people to see you imitating a three year old making noises that you haven’t made since you were, well, three years old.

And no, I never bought into that whole, “Dance as if no one were watching” idea. I mean, someone is always watching and even if they’re your parents, in the back of their head, behind the part of their brain that’s saying, “What a good father,” they are also thinking, “My goodness he looks like a total goober.”

Welcome to parenting.

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Beach Trip Deja vu

So my son and I are here on the outskirts of the country’s most popular destination spot—Pigeon Forge, TN. The house is a huge, three-level affair perched precariously (I’m seriously here) on the side of a mountain. The grade is so steep in fact, that halfway below the bottom floor of each house, and the ground, which falls off dramatically, is a catwalk for maintenance people to use to get to the electrical closet located in what might generously be called a basement.

At any rate, the original plan was for my family to spend the night at my mom’s house a mere 20 miles away, but since it’s only my oldest son and I, my mom made such a fuss about our staying for the night that we did. However, this meant that we got last dibs on sleeping arrangements. In this case, last dibs included the top floor, loft area consisting of two twin beds in a “we’ve been married for 15 years and no longer want to be sleeping in the same room” kind of set up. Also sharing this loft is my aunt, and my niece, and then over a half wall is a bedroom where my cousin and her husband are sleeping. So basically, there are six of us sleeping in a loft together.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal except for the fact that the house is made of all wood. I mean, there isn’t a stick of sheetrock anywhere. The walls are wood, the floor is wood and the ceilings are wood. What this amounts to is one giant cavernous noise funnel up to the top floor where we are all sleeping. Last night, when one of us turned over in our noisy bed, the rest of us heard it and were similarly disturbed.

Tonight, despite any arguments to the contrary, my son and I are making the twisty, turny trip over the mountain to my mom’s house where I will sleep in a queen bed, as will my son. We will walk around the house in near-nudity since we won’t have to worry about offending aunts and/or cousins, and we will not worry about snoring or tooting in our sleep, lest we offend those who might be offended.

And then tomorrow morning, we may or may not come back—perhaps opting to rather say goodbye via telephone and loiter around Townsend, TN checking out the Apple Barn and the little train museum. And then, hopefully having worn out my son, I’ll strap him in the car and we’ll hit the road on the way home.

Or, I might freeze my butt off in Gatlinburg tonight looking at the lights cuz I was too stupid to bring a coat. We’ll see.

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Marriage

To Grandmother’s House We Go…

For the first time in about 8 years, my mom’s side of the family (well, one of my mom’s) decided to all get together this year. And they are doing it in a four-bedroom cabin in Tennessee. This cabin is just over the river and literally through the woods from my mom’s house in Walland, TN and the cabin is located just this side of Gatlinburg, TN. So, from my mom’s house to the cabin, it’s about a 40-minute drive.

Originally, CareerMom and I decided we’d go up there, stay at my mom’s house at night to give the boys better sleeping arrangements, and then drive over to the cabin each day and spend time with family. However, as the time has drawn nearer, this has seemed less and less like a great idea.  For one, my youngest slept almost straight through the night for four nights in a row. This is unprecedented thus far and it is believed by many that dragging him up to Tennessee, where he’d have to sleep in a hard pack-n-play, would ruin whatever miracle schedule we’ve stumbled on. (Author’s Note: Since that four-night sleeping stretch, he’s had two nights of waking up twice, and then four times another night). Also, the car trip. If you’ll harken back with me to the Beach Trip of 2007, none of us were looking forward to spending 4 ½ hours up and down in the car, plus 45 minutes of gut-twisting back and forth turns through the woods to get to the cabin.

So as CareerMom and I lay by the fire the other night, we both confessed how little we were actually looking forward to this trip. Out of that came a plan: I would take our oldest son and go, while CareerMom stayed behind with the baby. There was really no way I could get out of going altogether given that the family made an effort to gather, but we both felt that taking the baby would only be a burden on everyone’s efforts at having fun considering the problems we have getting him to sleep in strange places. (Author’s Note: We took our oldest son down to the beach when he was four months old and despite constant admonishing while he was napping, people continued to yell and bang around and so he did not sleep and was miserable. Same bunch of people, same situation here).

I called my mom to break the bad news and she was, as expected, disappointed. But as I dug deeper into her disappointment, it became clear to me that really all she wanted to do was show off the baby. It was pretty clear that the rest of us coming was secondary. See, she has this little competition with her youngest sister whose daughter has two children. It’s all about whose kid is the cutest see and she’s built up my youngest son to epic proportions of cuteness and now, she’ll have no proof.  She also didn’t seem to buy my excuses, which are very valid and since she’s never raised a child, not something she can relate to.

At one point, she compared my youngest’s traveling issues with her sister’s daughter’s children and pointed out that since they are “in church all the time” (pointing out that we aren’t) her children are used to it. I pointed out, quite annoyed at this point, that having a child around other people in no way compares to traveling with children. Our kids are in daycare all day. They get along with people fine; they just HATE car seats, and they don’t sleep well in strange places.

If you’re in your fifties, and you raised children, you did so in the era of vans, during a time of built-in beds and tables and no car seats. Traveling then was a breeze compared to now. Now, the poor kid has to remain tightly strapped into a nonmovable, hard plastic car seat, with sides that come around like blinders giving the child little to look at for hours on end. It was a different time and traveling today is just so vastly different from thirty years ago.

Suffice it to say that I hung up the phone with absolutely no desire to go up there whatsoever. And what really steams me is that this will be the third time I/we’ve gone up there since spring and they haven’t come here once. But they have the nerve to question my complaints about travel.

It’s the holidays folks. How about we just be happy to get to see each other huh?

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Some Good Time Away with Just the Adults

CareerMom and I recently celebrated our 8th anniversary. No big milestone, but these days…8 years…kinda deserves something right? So, I booked us a night away from the house and the kids. We went to nearby Stone Mountain. They have a pretty nice Marriott and I got us a nice room for an evening and a massage treatment the next morning.

Since CareerMom is always fearful of asking her parents to watch the boys for us, I did it instead and it worked out beautifully. They came over and we gave them all the instructions for feeding and putting the boys to sleep and what to do when our youngest wakes up his usual two times. There were no tears (from either us or the boys), there was no sniffling…we just left.

One of the first things you notice about not having kids with you in the car is that both adults get to ride in the front of the car rather than the way it is usually; me driving and her sitting in the back keeping the baby from screaming. And we actually got to have adult-like conversation. It was really nice.

I won’t bore you with a play-by-play of the entire weekend, but I will tell you that it was nice to re-discover my wife. As parents, we get into this “parent mode” mentality that, while fun for the kids, is very much geared for the kids. And even once the kids have gone to bed, that mentality sticks because being a parent is a 24×7 job and you can’t just turn it on and off. I suspect this is why many marriages struggle once children are in the mix. There’s just nothing sexy about bathing children or changing poopy diapers and you’re usually just so “done” by the time they’re in bed, that you’re lucky if you have time for a shower before you feel like crawling under the covers and calling it quits for the day. So, forget relationship building on most days.

But when you’re away, I mean really away and not just “at the grocery store” away, you find that you can actually let it all go and be yourself again. On more than one occasion, I found myself looking at my wife while she was talking and thinking, “Ah, there you are. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed that playful side of you that I was attracted to in the beginning.”

I don’t know that I’ve changed like that, but I suppose I have too. Certainly, I’m much more stressed now that we have kids and I’m equally sure that it’s reflected in my behavior. And while I mentally made a note to be more mindful of my behavior at home when the kids aren’t around, I know that within a couple of weeks, after getting up multiple times in the middle of the night (and eventually staying up after the 4:30 feeding as I did this morning) and after the constant entertainment that is required to keep everyone from crying, I’ll fall back into my old habits. I’ll try not to, but I know I will. It’s just too hard not too.

It’s a shame though that one has to spend $400 on a night away just to remember who he is.