The Great Irony of Parenting

Last post, I mentioned the irony of travelling – when you are away from the kids you wish you were with them; when you are with them, you daydream about vacations. This is actually a corollary of what I call the great irony of parenting (This is like my “Murphy’s Law” so bear with me here). Here it is:

The great irony of parenting: I love my kids, but sometimes I just hate being their parent.

This is directly related to another saying: “The years are short but the days are long.”

Parenting is often great. On the odd Saturday afternoon, Andrea has needed to be out running errands or whatever, and I’ve had primary caretaking responsibility. We’ve spent these halcyon days playing in the playroom. The kids and I do puzzles, play board games while totally ignoring the rules, pretend to be Batman and the Joker beating the snot out of Thomas the Train. It’s great and we play for a couple of hours.

But then something happens. I look up and I get this sensation: Oh my god, it’s only four o’clock. I’m now done. Batman’s assault on Thomas has lost its novelty. I feel like we’ve had plenty of quality interactive time and now a little quiet time to ourselves would be perfect. And I have this unstoppable urge to tend to my iPhone villagers – they’re not going to lead themselves into battle with neighboring villages, after all!

The problem is, the kids just don’t see it that way. In their minds, it’s not time for quiet time to ourselves. It’s never time for quiet time to ourselves. We want daddy! There can never be too much quality interactive time.

Like that third piece of chocolate cake or 27^th time through Billy Madison it’s now too much of a good thing for me. I’m done. Fried. But the kids can eat more chocolate cake. They’d eat chocolate cake every meal, and snack times, to boot.

The worst of it is, we’re moving out of the good period. We’ve had fun up until now, but the witching hour is upon us. The kids are getting tired and ornery, and the toughest parts are ahead: piano, dinner, tubby, bed. I groan at the prospect of four more hours of parenting, having already reached burn out.

At this point, Andrea sends me a text: 3 more stops. There in 2 hours. Can u start dinner?

Just when I’ve given up all hope, I remember daddy’s best friend: Scooby Doo movie night! The afternoon is saved!

The vacation and the family trip

I think our kids have a reverse internal alarm clock. Do you have a morning meeting - need to rush, rush, rush? They’ll do their best to sleep until 8am. This morning, the first morning of our first real vacation in 6 years, our flight not until mid-day, Cody was in our room before 6am.

To make a real vacation, you have to get rid of the kids, and so our first stop is Houston. It’s not a vacation if you bring kids. It’s a family trip. The kids reminded us of this fact on the way there. Just past airport security the kids have begged their way into an Auntie Annie’s pretzel and a pair of Crocs each. With vacation on the brain, we’re in a charitable mood, and so we’re in-the-hole $100 within the first 20 feet of the terminal.

Upon arrival to the gate, we learned to our dismay that the airplane was a regional jet with no in-seat entertainment. Past flights have taught us this lesson – your options are three hours of misery or paying for the in-flight DirectTV. Sure it’s a little expensive at $7.99, but worth every penny. They could charge $100 and we’d do it.

Without the entertainment we’re in for more of a challenge. Putting Cody in one of these flying cigar tubes is like putting a hornet in a jar and shaking it. Once the batteries run out on his leap pad (aargh!) he’s busy calling his sister the most offensive name he can think of, nakedpants, and eating cheese crackers using the messiest method I could ever conceive (open the sandwich, scrape out the cheese with your fingers, bash the crackers on the tray until thoroughly crumbed). He keeps the rest of the flight well informed of his status throughout the duration (“Mommy, I bless-you’d on the window!” at full volume) and his search for batman watches in the SkyMall catalogue proves fruitless.

Chiara does better pretending to do Sudoku in the magazine. But halfway through the flight she wants her old shoes back- the entertainment value of $34.99 has already run out.

Side note- if our weekend getaways are any guide, we will spend a great deal of our vacation missing the kids. It’s one of the great ironies of parenting: Most of the time I spend away from the kids I wish I was with them; When I’m with them I daydream about vacations. Hopefully Hawaii is amazing enough to make it worth the sacrifice.

Our Complex Relationship with Scooby Doo

My kids love Scooby Doo. I don’t know why. You might think they find some perverse thrill in being scared, or a sense of security knowing that the kids in the show can solve the mystery and defeat the monster. But these hypotheses break down because they’ve watched every single episode over and over again. It’s to the point that we’ll see a monster on screen and Chiara will say “it’s just the shopkeeper” or “Shaggy is going to fall in the water.” It’s a scary mystery with no scare and no mystery.

Our troubled relationship with Scooby goes way back. Chiara once threw her greatest tantrum ever in my care when I refused to buy her a $5 Scooby Doo movie at Target – the kind of tantrum that had women of all walks of life coming up to me and saying “hang in there, you’re doing a great job.” As great a job as I was doing, to avoid the tantrum it would have been worth the five bucks for the dang movie.

Scooby predates Cody’s TV-watching days. Early on, Chiara could only watch at times when either Cody couldn’t (i.e. nap times) or when Andrea was too tired to give a darn. Andrea’s feeling was that there is no educational value so Cody shouldn’t be able to watch. It’s my contention that she got this basically backwards – that at, say, 20 months, Cody could learn from pretty much any old show where colored shapes move by the screen and people speak to each other in complete sentences (not sure if Shaggy’s “Zoinks!” counts as a complete sentence) and that Chiara should only be allowed to watch educational shows when Cody was asleep.

The kids are only allowed to watch the classic Scooby episodes, partly because the theme song really jams, but mostly because the new ones are dumber and meaner. The people in the new episodes sometimes say things like “stupid” and “shut up,” things that no 3-year-old should hear. Language like that is the sort of thing that will get a show banned from the Kimmel household for a long time (at least until Andrea’s too tired to care anymore).

Scooby Doo villains have been the source of much stand-up comedian derision, which I think is unfounded. If you’re a guy who just wants to find some buried treasure on a piece of property, I think it makes perfect sense to run around dressed as a pirate ghost or monster or whatever to scare away other would-be treasure hunters. Perfectly logical, if you ask me.

But I do run into one issue that I can’t get my head around: Let’s say you are one of those pirate ghost-cladded treasure hunters. Periodically you’ll actually catch one of Scooby’s gang that you’ve been chasing after trying to scare them away. And they’re scared and all, but they are either frozen with terror or cornered in the closet. Do you have any options here besides just cackling at them maniacally and waving your sword at them? You’re not going to try to hurt them, right? Presumably you went with the whole pirate ghost thing to avoid using violence in the first place. I mean, you’re not a bad guy, you’re just a normal dude searching for buried treasure dressed as a pirate ghost. Now you’ve got screaming kids and/or dogs within arm’s reach whom you’d like to get rid of. What are you going to do? It’s quite a conundrum, and you’re starting to be pretty glad you installed those trap doors in all the closets.

Yucks! Update

UPDATE: How's this for irony? Tonight, the very night I posted the case of the yucks blog post, we head to Dewey's Pizza in Lakewood, a family favorite. I'm parking the car after the 30-minute drive to get there, and what does Cody do but puke all over - and I mean ALL OVER - the car.

We're a ways from home and it's decision time so we started taking in the facts: The wait at Dewey's was 30-40 minutes. Cody is covered in vomit. We have spare clothes in the trunk. He's also acting much better. We haven't been to Dewey's in a long time.

So we ask ourselves a core gut-check question, "what would good parents do in a case like this?" The obvious answer is "go home and eat celery" Naturally, we proceed to do the opposite. We sit, eat pizza and even give a little crust and a little dessert to Cody.

On our way home, not five blocks from the restaurant, Cody pukes all over the car again. We're still cleaning up the mess.

A Case of the Yucks

Picture this: Andrea and I have finally – finally! - gotten away for a weekend. We’ve been planning this for months and are off to a Bed and Breakfast without any kids.

We finish a fabulous dinner. When we get back to the room, the staff has outdone themselves. The lights are dimmed; tea lights and rose petals surround the bed. A bottle of champagne waits on ice, beckoning. Andrea gasps, takes off her coat, and… dashes to the bathroom where she proceeds to throw up all night long.

It’s not the first time. Andrea’s been sick on trips dating back to our honeymoon in Banff: the list includes New York, Toronto, and Greece (in fairness the latter was morning sickness). She had back pain in London so bad we cut our trip short after she spent two days on her back on the floor. If she gets sick on our upcoming Hawaii trip, that’s it, we are done with vacations forever.

And now that we have kids, we have many more opportunities to get sick. Cody has specialized in the perfectly timed vomit – once we’re five minutes from the house and the babysitter calls, we know that once again the cufflinks are coming back off and Beef Wellington at Chez Francois will be replaced by Philly Cheesesteak from Penn Station. The amazing thing is that, despite covering (and I do mean covering) the kitchen floor, he seems fit as a fiddle for the rest of the evening. How does he do that? Is it nerves?

We have this newfangled health plan at work this year where we have about $1200 in a flexible account. Once we run through that, we’re on our own until we hit about $2500. Of course, we blew through almost half of our account by February. We go to the doctor every whip-stitch. It’s not Dad, who didn’t even go to the doctor the entire year of 2011. It’s mostly the kids and our overactive imagination when it comes to their health. Tummy aches could be indigestion… or maybe Crohn’s disease or… or maybe STOMACH CANCER! Better sit on hold with Cleveland Clinic right away!

Personally, the next time I see a doctor will be when the EMT drags me there. I just don’t feel the need to spend $50 to have someone tell me to rest and get lots of fluids. To wit, the last time Cody went to the doctor he was diagnosed with “a case of the ‘Yucks.’” His prescription? Rest and plenty of fluids.

On top of it all, for me, a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt efficiency expert, it just makes my hair hurt to br put through the most inefficient process in the world. The actual procedure to check a child for an ear infection – an experience we know intimately, I can tell you – takes about 30 seconds. But between the waiting, the waiting and the waiting, oh and the paperwork and the trip to the pharmacy (not to mention all that hold time in advance), the whole thing can take three hours.

Of course, it’s impossible to tell the real thing from a false alarm. My kids tell us almost daily that their tummy hurts. Chiara saying “my tummy hurts” is like me saying “I’m having a drink.” It’s an everyday thing. But when it’s time to go to the doctor, it’s time to go. Let’s just hope next year’s insurance plan is more comprehensive in covering the Yucks.

When exactly did “dumb” become a bad word?

My vocabulary is diminishing the longer we have kids. It’s not because we dumb down our conversation to their level. Andrea and I still use words like expedite, hypothesis and tangential while talking to the kids.

No, life is becoming increasingly restrictive in terms of the “bad” words I can use. Of course all of the pure, non-debatable curse words were of course first to go. Even though some of these were once staples of my communication, even I had the self-restraint to largely eliminate these words myself. As my three year old became a terror I started losing my resolve, but there’s nothing like hearing him say “gottendannit! gottendannit!” that will put a stop to that. You can guess which expletive he developed that from.

Then there are all of the substitute words. Andrea’s trick is to use words like sugar and fudge in place of her true feelings. My personal favorites - darn, dang, drat, stinkin’, friggin’, frickin’, freakin’ - are no longer allowed. And it’s not without merit: when my five-year-old started saying “I wanted chocolate milk, dang it!” Andrea was, shall we say, unimpressed. I could only muster a sheepish defense.

It goes without saying that any sexually explicit or otherwise vulgar words are off limits. Naturally, any references to human waste are similarly eliminated. The kids aren’t supposed to say, for example, poop, except in the context of needing help going potty. This, of course, is maybe Cody’s favorite thing in the world to say because of the reaction it causes – he basically runs around all day saying poopy brains, poopy head, poopy poopy poopy! about every solitary thing in his surroundings, raising the ire and blood pressure of his mother and me. Chiara is very helpful in this situation, reminding us repeatedly that “Cody said poopy!” and ignoring when we say “ignore it!”

Ok, so it’s not easy, but any grown adult with a little bit of will power can eliminate the above and it’s perfectly reasonable to do so. The next level is trickier. Most words that evoke any bad feelings at all are now off limits as well: hate, kill, shut up, stupid, jerk. Sometimes it’s just hard to remember that a word you used to use in everyday life is now forbidden.

And every so often, I’m blind-sided during normal conversation. When, in the midst of daily life, I’m interrupted mid-sentence by someone in the family saying “you can’t say ‘dumb’!” all I can do is offer a blank stare and say “when did ‘dumb’ become a bad word?”

So, as this trend continues, I can project a very limited future. Therefore, I will close with the one sentence that I predict will be allowable one year from now:

I am job!

The rise of the machines

This is post #2 - post 1 is below.

I call this a parenting blog, but to be honest, we’ve abdicated much of our parenting responsibility to the people at Disney, Apple and Nintendo. Our kids want to do little else but play with their electronic devices. They beg to play iPad the moment they roll out of bed and Wii as soon as they get home from Sweet Kiddles each day. If you are ever in their presence, do not let them know that you own a smart phone. It will be commandeered and covered with Angry Birds variants before you even know what hit you.

We have a time limit of 1 hour of electronics per day which we usually can stick to. Nevertheless, Andrea, who got the iPad for her birthday two years ago, is the only one who almost never gets to use it because it always seems to be running the Monsters Inc. game, the Team Umi Zoomi game or Temple Run II. In part, despite the time limits, they’ve gotten good at getting off one electronic device and onto another. And the electronic devices are so numerous and can’t all be watched at once. They outnumber and are overtaking our family. It’s the rise of the machines.

And sometimes, let’s be honest, we just need the electronics. Parents today are left with few tools in our tool kit. We aren’t allowed to hit, bite, scratch, scream, whine, pout or yell. In other words, it’s not a fair fight. But we do have the ultimate weapon, the ICBM of parenting. We always can flip on a show, plop the kids on the couch and sip Chianti.

I try to justify it to myself that they are learning strategy, planning and money management – they play a lot of games like Monster Pet Shop where they have to purchase monsters, grow them and sell them for a profit. But the fact is the learnings aren’t really sticking. Rather than reinvest their profits, think strategically and grow, they always seem to squander them on wallpaper, toys for the monsters and the latest, most fashionable underwear for the pet shop owner. And their reckless spending isn’t limited to their own games – within seconds, Cody destroyed 2 months of my gem-banking efforts in my Village game on decorations and other brick-a-brack. Andrea doesn’t understand it at all, but I was furious (although I must admit my village does look really nice with all the daisies surrounding the towers and barracks!). It just seems like you can’t teach a 3-year-old good business sense.

So we’re constantly worried how all of the electronic stimulation will affect the kids. Who knows. The Good Lord knows I consumed an awful lot of Mario Brothers and ThunderCats in my day. And I turned out all… OH, GOODNESS – KIDS TURN OFF THAT NINTENDO!!!