ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

i very, very nearly posted that exact moment exchange here but actually it works better neanderthal's way around. valiant effort I tho on wins' part

i'm really starting to feel like Beaten Down Dad

ok, have eight peaches before dinner

sure, don't do your homework, wtf do i care it's your life

lol

that's the spirit

"Ok one more octonauts episode" is the one I'm really bad about, bc deep down I know it means another 22 minutes of peacefully looking at my iPhone.

3yo son: "I'm gonna eat your penis!"
Me: "That is a thing that is not going to happen."
3yo son: "Us gonna eat all the penises!"
Me: ...

talking with my son now is basically like one long Butthole Surfers song

Trying to use proper words during diaper changes now has my kid talking about his "peesin" and "test takers".

Also he pissed while standing in the bathtub last night and was like HOLY SHIT HOW DID I DO THAT and spent the next couple of minutes thrusting his crotch out hoping that it would happen again.

"Ok one more octonauts episode" is the one I'm really bad about, bc deep down I know it means another 22 minutes of peacefully looking at my iPhone.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Tuesday, September 6, 2016 1:35 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We've been on a HUGE Octonauts kick lately. I like it a little less than Wild Kratts, but between the two my kid knows more about animal behavior than I have ever learned.

octonauts is the greatest tho

do they have american accents in america???

no

it's p much all former-British colony accents + Peso

Same classist division of accents

btw I'm p bad with specific british accents -- what would you call the captain's accent?

K started pre-k today. Having just hung out with an old best friend who is still childless, I was just thinking about how having kids marks the passage of time and aging in a very distinct way that you maybe don't feel as much without them, like it gives life a clear narrative arc, where it's really easy to picture all the future milestones approaching. You don't start a new grade every year, just get a year older, which seems like nothing, but a new grade is huge. New schools, starting new activities or sports, puberty, college apps, college, and they're suddenly adults who no longer live with you, it all comes up very fast compared to any specific, marked changes that occur in a childless person's life. It almost makes me want a third child just to have the illusion of prolonging this phase of life.

It almost makes me want a third child just to have the illusion of prolonging this phase of life.

yea, i've thought about that too, we're not having another but i've often thought about having another so i can postpone having to say goodbye to these early childhood years, which tbh are racing by. other times though i can't wait to get some of this horrible shit (tantrums, no sleep, etc) over with. i look at some family members with kids who are 8, 10, 13 etc and it seems so much easier

We're really thinking about having another kid right now. We're so unprepared for it, especially financially, but if we wait much longer we'll probably be too old. Like, if he had a third kid now, my wife would be 60 when they graduated from high school. I'm really stressing about this and not sure what to do. Our youngest just started kindergarten this week and our oldest is in 7th.

We're sort of in the same position, like ideally another 3-5 years before having another kid would be best financially (because I don't see affording an actual house before then), but then we'll be pushing the "older parents" envelope in terms of risks, energy etc.

I'll be 52 and Carl will be 58 if/when our kid graduates from high school. We will not be having another. Unless we find one on the street then maybe we would keep it.

My fourth (a boy) was born last night!

wow congrats!!!

teens > little ones, except for cuddling. easier? I dunno, you have to be more on your game the older they get. but it's more fun. at least for me, but I don't like babies, despite having raised 3 of them.

xp nice! I don't think we're gonna go for 4 but I see the appeal (here in France mothers win a medal from the government for having 4 kids)

congrats!

Heh, thanks everyone :)

Unfortunately we don't get a medal here in Holland, and also no discounts and other perks like big families get in Belgium.

Still, four kids feels alright somehow. They were all born about two years apart from each other, so they all grow up together.

ah that's great! Congrats! Would quite like a second, now, but cannot ever imagine wanting more than that...

Congrats Arch!

Aw! Congratulations!

congratulations!

dates to 1920, when France needed babies after WW1

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Medaillesdelafamilefrancaise.jpg

we get perks for 3 kids, reduced tariffs for entry into museums/cultural things etc., and on transport. but to get the bronze medal we need 4, silver is 6, gold is 8.

Well done arch!

This weekend, I checked my kid's search history prompted by Tracer's story. I came up clean! He could be using some sort of "Incognito" mode though. I wouldn't put it past him because he's pretty savvy, but I didn't worry about it today.

I did find out that he has a YouTube channel though! He makes videos of himself playing Call of Duty and other games while telling little stories about his life or trying to be funny. His history of liked videos was mostly the same. Anyway, there wasn't any worrying content in the videos except for at one point he inadvertently doxxes one of his friends from school, who also has a channel doing the exact same thing: "Oh, and let me tell you about [channel] name. His name is [the kids' full name]..." *sigh* The video doesn't have enough views though for me to be worried about it though.

Anyway, just wanted to share the results of my snooping.

― how's life, Sunday, June 5, 2016 9:39 AM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha ha. This youtube channel thing went bad pretty fast. I'm not going to give any details on here, but for the love of god people, don't miss any opportunity to spy on your kids online. Track that shit!

😕

yeah it's been that way-ish for us as recounted on either this or another thread, but I dunno, he's 13, I'd been checking out my dad's playboys and penthouses for years by that point. also is there really much that's that bad on youtube? my kids watch *tons* of youtube (pretty much no tv anymore, by their choice) and they mostly seem to watch minecraft videos etc. is there much gore or boobs on youtube? (not talking about the rest of the net OBV)

No, it's not about the rest of youtube's content for me. It's about his. There's a cyberbullying angle to it. I'm pretty disappointed.

oh, I see, wow. ugh.

I'm worried similarly about the 11yo in our household. I've overheard him being really quite aggressive/bossy to his friends online on Skype when they game online. He's a good kid, but god boys are dicks on the internet.

Yeah, I just got done chewing him out about it and I'm pretty depressed.

Was going to post this in the lurking clowns epidemic thread, but it became increasingly ILP-M as I wrote it:

We HAD given our children a warning about clowns, because one of the earlier supposed sightings wasn't far from us. That one turned out to be a hoax, but to be honest, the whole thing is unnerving anyway. "Ok, is this clown going to be another college kid hoax or is somebody going to do something actually malicious eventually?"

So we took my daughter to a colleague's daughter's birthday party. The parents had hired a magician. He shows up in this jester outfit with skulls all over it.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigsalad_media/m/magic_michael_forest_hill/54001557cd7e1.jpg

My girl was so terrified she clung to her mom for the entire 3 hour party.

Poor guy, I had never been to one of those parties where the hired entertainment had to work a really tough crowd of disinterested children. He did alright though. He was really good with balloon animals too and when we left, my kid kept crying "balloon animal! balloon animal!" But she wouldn't go back and ask the magician for one because of his spooky clown outfit.

And that's how I spent Sunday evening becoming an expert at balloon animals!

how you gonna make balloon animals with a nail through your hand

Magic?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrFyRT3nPS0

Well she was adorable tonight except for being completely rude at the first five houses and not saying thank you which I was ready to just kill the whole escapade at house #3 but mom was right - in part - that she needed to warm up a little, shyness etc. but I will not suffer rudeness!!! ARRGH.

Anyway I think part of it was feeling silly in costume, which I totally get, and I think the way I turned Halloweeen around for myself was by dressing up as various genuinely terrifying things and actually scaring people. I suggest: What about next year we dress up as something scary? And try and scare people, like Dad used to do?

"Next year I'm going to be a mean cheerleader that only likes girls!"

OK!

Someone gave my daughter a kazoo for halloween and I'm not sure if I like her anymore.

hahaha

lol

how have you all talked to your kids about death and dying?

my four-year-old has been asking a lot of questions. his great aunt gave him a little dreamcatcher in his room with feathers on it and he asked how feathers fall off of birds and i told him that they either fall off naturally the way our hair falls out or else we can pluck them from a dead bird. he asks "how do birds die?" to "where do birds go when they die?" to "what happens when i die?" he's heard language about death and dying before in passing but he's only now started to ask a lot of questions.

i gave him some answers but im not sure there is any satisfactory way of going about this. i talked about how our bodies shut down and we become part of the earth (im agnostic so i didn't talk about heaven and eternal souls and all that, though my wife has mentioned heaven a little bit to him). fundamentally i find it comforting that we do become part of the earth when we die. but i also talked about how we live on in the memories of people who loved us. i have an uncle who died about 10 years ago, an artist who created thousands of prints, and whose work is on the walls of our house and in all of my family members' houses. my son knows who that uncle is even though he died before my son was born so i talked about how my uncle got sick from cancer and died and become part of the earth and now he lives on in our memories and our love for his art. my son creates a lot of art too so i thought he might connect to that. but who the fuck knows really?

now he's asking questions right before bedtime about where he goes when dies, when he goes into the earth what happens to his pajamas, his toys, etc. he definitely seems a little alarmed and confused by it all but still asks questions about it in that everday incessantly curious way he asks questions about basically anything that four-year-olds wonder about too though.

my stock answer to "where do we go when we die?" is "we go back to where we were before we were born". tbf neither of my kids have gotten too death obsessive - it certainly hasn't registered in any serious way with my 4yo, who enjoys "playing dead" and has seen various dead things (animals mostly) but I don't think really grasps the enormity of it. My daughter was about that age when my great-grandmother died (at 101) and so she's been through the thing of a relative dying but she never seemed particularly fixated on it.

I realize the above is not helpful at all, lol...

"where do we go when we die?" is "we go back to where we were before we were born".

i like that answer a lot actually

i talked about how our bodies shut down and we become part of the earth

This is basically how we spoke to our kids about it. Neither of my kids have had anyone close to them die yet, other than small pets. We always stop to examine dead animals when we find them in the road or the woods or wherever.

My nephew, who is in seventh grade like my oldest kid, had a friend die on Sunday. I haven't gotten any reliable word on how it happened. I never met the friend, but it's been heavy to think about. Nephew himself is already being treated for severe depression, so it's gotta be extra hard on him.