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

i mean we never intended for octonauts and ninjago to become a thing either, but despite their not-realness they play an ever-present part in our lives

BEEPS: "Can Santa read minds?"

ME: Me, playing along with the world's cruel trick on children just one more time. "Why, no, of course he can't."

lol ninjago

i've recently heard crap parents feed their kids like "santa has a meeting with all the parents"

that's what the santa myth needs. corporatizing. "every year we pay into a fund santa has set up and if you're good mommy & daddy will get a return when you're 18 to pay for college"

"Santa left you this Powerpoint presentation so you can understand your deliverables this season."

I kind of want to do that now

"don't forget to file your TPS report on christmas eve"

shhhh be quiet for Santa's webex honey

more like:

"Make sure you update your FY16 good behavior goals by Dec 21 so Santa has time to review them and give me feedback before Christmas."

do people in the states hang plush santas out their windows, like he's struggling to get inside the house? I think they're hilarious but I remember my son had a stage where he would build gingerbread houses with the chimney loaded with traps to keep santa the fuck away

we don't do Santa Claus at our house. presents come from people, people that require thank yous.

yea agreed, though we're fine w/ santa being like a fictional christmas dude who is part of stories we read together, but he is not the one giving presents because he is just a character in stories, he is not real. real people give presents. nobody comes down the chimney in real life but we are fine reading stories where that happens.

we definitely got a tree, i am not catholic or christian even though i was raised catholic, but we like having a tree, we have lots of family ornaments and the lights are nice

Same here exactly^^^

I clearly remember telling my mum there is no Santa Claus. We were in the kitchen with mum's best friend when I made the earth shattering announcement. They both broke into hysterical laughter and one of them said 'Well there goes half your Christmas presents!! Hahahaha " and I remember think 'oh no! What have I done???'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueVPUsyrT0s

We went through this with

BEEPS: Is there really a tooth fairy?

ME: Do you really want me to tell you?

stare at each other for 30 seconds.

BEEPS: My friend from school got a two-dollar bill once.

xp
Parental death with betrayal frosting. Phoebe wins.

I feel like I've told my tooth fairy story before but here it is: I started suspecting that there was no tooth fairy around 7 or 8 so one day when we were driving somewhere I asked my mom who the tooth fairy was. She said, "Who do you think she is?" and I guessed the name of a woman who used to live in the same apartment complex as us that my two-timing father had been sleeping with. So my mom was like, gritting her teeth and gripping the wheel, "Nope. It's me. I'm the tooth fairy."

haha oh wow

loooooool

And you're all "You mean dad was sleeping with you too?"

He did have a type (women who paid small children for teeth).

fuck, that's hilarious

haha carl that's awesome

I'm not sure what my younger kid's take on Santa is. I'm definitely not taking an aggressively pro-Santa stance this time around though.

― how's life, Tuesday, December 15, 2015 8:11 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ok, day after I post this, I come home from work and the first thing I hear from her is "Daddy, unicorns are real!" Because apparently she'd seen this:

http://www.fox5dc.com/about-us/season-of-wishes/57638341-story

I've got a whole different problem now.

Ella borrowed this book from the library in September
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91KpE2-3cpL.jpg
and it's been non-stop Father Christmas/Santa pretty much ever since, with occasional returns to the hardcore Betty Boop obsession she developed in seconds after watching a single old cartoon on our local community TV station

wooooah, big image, sorry

though, frankly, that's how big it looms in my life, so the rest of you can deal with it too

Kids get to open all their presents a day early, due to having actual xmas day at their mums. Open dozens and dozens of boxes of lego, skylanders, lego dimensions etc etc.

Kid 1 immediately goes to the WiiU and, ignornig all his new Skylanders, fires up Splatoon which he's had for ever.

Kid 2, when he realises he has to wait for the Dimensions game to update on the PS4, wails "I have nothing else to play with!" while surrounded by piles of new toys.

>:|

Welcome to parenthood, Trayce!

*cries*

"What was your favorite part of our trip to Thailand?"

"Playing video games in Bangkok with [friend's kid] Joey."

lol

I have witnessed a decade of Christmasses if my niece being a goddamn asshole about presents

:/

After she came back from summer vacation I asked Beatrice's best friend what she liked most about the Alaskan cruise she had just come back from. 'I got to see 'Inside Out'!' LOL
Xpost

youth is wasted on the etc

stealth/non-stealth parenting tips for getting a little one to eat vegetables? have a 14-month old that just learned the valuable skill of saying "no." currently cooking up greens (kale/spinach/etc.) and dumping them into grilled cheese sandwiches (minimal cheese, healthy bread) and that seems to work.

Yeah I sneak chopped up veg that he didn't eat earlier into a pita with cream cheese. You can make big matches of pasta sauce with loads of veg in but apart from that I don't think you can really force it so I try not to make a big deal out of it

My wife grew an herb garden in the window as a little mother/daughter project. Once the leaves grew she was allowed to eat as much parsley etc. as she could. That's not "sneaking" per se, but she became invested in it. After that it wasn't hard to add other veg to her plate at meal time, although she's still particular about which ones.

12 hours! 7 to 7! Fucking hell!

dunh dunh duuuunnhhhhhh!!!!!!

No fair, M is still coming through to our bed, waking through the night, then waking up before 6am most mornings. (she's almost 4.5)

I think we've had about two solid weeks of solid 12 - 13 hour sleeping and it's amazing. He also started walking on Christmas Eve - like really walking, more than three or four steps - and talking a lot more and I swear he's just exhausted at night from all this learning and doing.

Sneaking foods into things dont work with the 7yo. He's celiac so has developed a real distrust of food generally, and if *anything* changes in taste or texture from expectations he outright refuses it. His list of foods is getting narrower by the day and I really worry he aint eating right (being also vegetarian on top of that) but... its not my kid, so not much I can do. Also he's a stubborn little &*%&^

He once refused to eat a zooper dooper iceblock because daddy cut it open upside down.

Last ten days or so we've got into a really nice groove of sleeping from just past 7pm through until 5-7am; most days it's about 6am. This is after 13 months of pretty much every two hours. We'd got to 1-2 wakings a night and then Em got a cold and conjunctivitis and went into the back bedroom, so I did all night wakings, and, by necessity, a little bit of controlled crying. And that seems to have done the trick. As others have said, this has coincided with serious walking and gobbledegook talking since she turned 1, so I suspect she's also just knackering herself out. It is a blessed relief, because we were pretty broken. I also have no doubt that once she can get herself out of her cot / bed that we will have night time visitations!

http://www.theonion.com/article/parents-crying-child-must-not-be-any-good-50322?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=InstantArticles:NA:InFocus

Switching from a crib to a toddler bed. What age did you do it? How did it go?

badly

I mean we did it around 3, and she liked her new bed, but she also started getting out of it all the time at night, which totally fucked up her ability to sleep by herself, which caused our current crazy sleep situation (in combination with having the baby).