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

see, has affected my ability to type, cant even spell arrgh i'm falling

My middle schooler just casually brought up that they were talking about Mali in social studies and my wife started in on a huge sermon about drugs.

:D

took me 2 hours to get the joke :(

Does the joke require an american accent, if I'm reading this right?

(cos i didnt get it til just now either)

Anyone have thoughts on whether or not to post photos of kids to facebook? We try to mainly confine it to a private "channel," but even that has 59 members, many of whom are not family and we were considering limiting it to family. Also wondering if I should stop with the occasional posts to my page -- although it's "friends only," I do have hundreds of fb friends, some of whom I just don't know all that well.

quit facebook is the easiest solution to this conundrum

Seriously considering that, for real, but then I'd have to actually go to like 20 different websites every day to get my obsessive Trump and Bernie updates.

Carl isn't on FB, and I never post on FB, so we don't have that issue. However, we do like having a platform to share photos with select individuals, so we got a smugmug site/domain and password protected it. I like it because I can turn off comments and everything that I don't want on, basically it's just the pictures, a download link and a link to buy them if they so wish. I gave the password to just our parents, so they can access it and download whatever pictures they want. I also keep every single photo/video we take on the smugmug site in an archive folder, that no one has access to except myself. So I use it for backup as well.

Our older kid got busted yesterday. He was snooping around a vacant house in the neighborhood with a couple other kids when one of them broke a window with a rock. The house was apparently supervised by a nosey neighbor (the cops referred to him as the property manager, but I've lived in the neighborhood for 5 years and that property has never been "managed" so to speak). No charges were filed but the kids all have to pitch in to replace the window and help the property manager clean up the mess. Wife and I weren't even home, but his grandma was there babysitting our youngest kid when the cops brought him to the door. The kid was FREAKING out - I think it's probably good he picked up for something minor and had the shit scared out of him. Reasonable learning experience?

Hahah yep, that def will be. I remember when my younger bro was tossing rocks into the road once as a kid when bored, and he smashed one (by mistake) right thru the windscreen of a passing car. Driver screeched to a halt, got out, and started chasing him in bellowing fury. Never seen a kid so terrified. Dont recall S ever doing anything remotely bad again.

kinda glad to hear kids still throw rocks at things tbh

Just booked our first legit all-inclusive resort vacation. One of the daddest things I've done to date.

Found a very good flight plus resort deal through Costco. Highly rated though very standard issue looking place, sort of a docked luxury cruise ship with a beach. I just want to not worry about much of anything for four days.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/dont-post-about-me-on-social-media-children-say/

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/pout-some-more-and-it-goes-on-social-media-outside-the-family-parents-say/

I only posted two videos of my kids and about 2 dozen pictures last year. Most of this was done so their grandparents (who travel a lot) could see them. But even then, late in the year I just started sending them over via text message.

There are more pictures and videos of my children on facebook than have ever been taken of me. It's totally time to take them down and let them control their own social media presence the best that they can. But it's just one of those arduous tasks that I don't want to do (like all the ilm ballot poll clean-ups that I said I was going to do when I became mod!).

i never ever post my kids on twitter or FB, although i totally do on Flickr! i have no idea why i'm making that divide.

we post like a couple photos a year on FB. twitter is mostly work-related for me, so none there. we have a smugmug site that is not private although it probably would be a good idea to make it private

kids stuff is strictly flickr for us, and p much all of it is set to private

my 7yo was supposed to be doing math homework this morning and when i came downstairs he told me: 'i was watching youtubes of john cena and brock lesnar'

Maybe this subject has been discussed to death, but we were over at the house of friends with a son K's age, and I was slightly jarred by how different boy and girl toys are today, like as much as ever if not more. In particular I thought it was interesting to contrast the talking toys -- Captain America says stuff like "You're going down!" and "It's go time!" in this cold, aggressive tone, whereas K's toys all say stuff like "Can you help me feel better?" and "Let's dance *giggle*"

Hammer's got that mean teddy bear from Toy Story 3, so every once in awhile, I'll hear the disembodied voice of Ned Beatty announce from inside his closet, "Have you forgotten about me?"

― pplains, Thursday, June 19, 2014 10:42 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We haven't bought very many talking toys for our kids. Just these two, that I can think of.

Bumblebee, who despite being a Transformer, is unable to transform:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpH8-hluyfg

And Princess Twilight Sparkle, who is definitely not voiced by Tara Strong and it doesn't even sound like words that Twilight would say:
https://youtu.be/0xasDji1yG0?t=4m52s

Bumblebee, who despite being a Transformer, is unable to transform:

He must feel insecure about that.

Of course, this Bumblebee is better than the Optimus Prime I bought for him back around 2009. My kid was unable to transform it, so he handed it off to me. It must have taken me about twenty minutes squinting at the instructions and the second time I tried a piece snapped off in my hands.

The boy's also got this Spiderman doll that ... sounds nothing like Spiderman, right?

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

My kids got a birthday Thomas the Tank Engine that pulls a little cart with a birthday cake on it that plays an abbreviated version of the most recent iteration of the Thomas and Friends theme song. They received this gift on Saturday. We have in the intervening day heard this song about 500,000 times (500,100 once you factor in Youtube views of old Thomas episodes)

yea i have quickly learned to dismantle the battery in most of our singing toys

I'm currently dealing with it by treating it as a neverending vocal exercise and singing along to practice the technique stuff I've been working on in my voice lessons.

lol

my 3 year old loves thomas, building train tracks and connecting the magnetic trains is a genuinely fun thing to do w/ him, he gets very excited

but have you read the books? like the original stories by wilbert awdry? they are garbage imo

yea i have quickly learned to dismantle the battery in most of our singing toys

It's very unfair that I became a parent right at the dawn of the "fastened in place by screws" era of battery covers.

haha I have not read the books, no; our only connection to Thomas-related lit is modern coloring/sticker books

btw I have decreed they will not see the sticker book (OVER 700 STICKERS!!!) until they are teenagers

haha

xxp: Yeah, that's a huge pain in the ass, but I guess kids do swallow batteries and die. I dunno, my kids never came close to eating a battery.

I mean, you've touched your tongue to a battery before, right? What kid is going to eat that thing.

Now the screws, those would seem tasty if they got loose.

The worst is when we get our daughter's hexbug track out. We've bought her a couple dozen of these things and they run on dodgy watch batteries, so I pretty much have to just sit there with screwdriver in hand to replenish them as they die.

http://cdn.ubergizmo.com/photos/2010/3/hexbug-nano_main_468.jpg

but have you read the books? like the original stories by wilbert awdry? they are garbage im

this is so otm - like I'm okay with the train toys and the tracks and stuff but the stories ugh so fucking idiotic. Thomas the Really Useless Engine, Always Fucking Things Up by Not Following Clear and Simple Instructions.

haha exactly

I have multiple times said that the show should be renamed from "Thomas and Friends" to "Those Fucking Stupid Trains"

H and I have a running joke about Percy where we narrate horrible calamities in Ringo Starr's voice: "Oh no, Percy, you've gone off the bridge again and all your passengers are drowning" etc.

There was an old episode where the trains were being taunted by a bunch of lorries who were threatening to take their jobs away and delighting when calamities struck the lorries down and they could continue hauling freight.

One of the calamities that Thomas watched and laughed at was one of the rude lorries DRIVING OFF OF A CLIFF AND EJECTING HIS DRIVER DURING THE FALL/CRASH

Also Sir Topham Hat is a total capitalist pig taskmaster.

sorry, it was Toby who was the total psychopath rather than Thomas:

http://ttte.wikia.com/wiki/Horrid_Lorry

We are not at the full-on Thomas stage yet but I believe it's coming soon.

My wife and I are kind of up obsessed with the songs on all of Cecil's toys. Like are the singers stoked to have a gig, or horribly depressed that this is what they have to do for money? One of the toys he has has a male singer who sounds like a total theater kid type and you can hear the shame in his voice when he starts singing about counting.

I can tell you from anecdotal observation that the singers are stoked to have a gig

"i like to trump and i am crazy (DJP)
Posted: April 4, 2016 at 10:03:03 AM
My kids got a birthday Thomas the Tank Engine that pulls a little cart with a birthday cake on it that plays an abbreviated version of the most recent iteration of the Thomas and Friends theme song. They received this gift on Saturday. We have in the intervening day heard this song about 500,000 times (500,100 once you factor in Youtube views of old Thomas episodes)"

This is why electrical tape over the speaker grill is the most important tool in the parental toolbox IMO.

The thing I hate most about children's television is watching children's television, and the thing I hate second most about children's television is the way your kids start talking like children's television.