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

she can make your face into a sunheart

Bloody kids!

B and the 2 boys went off to the shopping mall about an hour ago. Not 15 minutes later, Mo's little english friend who is here seeing his dad, knocks on the door. I am confused. "none of them were here... was Mo expecting you?". A replies "well yeah, we were gonna take him camping with us but he hadnt answered any of my texts so we came over to check, I guess he's still sick"

Me, to myself: sick? Mo isnt sick wtf. Kid slinks off sans his friend. I disctincly recall them talking about maybe doing this weekend camp thing a few weeks ago. How could he have forgotten to arrange it properly raaargh!? Hes twelve. He should know better now.

haha don't get your hopes up... My 26 year old brother forgets to arrange literally anything. I think he's supposed to be staying at mine tonight after some hideous all-nighter but I had to ask him how he was getting home (he lives hours away) and he said " oh yeah...." and I think means to stay here but...? He was going to tell me when he'd arranged the journey here, which he hasn't yet so who knows where he'll end up.

lol :) Men!

As it turns out B had already texted them back and said "no Mo isnt free today hes not well" (which explains that comment) and the bloody kid turned up at the doorstep anyway!

There are many aspects of parenting that have made me feel old and out-of-touch, but maybe none so much as becoming the guy who tells a sleepover party of six-year-old girls "I'm not kidding! It's time to go to sleep!"

lool

btw my brother ended up not here, but in London, then rang me to say he'd missed the bus back to his (my parents') home and didn't know when any others were. (Left him to it and he ended up on a later bus)

There are many aspects of parenting that have made me feel old and out-of-touch, but maybe none so much as becoming the guy who tells a sleepover party of six-year-old girls "I'm not kidding! It's time to go to sleep!"

― how's life, Monday, August 28, 2017 4:39 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sometimes when I start doing my "tough parent voice" and get self-conscious about it, it reminds me of that Richard Pryor routine about being a naïve kid and threatening mafiosos to pay him:

I busted into the office with this motherfucker. Talkin' about... "All right. Give me the money. Motherfucker!" Doing my best black shit. You know. You know. That shit usually scare whitey to death. And these motherfuckers didn't do nothin'

I always feel like I'm "doing my best parent shit" and the kids don't flinch.

I tried hardmanning my older kid last week about what time I needed him home and he completely called my bluff and continued to argue his position for 45 minutes until I gave in.

omg I'd have lost it well before that point.

It was tough. I've lost it before - sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. In all, this was over something pretty petty so I didn't want to make it worse than it was. It was essentially a case of trying to convince a hungry and tired child that they're hungry and tired.

I feel a lot of pain around starting my daughter in kindergarten. Seeing her go from this nice little sheltered small preschool to a mega-sized public elementary with 200 kindergartners. Seeing her experience so much anxiety around the change. She has friends at the school but none wound up in her class. I feel like maybe I am reliving some pain I went through as well, because there was something unplaceably painful about the whole experience of public school, even well before I got to the age where actual bullies made it painful.

I don't know, I just feel this terrible existential anguish about it like, "welp, you've reached the point where I have to send you into a chaotic and strange world for reasons that you can't understand and I can't completely understand either."

it's just crazy to me that you have a child in kindergarten so maybe it's just we're getting old

When did/does she start? You say she's experiencing anxiety about it - has she already been through a few days?

I totally understand the angst about sending your kid off to school though. I spend every first day of school off from work, waiting for the bus - THE BUS - to bring them back to me. And then every day after that waiting for whoever is supposed to meet them at the bus to let me know that they got back home ok.

But I think that schools have gotten a lot better about bullying. Even though there is some of it there, it's not as bad as it used to be and the schools have better systems in place to handle conflicts that arise.

Our littlest, 11 now, has started middle school, entailing a métro ride across the city (~30 mins each way). We're taking her and picking her up this first week, and probably some of next week, but then we'd like her to be on her own. It's pretty normal here for kids to ride the train to school, but it's still a bit of a leap of faith for us.

Our oldest has started her last year of high school too! We had kids early for our peer group (mid 20s) & I have plenty of friends my age still having their first. It's weird.

Sometimes I just feel like the entire apparatus of school is a terrible thing to put children through, even when there's no bullying. For example, I hate the way they have different teachers each year, different classmates each year, so much change every single year for like 17 years of their lives. It seems so destabilizing.

Dropoff today was bedlam. The K kids wear tags with their name and class to make sure they get to the right room because they can't even accommodate parents bringing their kids into the school, it's so over capacity.

K was fine when I picked her up fwiw and said she had fun in school, but later in the afternoon had an extreme meltdown, which I guess is pretty typical for how kids her age process stress.

Oh god having the same classmates every year would have been horrible

Wait wait... you dont have the same class mates each year? In HS i get that, youre picking subjects but when I was in primary school, we more or less had the same set of kids going thru the same classes unless they like, moved or something.

Actually even in high school I did up til year 10.

Well in my elementary school actually it was a relatively static group -- we might shift back and forth btw classes but there were only two or three teachers in a grade so we were mostly with the same kids in K-6. Middle school fed from a bunch of different elementary schools and also some kids I was friends with left and went to private school. I guess had I gone to my neighborhood high school instead of a magnet school I would have stayed with a lot of the same kids.

K's school has 8 fucking kindergarten classes of 25 kids each. Also the area is just more transient and a lot of people move to the suburbs somewhere btw K and 5th grade/

Not sure about elementary, because we moved so many times when i was in K-5, but def staring in 6th grade we had multiple teachers throughout the day and different kids in each class.

8 kinder classes! yikes thats a heavy load of kiddies :)

Henry and Bee's school has 8 Pre-K classes

Maybe it's 6. They take up a 1/3 of the school.

K's class seems fine but the overcrowding is really felt at dropoff and pickup. Dropoff is basically a huge bottleneck at the gate and you have to kind of push your kid through the crowd and just send them in by themselves. At pickup (which is split into four locations), you feel like you're waiting for someone to be released from a POW camp.

Friends who have kids our kids' age are turning 40, and they're having their 40th birthday as a no-kids event during the day on a weekend. For some reason I feel IA about this -- it seems like common decency to either allow kids or have it at night. I don't want to leave my kids with a babysitter in the middle of a Sunday.

lol yeah that seems like a dick move, who's going to babysit all those kids

it's valid for them to have a no-kids party, it's valid for you to say you can't go because of it

I don't mind a no-kids party at all, I just don't like it being in the middle of a Sunday. Like, we all work, and weekends are our time with our kids. I don't want to leave them with a babysitter at 4pm when I don't see them during the day all week.

Today one of my sons asked our Amazon Echo to play "Lady Gaga, 'Bad Running Man'". I really wish this song existed.

it's about me at parties

middle of sunday too that's a bad time for a party. we're getting ready for the week man

is having constant heart palpitations a normal side effect of letting your toddler play at painting? "oh fuck the sofa... the floor... where's she going, fuck, the wallpaper, no not the spare room with the bed with white sheets!"

Yes. We try to do art outside, or say "on the paper or not at all." But still end up doing a lot of "oh god not there please."

Cleaning the house while children are living in it is like shoveling the sidewalk while it's still snowing.

Me, I pretty much think we'll repaint the walls and get the furniture recovered once we're past Nonstop Chaos Stage. In the meantime we'll live with an awful lot of chaos.

outside, tarp, newspaper, full hazmat only way i roll

We have this huge plastic sheet we put over the table for painting, which works quite well, except for Ella's clothes, which inevitably get througly painted

When he was like, 4, the stepkid wrote his name all over the hallway wall. Mo mo momo mo mo mo mo mo mo in rows. B has shown me a video of him walking up to this mess, and asking Mo to his face "did you do this?" and the little shit says "no, it wasnt me!" to the camera!

he also once daubed "I Luv u daddy" on a pillowcase in texta.

I parked next to a beat-up car a couple of weeks ago, and on the back of the headrest among various scribbles in market was scrawled in childlike hand I <3 YOU MOMMY

*marker

Adorable!

I picked up our toddler from the childminder once and she said they'd been doing messy play in the kitchen with water and flour. I looked round her spotless kitchen in amazement.

outside, tarp, newspaper, full hazmat only way i roll

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Sunday, October 15, 2017 4:51 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

I think I may be fully done with ever hanging out with childless friends with my kids after tonight. Granted this is an especially taxing friend.

I'm basically down to one pre-kids friend who is still childless himself that I can still deal with. And he's a very familial guy with nieces and nephews so he gets it.

Huh. What's the problem? I have a handful of childless friends

Get better childless friends.

Maybe I just had a weird way of picking friends before I had kids

I mean tbc, 50% of it is just that almost any childless person is going to be less accustomed to the rhythm of life with children, so they won't really "get" for example why plans have to be scheduled in a certain way, why you can't be as loose about things as they can etc., even if they rationally understand it via explanation/observation.

Also, I just had an especially annoying experience with a friend, so I'm coming off that.