Category Archives: Dad Stories / Parenting

Do you have any cards that play the Mexican Hat Dance? You do? VALENTINE’S IS SAVED!

More holidays should have Kung Fu Panda-themed cards.

GateHouse — If there is any place on Earth more bruisingly depressing than the Valentine’s Day card rack at Target on Feb. 12, I’ve yet to hear about it. OK, that’s not entirely true, I can think of plenty more depressing places, such as the offices of whoever has to do promotion for the “Chipmunks” movies and wherever Newt Gingrich goes to apply his pre-stump speech neck-grease, but at least the people shopping at Target have their own non-billionaire-provided money, now that I think about it, so I think Gingrich wins for most depressing? Winning! Aw, that’ll be a weird feeling for him.

What am I doing here on Feb. 12, you may ask, judgingly? Well,  usually I’m like weeks ahead of the Valentine’s situation, because I’m really super-thoughtful at all times, except this year, when I’m scraping together a Valentine plan with two kids, which is making the card selection process a lot more enjoyable and family-oriented and part of a bonding ha oh I’m just kidding it’s a miserable nightmare please tell me someone stashed burlap sacks full of painkillers in the “Get Well Soon” section or something.

But it’s not a nightmare because of the kids, who are being great, except the one who keeps drooling on my face. No, it’s a nightmare because of the desperate surfeit of miserable greeting card manufacturers.

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How To Put On A Baby Carrier

NickMom  Step 1. Slide left strap over left shoulder. Slide right strap over right shoulder. (Note: Step 1 may require dislocation of shoulder. This is normal.)

Step 2. On front of carrier, put the deal into that clicky thing.

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The COMPLETE SET OF HELPFUL INSTRUCTIONS over at NickMom.


Top 9 Least Appropriate Ways To Prepare Your Older Child For A New Baby

NickMom — The baby is coming! The baby is coming! And your world is a blur of excitement and joy and harmony! But HOLD UP — what about the other child that already lives in your house? OH YEAH. THAT GUY.

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  1. I mean, if you have to watch all those delivery videos then everyone should watch all those delivery videos, right?
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Nanny Application: Kanye West, aka Ye, aka Nanny McPheezy

Read the full unprecedented artistic version via NickMom.

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The Smart Baby Scale: And to think, you used to have to bore your Facebook friends manually

It's shocking how much time was not needed to locate this image

GateHouse — You know what Facebook could use is an increased level of unprovoked information about people’s kids, and before any of you jumpy gophers who leave a Facebook tab up “at work” to pounce on posts/comments like rabid animals get all “snarky” and “sarcastic” and “busy with quotation fingers” I know I put kid pictures on Facebook all the time too; I am not saying that I never do it or you should never do it, particularly if hypothetically your child was all sweet pushing his baby brother around in a stroller or that baby has a particularly lively reaction to your eerily accurate Swedish Chef impression. I am just saying that oh my God seriously if I see another child I don’t know sitting on a toilet I am definitely canceling the Internet service of the elderly neighbor/nonprofit I’m stealing wifi from, which is either “rutner house” or “Beaufort County Orphanage” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys.”

(Incidentally this is where my 8-year-old would roll his eyes and go, “Don’t listen to him, Dad’s being sar-castic,” not that I would put that on Facebook or anything EVEN THOUGH IT’S UNBEARABLY CUTE AND YOU SHOULD ALL KNOW ABOUT IT.)

And yet here we are, thanks to the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual gathering of people to whom I would normally ascribe a dumb, nerdworthy nickname like “coding goobers” or “zittlywankers” or “Parrotheads” except I’m sure that any one of them is capable of building a nanorobot 14 molecules high that could kill me in my sleep using an endoplasmic reticulum. If you haven’t read up on this thing take a look online; seriously, it’s like a “Star Wars” convention for nerds.

Well, make that nerds and their parents: Because of CES we will soon have access to a device that will weigh your Precious Little Angel and auto-fire the results to Twitter and Facebook, saving you the trouble of weighing your child on some vintage hand-cranked lead-painted off-the-grid scale from Service Merchandise in 1983 and using a whole separate app to bore everyone to tears manually.

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Top 9 Most Frequent Topics Of Songs Made Up By My 7-Year-Old And His Friend Alex At Dinner

NickMom — They’re pretty much the Hall and Oates of digestive tract-themed improvisational dinner music. Head over to NickMom for the list.


Apparently there are parenting downsides to that “MythBusters” episode about burning Christmas trees

This photo is not at all interesting to the average impressionable 7-year-old or anything.

GateHouse — The 7-year-old and I have been watching a lot of “MythBusters” lately. which is, needless to say, a fantastic idea when parenting a second-grade super-absorbent spongeperson who enjoys explosions and fire and large trucks crashing into other trucks to create explosions.

I justify this regular explosion exposure by sitting next to him and occasionally shouting “Science!” like the guy in that Thomas Dolby song. I mean, “MythBusters” isn’t an attention-deficit cartoon designed to overinflate action-figure profit margins or move units of cereal, right? Moreover, thanks to the wonder twins of DVR and Apple TV we get to skip the Commercials For Things, although I would probably feel a little better if Discovery could make with the less advertising of “Weed Wars” and that show about people’s first week in jail). Otherwise, it’s QUALITY TELEVISION. And if quality television so happens to involve endearing humans rocketing themselves down awesomely lengthy makeshift waterslides and crashing backhoes into things, well SCIENCE!

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Top 9 Reasons Giving Birth At A Concert Would Very Much Suck

NickMom — 6. Coldplay may make great baby-making music but Chris Martin gets all weird when you start screaming during contractions.

Rest of list, featuring no more Coldplay references I PROMISE, is here.

Who cuts down real Christmas trees? REAL MEN, WITH AXES, THAT IS WHO

Basically what I looked like, except I had a larger axe

GateHouse — We never cut down our own Christmas trees when I was a kid, mostly because it turned out that they sold objects very similar to Christmas trees at the Target in Marion, Ind. — and get this: You could hardly tell the difference! Well, there were a few giveaways: Instead of dropping crisp needles all over the carpet the fake ones appeared majestic and invincible for what was sometimes months (taking down the Christmas tree is super-boring), and instead of having to be cut down they could be disassembled like Legos and returned to their spot in the attic. That said, instead of smelling like fresh forest pine they smelled like a Target in Marion, Ind.

As such, Christmas was as much about getting out the tree as it was getting out the box the tree spent most of its year in. Being lucky enough to have both a Christmas-loving family and large ceilings (mostly the latter), our tree was a beast, a monstrous army-grade Artifical Douglas Fraser Fir Pine something (OK you got me I cheated my way through horticulture) that came in a box large enough to, if needed, store the car.

When you are a small person, boxes of course are the coolest toys ever, or at least up there with such perennial childhood chestnuts as bubble wrap, pieces of broken cement, packing peanuts and handfuls of gravel. This year marks my 36th of wondering what in the hell we’re all doing departing Thanksgiving dinner to camp under neon signs for off-brand tablet computers when if we give every kid in the country a pile of UPS bubble wrap, packing material and about 30 pounds of dirt kids would all be murderous-eyed with joy (except of course for the selfish materialistic ones, but we could just throw gravel at them).

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The Daddy Shower: “THE LATEST TREND IN BABY SHOWERS!” according to this press release, which lies

OMG this looks so amazing.

GateHouse — If you have ever been a parent and/or subjected to one on Facebook, you know that child-rearing is filled with people doing strange and terrible things, such as affixing leashes to their children in theme parks, motoring to a Walmart at 10:45 p.m. on a Tuesday to purchase Harry Potter costume components or posting six-minute videos of sled rides on the Internet, and trust me when I say I have only done two of those things so I CAN CLAIM MORAL SUPERIORITY HA HA HA oh my God why aren’t more people liking this picture of my son’s Harry Potter costume.

(It also, according to the coffee shop at which I am currently quote-fingers working, makes grandparents do things like attempt to facilitate a conversation with a 6-year-old on a speakerphone in the out-of-doors because it’s not like anything could remotely not work in that scenario, which reminds me: If you take someone else’s iPhone and then throw it in a parking lot and then drive over it and back over it and then then drive over it again until it is dead is that still illegal?)

Anyway, because parenting is filled with strange and terrible things it is ripe for people selling stranger and terrible things, which brings me to the idea of the “Daddy Shower,” which I learned of via one of those caffeinated press releases  (“THE LATEST TREND IN BABY SHOWERS!” it lies) that indicates that Brooklyn, Paris and Dubai have been secretly hosting underground Daddy Showers for months and is written in such a way as to indicate the author had been viewing adult human males for years with binoculars from behind trees but had yet to risk approaching one.

“Think baby showers are just for moms?,” it continues, addressing a problem that no one has ever complained about ever. “Not anymore!” And it is here that I offer ALLELUIA because seriously you guys I had just gotten through telling my friends “I mean it’s nice that we make more money and never deliver babies and have totally invented a way to wield phrases like ‘Strategic Content Financial Control Analyst’ as though they have any meaning at all, but dammit why do all the gurlz get to sit around rooms full of matching centerpieces opening presents for three hours at a time? INEQUITY!” And then I pounded my table importantly and sipped Scotch and I think harumphed? I can’t be sure, that was a really long sentence to remember.

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Springsteen’s father’s baby shower gifts: disapproval and detachment, and maybe a rattle forged from human pain.

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