NickMom — There aren’t that many good ones, tbh.
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- “Whoa, 24 babies on one flight? That must be a record!”
- “The captain really hates talking to children.”
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Tag Archives: moms
The Worst Sentences To Hear Right Before Boarding The Plane (NickMom)
School Picture Day: Forever Capturing Your Smile, Or Whatever The Hell That Is You’re Doing
Sixth grade.
Island Packet — Generally speaking, we don’t order or display school pictures very often, for one simple reason: I have seen mine.
My mom has hanging in her house the complete and unabridged collection of Godawful Jeff School Photos, everything from a mint 1980 Floppy-Haired Kindergartener to a 1986 Inconceivable Geek With Monstrous Plastic Brown Glasses to the 1991 Moody Teen Who Is Scowling Because His Parents Made Him Get Braces in the 11th Grade. The pictures are arranged in chronological order in an oval, ostensibly to simulate a clock and the passage of time. It’s a treasured and invaluable part of my mom’s home decor, and I want to smash it with a hammer and light it on fire, then smash the smashed pieces with a hammer and feed them to a moose, or any kind of animal that eats hopelessly nerdlinger school photos, I’ll have to look it up.
I bring this up because we got our school pictures from my younger son’s day care last week. Read more.
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Right, Like You Haven’t Fed Your Kid This Type Of Bacon Before
Stop looking at me like that, Paltrow
Island Packet — I casually mentioned to a friend last week that I’d made my son waffles and bacon for breakfast that morning. I also casually mentioned that I’d done it a few days before, and a few days before that, and probably a few times the previous week as well. My older son does not have an adventuresome palate, so when his dad finds something the boy will eat that doesn’t originate from exhaust-belching factory machinery with the words “VAT OF NUGGETS” on it, he sticks relentlessly with what works. So, sure, I said, waffles and bacon. Get some OJ, throw some fruit out there, breakfast of champions. Let’s get this kid to third grade.
But my news seemed to come as a solid surprise, like, wait, you make him waffles and bacon? Every day? Sure, I replied, feeling really pretty jaunty about myself and my breakfast-related fathering, given all this sudden affirmation and everything.
Well, obviously, this was a bit of a communication breakdown. It took me a few minutes to realize she was talking about actual waffles and actual bacon, while I was talking about something different — namely waffles that can be waffled in a toaster and come from Sam’s Club in a box of 35,000, and precooked bacon that can be re-cooked in a microwave and come from Sam’s Club in a box of 47,000.
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Toddlers almost fall into the ocean pretty much all the time, right?
Yeah, yeah, I’m working on it.
GateHouse — So it’s totally normal for kids to almost fall off of piers into oceans during trips to the water with their dads, right? That’s a thing that happens pretty regularly? Right? All the time? I’ll take your collective silence as a big yes.
Being a brisk and glorious Sunday morning, and because it had been a gray and pallid Saturday and we were all tired of being in the house with each other, I took my youngest — an 18-month-old mucus production system — out to a local pier for some good old-fashioned rock throwin’. I contend there is no greater activity for children than rock-throwin’, in any capacity. Rock thrown’ into the water, rock thrown’ into the pond, rock throwin’ at a wall. Every Christmas, every single Christmas, we go through this profoundly insane charade of making a gift list, receiving presents from the gift list, opening said presents, writing thank-you notes for said presents and spending a few hours playing with presents that are all like 750% less fun than an average pile of rocks. Geology has given us the perfect toy, and here we are screwing around with Legos and action figures and whatever Monster High is.
So with a day to ourselves we headed to watch people casting nets into the Intracoastal Waterway. We’ve done this a number of times. Once my older son and I came across two fishermen, two youngish guys of probably 20 or so who had not spent a great deal of their day in the field of personal care and at least one of which was, unless he was suffering from a glaucomal condition not readily apparent, probably illegal.
It takes a village. Just not one built using Minecraft.
This thrilling-looking excitementfest is what it’s keeping my son up late at night.
Island Packet — For going on nine years, the video game situation in our house has been happily deplorable.
By “deplorable,” I mean we don’t have video games. We are sans Wii. There is no Xbox here, no PlayStation. One time a friend brought over some device that you control by hopping around your living room like a hysterical lunatic, which wasn’t something I could see doing regularly. Somewhere in the attic there’s an ancient blow-on-the-cartridge-era Nintendo, which essentially represents the precise moment my video game evolution came to an end. And that’s it for video games. Somewhere, we are being pitied by the Amish.
Yet it’s hard for me to stand atop Hippie Mountain and say, “The scourge of video games shall not touch this castle!,” because in place of the Xbox, we’ve become obsessed with something called Minecraft. And apparently if you are the parent of a boy between the ages of 3 and 18, there’s a solid chance you just went, “Oh my God yeah, Minecraft!” — especially if you’re the kind of person who talks to your computer a lot. Read more.
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Latest @NickMom: Things The Harbaughs’ Mom Probably Said To Them Last Weekend
NickMom — And you thought your kids’ sibling rivalry was annoying..
8. “Maybe you could compete to see who could get his high school crap out of my basement faster?” 5. “Did you know your other brother Jake is a heart surgeon? Now that’s a job with a future.”
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Read the full list at NickMom.
My ancient Chinese secret to classroom volunteering
Whatever, this is NOT food.
GateHouse — Because I’m idiot-lucky enough to work either at home or at coffeeshops — such as this one, next to two guys currently talking with spirited middle-aged titillation about real estate in North Dakota and its connection to fracking, and if any of this makes sense to you you should be putting a down payment on something in Fargo RIGHT NOW, you’re welcome — I’m able to volunteer semi-regularly in my older son’s classrooms. It’s one of the best things about my work arrangement, because I can feel like an attentive, mindful part of my son’s education, and also because I can totally spy on him.
In recent years I’ve brought in and operated an iPad for a presentation about the weather (my son can’t be trusted to bring home both of his shoes every day, let alone something shiny and fragile), and served as a mentor for “Junior Achievement,” a five-week program on first-grade level economics that ended up being primarily about coloring pictures of fruit carts. Once I gave a short talk about my great-grandfather’s immigration to Ellis Island, a colorful and historically accurate speech memorable mostly for being interrupted by a classmate named Olivia who really, really likes Chee-tos.
So right before Christmas my son’s class hosted an International Food Festival to commemorate the holidays. His class comprises a pretty equitable cross-section of backgrounds, so I was looking forward to sampling some authentic cuisine, while subconsciously revealing to him that there exists a bright diaspora of food outside the that which comes in nugget form. Naturally this was a hysterical failure but whatever.
My son’s chosen culinary homeland was China, and as a parent volunteer my job was to deliver the authentic Chinese food he insisted on bringing: fortune cookies. I know. Also, I know. And yes, we repeatedly told him repeatedly, in repeated form, that fortune cookies are less from China and more from the Chinese restaurants that can be found in strip malls under bright usually broken neon signs that say CHINESE and are usually next to Shoe Carnivals. But he insisted on them, because, I suspect, they are fun.
I am unsettled by the appearance of this triceratops in my home
Oh, sure, it looks cute until it starts with the HIDEOUS ROARING
GateHouse — So naturally, there is an animatronic triceratops in my house.
It’s right there, six or eight feet behind me, staring at me with dead Rock-A-Fire Explosion eyes that are currently locked open as if to say “That’s right, go ahead and keep thinking we’re extinct.” It is a large thing, maybe three feet tall from foot to the summit of its crested defensive shield. It’s quite lifelike, or at least as lifelike as a three-foot-tall animatronic triceratops sitting in your office in 2012 can be (and when I say “office” I mean “space that contains one old desk and 1,900 plastic baby toys”).
And being a children’s toy that is in my house, it naturally makes unholy amounts of noise, hideous shrieks and hollers that are quite ill-befitting the animal’s herbivorous nature. When you turn this thing on, it basically becomes a self-aware hell beast that makes robot sounds. It sounds like what would happen if a water buffalo gave birth inside one of those old metal garbage cans that Oscar The Grouch lived in, and it does this several dozen times a day, whenever one of my children activate it, which they do, all the time, constantly, because, in their defense, it is a animatronic triceratops in their house, and it is awesome. It’s just about the best toy ever, and yet here I am, passive-aggressively grousing about it in newspapers. Luckily, one of them can’t read yet, so I’m at least 50% safe here.
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Oh, just spending some quality time with my son in a graveyard
GateHouse — Despite their reputation for being lively and fun, cemeteries are really rather spooky. This is because they’re generally solemn and sprawling and “respectful” or whatever, but I think it’s also because the ground beneath them is stuffed full of dead people? Like, everywhere? Like, you can’t really walk or jog or lay a picnic blanket down without running probably into someone’s “final resting place?” (They also have headstones everywhere, some very large and ornate, that make them extremely inconvenient for baseball games and water balloon fights, but that’s for another time.
I mention this because I’ve spent the better part of a weekend in a cemetery, as I’m staying with relatives in a small town in upstate New York filled with very old and deceased people. The house I’m staying in is a very old house at the foot of a very old cemetery, and its backyard is basically all gravestones, which means the place is almost certainly haunted, but it’s not like you have to worry about the neighbors in the back having parties or anything. (Seriously, to park at the house you need to pass through the cemetery’s very old gate. It’d be a fun story, if I wasn’t too busy jumping four feet in the air at every single last creak and pop while simultaneously, and this is the only word that makes sense here, whorlping.)
The cemetery is very old — the earliest birt date my 8-year-old son and I tracked down was 1771 (“You kids think you have it rough? In my day we had to walk uphill both ways and WE DIDN’T HAVE AN AMERICA you ungrateful hippies”). And it is very large, and there are tiered rises topping its many exhausting hills. And finally — and this is the part that surprised me a little bit — it is AMAZING for hide-and-seek. Like, I will never play hide-and-seek anywhere else again. When my 11-month-old wants to play hide-and-seek in a few years around the house, I will be like “ABSOLUTELY NOT” unless we can get to a nearby cemetery, which will be an entertaining detail he can bring up to the therapist later.
About
I'm a a writer for such outlets as Men's Health, South Magazine, Nickelodeon's NickMom.com, Billboard, brucespringsteen.net and Paste, a syndicated humor columnist for GateHouse and a father of two (the younger of whom has been personally approved by Bruce Springsteen) on the coast of South Carolina. Even longer bio/clips.Posts That Appear Strangely High in Google
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