parenting memes and things

I loved this visual so much I had to doodle it.

Me: What do you want?

Toddler: WANT!

Me: Please use your words

Is your mama a llama?

Also, is my mama a dragon?

erm… THAT just happened

look at my thing i made

i love my baby! #mybaby

soooo… i just did a thing

new baby just dropped

this vs hydrogen bomb

[circle factory image] i guess we doin babies now

I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.

waiting for the new pope with mama

“Hey, he’s lying. In case you didn’t know.”

“She knows” says my child, “she just pretends to believe people who are lying to be nice. CLASSIC my mom.”