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

my son starts school in September and the (state) school has just announced they will be asking for 'voluntary contributions' of £10/month. I understand why they have to do this but yet again FUCK THE TORIES

my newly 9-year-old daughter (today's her birthday) has asked if she can have her own email account. i'm thinking she's too young, even for google's family link account, but it would make things more convenient since right now emails from her friends come to me or my wife. thoughts?

Happy 9th! That's coming up quickly for us as well.

Email? Sure, but monitor, monitor, monitor, imo. Have rules in place about transparency. How much internet access does she currently have? All I really want to say about that is I've learned lessons this year after having been laisez-faire about my older kid's internet access.

My first child is due in, er, 16 days. What's an emoji that combines anxiety, joy and terror? Perhaps it's just my normal face

That's so exciting Chuck! All three emotions are entirely appropriate.

https://thereviewweekly.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/good-luck-chuck.png?w=1000

lol my niece (11) just remembered she can now text me (since last weekend)

so far it is a blizzard of near-miss spelling and emojis arriving as question marks in squares

yeah but how’s her texting tho

My 4yo told me yesterday he didn't think Father Christmas was real! I asked him who he thought put presents in his stocking and he said 'you'.
So he's had literally one Christmas where he's been old enough to 'know' what's going on and possibly believe in Father Christmas.

Incidentally he'd started school the day before, but doubt he'd have talked much about Christmas and definitely not with any older kids.
:(
I waffled a bit but didn't confirm either way. We were talking about angels and whether they were real. He doesn't care about angels but really seems to want fairies to be real.

(xp) lol my friend has twins who are 6. they both have ipads (she said don't judge her). she imessaged them saying "go to bed." the girl then imessaged the boy something like "mommy said go to bed. if you don't you are in trouble and i will tell so just do it or you're in trouble like serious trouble!" she sent me and someone else on a group text screenshots of this and we were all like "how does she write so well on an ipad, and so fast?" then simultaneously realized she had figured out how to talk into it.

xp if my 3 1/2 year old figures out pa xmas is fake in the next year or two i will be delighted. i'm certainly not going to be pushing it as a thing, though my wife my be more ambivalent.

parental santa lies did trump *and* brexit

We had a daughter! It’s been a long week. Our water birth plan turned into an induction plan which turned into a last-minute emergency C-section. That took two days. Then we spent two days staying in a busy maternity ward like something from MASH, which was actually a riot. Then we went home! Then we went back to the hospital! And spent two days in an austere ward for a terrible-seeming health issue that turned out to be quite fixable. Then we went home again today! Fingers crossed this stage lasts a lot longer.

Anyway our daughter is a fucking joy and have 87 frozen family-cooked frozen meals to eat <333

Congratulations!

yay!! congratulations!

Well done!

Hurrah, congratulations on making it through all that with so much joy! And bon appetit...

huge congrats chuck!

Congratulations! I wish all the love and luck to you and your family.

Congratulations!
Maternity wards SUCK ime, glad you're home

Congratulations Chuck!

Congrats!

Congrats Chuck! Sounds very similar to the birth of my daughter, except she finally came out as my wife was on the operating table about to have the emergency C-section.

Lots of fun times ahead but be sure to enjoy every moment as my daughter started secondary school this month and I have absolutely no idea where the time went.

Not sure where to put this really, but need to put it somewhere. Since my daughter was born 6 1/2 years ago I have pretty much been one step away from tears the whole time. Everything is both amazing and terrifying and she's so small and vulnerable and I don't know what I'm saying really but it's quite exhausting.

Oh man, I'm with you.

The joys of parenting!

It’s only been a week but totally cosign that

Sometimes when she farts on my lap, I end up laughing so much I have to put her down to stop from shaking her :)

I haven't checked in here in awhile. Got an update to this post from four years ago: ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

the other night he's messing around with an old PSP handheld game, looking through the camera just before bed. "See, Dad, look at this," and he hands me the console. We've got just the one lamp on, so there isn't much to see, especially on that low-res display.

"What, what do you want me to see?" I ask.

"You see all that dark stuff coming out of the walls? THAT'S the stuff that comes to me in my nightmares."

And he's talking about the lousy artifacts you get on a bad camera.

That five-year-old is now a 10-year-old who heard all about freakin' LSD at Red Ribbon Week. Trying to tell me it's like watching a movie that's real, characters coming up to you who aren't really there...

I tell him that "I hear" it's not like that at all. Stuff gets a little wavy, colors get a little vibrant, but Mickey Mouse doesn't knock on your door or anything. Then I remember that PSP game. "Remember what that camera looked like? How you saw stuff in the walls that wasn't there? LSD is more like that than it is 'Alice in Wonderland'."

He thinks for a moment, and then says, "Maybe all our brains are trying to 'see' something that's not there, and that's why life looks like that crappy camera sometimes."

I swear, he's *this* close to figuring it out. Lord knows I haven't yet.

Wtf is red ribbon week

I thought it was a USA thing?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Ribbon_Week

Though that's the first time I've heard its origins from a tortured DEA agent.

The red ribbon became their symbol for prevention in order to reduce the demand of illegal drugs. California Congressman Duncan Hunter and teacher David Dhillon launched "Camarena Clubs" in California high schools.

This caught my eye but it's not that Duncan Hunter. (It's his dad!)

That's uncomfortably close to Macarena

Red Ribbon Week sounds like some bullshit. Do they still have D.A.R.E. too?

I posted this on Facebook a while back so sorry for those who have seen it twice.


Me, trying to tell Henry about Snoop Dogg’s (his fave artist and birthday-sake) cover of Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand while his big sister is in earshot:

Henry: Who is Nick Cave?
Me: He’s an Australian singer. He was in a band called The Boys Next Door...
Beatrice: That’s a bad name for a band.
Me:...and then a band called The Birthday Party...
Beatrice: Stupid name!
Me:...now he’s in a band called The Bad Seeds...
Beatrice: Awful!!
Me: ...and Snoop Dogg covered one of his songs.
Beatrice: DISGUSTING!!!!!!
Me: 😡😡😡😡😡😡😡

Wait till she hears about 'Grinderman'!

I tell him that "I hear" it's not like that at all

hah

there was this kids video we'd watch that had this weird glitch where for like, 3-4 seconds all you'd see are the wireframes of the characters, it's like the people who made it forgot to watch it before uploading (it's racked up 100 million views since, LOL). my boy (who is almost 5) gets very unsettled by this now.

Loving Henry's running commentary there, beautiful!

Tell him he has an album called 'Henry's Dream' and a song called 'Henry Lee'

Fuck, misread it was Beatrice, I shall go boil my head

He's right tho Birthday Party is a stupid name for a band =D

>:(

is not

i will fite u beeps

My boss is huge asshole, so I've just quit my job to be a stay-at-home dad for a few months. My daughter is only three months old. I am pretty confident this is a good decision, I think! We can afford a few months, anyway.

Yasss! Do it. ❤️

Go on son

I'm enjoying being a stay-at-home parent more than I want to admit! Maybe not today, the day of screeching, though.

I am in Jerusalem and wow are there a lot of little kids here

My kid lost a tooth the night before Xmas. We told her that she could write a letter to the tooth fairy after Xmas, so that Santa didnt run into her. I have no idea if she still believes or not, but if not she's holding her cards close to her chest. I put the tooth inside a ziploc bag and then shoved that into a coffee cup, because I'm some kind of idiot.

So Xmas comes and goes and last night I'm sitting around watching TV and suddenly remember the tooth! We had cleaned house three times in the last three days and the cup was no longer where I left it. I was watching the kiddo because my wife was at work, so I told her I had to go outside and look for something I accidentally threw away in the trash. "What is it?" she asked. I said I'd tell her if I found it.

With a flashlight in one hand, I dug through 2 bags of trash, including old meat, cat food, and snotty Kleenex. I found three empty Ziplocs, which led me to worry that the bag opened at some point and dislodged its contents to be mixed in with all the worst granular detritus. There was one bag left but I had been out in the driveway long enough so I rebagged all the trash and went back inside.

As soon as the sun came up this morning, and as my wife and kid slept, I went back outside. The plan was to tackle the third bag and then recheck the first two bags in the sunlight. I got almost all the way though the third bag. All that was left was a big pile of cat litter. I almost gave up hope but decided to give the litter a sift (with my gloved hand). I pulled up a ziploc bag! Looking closer, it contained my daughter's tooth! And it had remained sealed despite all it had been though.

Brought it inside, removed it from the ziploc, gave it a quick wash under the tap just in case, and placed it in a new ziploc which I tacked to the bulletin board. Pretty sure I'm not going to tell either of them about it so I'm just documenting it here.

the last time i played tooth fairy i forgot to do it, so tried to make the switch in the morning, my son woke up while my hand was under the pillow. he gave me a look of disgust, closed his eyes and mumbled "dad you're trash"

Lol

Also, amazing saga, peace!