Author: Family Friendly Daddy Blog

Leave a comment Posted on parenting, People

Fake Sympathy For My Son’s Fake Whining

September 21, 2012 at 10:39 pm , by 

22 months.

Last month I saw this Garfield comic that happened to perfectly summarize how I think my toddler son tends to see life. (I now have it cut out and taped up near Jack’s pictures on my cubicle wall at work.)

This concept most applies to our car rides to and from Jack’s day care and my office, 5 days a week.

Jack wants to be entertained, so I keep around a toddler’s survival kit: A book, a toy truck, and a stuffed animal.

After half of the car ride, what does he do? He “accidently” drops any of the above items.

That’s always annoying. Try explaining to your toddler that you can’t sacrifice safely driving to turn around and attempt to pick up his “fallen” stuffed giraffe.

It doesn’t work. Dang logic.

But when he’s not trying to engage me by him losing reach of his toys, he’s instead “hurting” himself with them.

Yesterday Jack kept accidently dropping his two Thomas the Train toys into his knees, making sure I heard his fake whine: “Eh, heh heh…”.

You always instantly know when your kid is faking being hurt, right?

So each time I hear a fake whine, I reply with an equally fake “Ahhhhwwwhhh!”

What’s funny is that it didn’t take him long at all to realize I wasn’t being serious either.

So each time each hears my faux sympathy, now his response is, “No. No. N-n-n-no!”

He wants to be sure I know that he knows.

And then what does he do right after? He repeats the cycle with another “Eh, heh heh.”

Until he has the attention span for a handheld video game, my son is stuck with pretending to drop toys and/or pretending to get hurt by those same toys.

The world exists for his amusement. I wish car rides could be the intermission.

Leave a comment Posted on parenting, Storytelling

I Am The Human Resources Department Of My Household

September 20, 2012 at 11:12 pm , by 

22 months.

Like many Millennials, I grew up with this unrealistic belief that if I simply had a 4 year college degree, I would be all set.

Instead, I entered a work force where too many people, just like me, already had a college degree. So I wasn’t that special after all.

Now I’ve come to terms with the fact I need to become more special to actually be special.

Right now, we live in a 2 bedroom townhouse. Simply put, I’m not going to be in the right mindset to even think about planning to try to have another child in home with only 2 bedrooms.

I’m just now.

Also, the part of Nashville we live in wouldn’t put our son in the school district we would want him in.

Maybe what I’m saying right now sounds a bit on the superficial side, but I’m just being honest.

I don’t care about driving a nice car or living in a big house, but I recognize the socioeconomic pressures of parenthood prodding me to climb the corporate ladder.

This is me planning my way out of “townhouse life” into “small house with a small yard in a decent school district life.”

If I was still single, I just don’t know that I would be so inspired to try this hard to “move up” in the world.

But now I’ve got two people depending on me. That sort of makes me a bit more motivated.

I have had this re-occurring dream where it’s my final semester of college and I have just realized there was this one class I forgot about.

Then the terror sets in as I realize I won’t be able to graduate on time.

Whenever I have this dream, I wake up in relief, telling myself:

“That’s funny. You graduated college a long time ago. You don’t have to worry about classes anymore. Those days are long gone.”

With that being said, last night, in real life, I started taking a course at Lipscomb University.

I will be spending 3 hours every Wednesday night, through December, in a class that will be preparing me to become HR certified.

Then I still have to pay a couple hundred dollars and spend 3 hours taking the certification test, getting at least 70% of the questions right.

All to become an official HR guy.

Yeah, like Toby and Holly on The Office.

It was only a couple of months ago that I figured this out, but since graduating college, the field I have been working in has been Human Resources; not Sales as I thought. So I’ve decided to make something of it.

Turns out, HR is one of the (few) things in life I’m actually really good at.

It involves mediating between different departments, reading people, and knowing how to motivate them in order to bring productivity up- all that fun stuff.

I have a natural talent of playing the role of a middle child; the ultimate mediator.

Interestingly, most of the responsibilities of Human Resources seem to translate pretty well in to my role at home, especially as the dad:

Educating, training, empowering, and rewarding.

I’m always in the middle of stuff, trying to help everyone communicate better and always looking for new strategies and protocols to improve efficiency in the long run.

So whether in the office and in my home, I guess I’m pretty much the Human Resources department. But I’m cooler than Toby Flenderson.

 

Top image: Career, via Shutterstock.

Bottom image: Personnel manager writing, via Shutterstock.

 

Leave a comment Posted on parenting, People

Making New Friends As A Married Couple With A Kid

September 18, 2012 at 11:42 pm , by 

22 months.

I don’t know why, but over the past couple of months, my wife and I seem to have been making new friends, in addition to our old ones.

Are we suddenly cooler than we were before?

Maybe it’s because our son is a little bit more independent now, so we can be a little bit more free spirited and outgoing; therefore attracting new people into our lives with a newfound positive energy.

Some of these new friends are like us- married with a kid. That’s natural and it makes sense that we would want to get to know each other better.

But also added to our list of new cell phone contacts are married couples who don’t have kids; or who are even single.

It’s a very interesting process to become friends with someone new at this point in my life; when it doesn’t involve my kid.

I’m sort of rusty on how this “making friends” thing works; especially since now it involves texting and Facebook messages more than it does phone conversations.

There’s like this unintended game of “I’m not stalking you” that you have to play with the person, at first.

They text you first: You get a point.

You send them a Facebook friend request: They get a point.

Basically, you’re trying not to be the one who creeps the other one out.

After a few rounds, if neither of you has weirded the other out, then it’s official: You’re real friends!

I think the most challenging part of making new friends these days is trying to make plans with them via text messages.

The art of discussion is dumbed down to caveman talk to where you can’t really offer up a hang-out plan then decide against it without sounding like a flake.

It’s not like you have the space in the text message to thoroughly explain the cons you instantly realized about the plan you just suggested.

But I’m up for the challenge. If people want to legitimately be my real life friend, whether they have a kid or not, I will do my darndest not to creep them out or be too vague like a hipster.

I would say, “I’ll just be me and if they don’t like it, then they’re not really my friend.”

However, I’ve learned that “be yourself” is the worst advice you can give some people.

Leave a comment Posted on Nostalgia, parenting

Mall Toddlers: My Idea For A Straight-To-DVD Kids Movie

September 17, 2012 at 11:59 pm , by 

22 months.

So maybe the “In Theaters March 2013″ part is just wishful thinking. Hey, I’ll settle for straight-to-DVD.

It’s not easy reuniting your toddler with his two best friends from daycare for weekend plans. You’re dealing with three different napping schedules… enough said.

The plan was for Jack, Henry, and Sophie to hang out at a park playground, but then a random thunderstorm showed up.

By 3:45 on a Sunday afternoon, it was difficult to justify paying to get into one of those indoor playgrounds, knowing we would all just need to get our kids home for dinner after about an hour and a half anyway.

So by default, the mall became our play date destination.

I admit, I really had no expectations on how things would go. I mean, normally, I would have low expectations in regards to meeting fellow parents and their kids at a place I haven’t really tried out myself.

Turns out, it was a good gamble. Our German-looking kids found plenty of activities to keep themselves entertained.

All we had to do was follow them around and keep up with them like a camera crew on any given TLC reality show.

The more we chased them, though, the less necessary I felt. I don’t mean that in a sad way, though.

Instead, I could easily imagine it like some straight-to-DVD movie about three toddlers who take over the mall after hours.

Like all those goofy Air Bud movies, the toddlers would have computer-animated mouths and they would talk like adults.

So it would sort of be like Look Who’s Talking meets Air Bud if Air Bud revolved around toddlers instead of athletic dogs.

I suppose the plot line would involve a kooky Croatian villain named Mr. Stincovic who coincidentally happens to sneak into the mall at the same time in order to sabotage Santa’s upcoming visit the next day, by bringing in potato sacks full of skunks.

Does that sound lame enough for a straight-to-DVD kids movie? It doesn’t take much.

In the likeness of Home Alone, the three toddlers would use the mall itself to torture Mr. Stincovic with booby trapped obstacles:

They would pour out Dippin’ Dots in a trail leading from the food court to the carousel, which happens to be running at all times, unmanned.

Once Mr. Stincovic, who goes by “Mr. Stinky” for short,as if the pun wasn’t obvious enough for 4 year-old viewers, lands conveniently on the carousel horse, Henry would pull the lever from “slow” to “turbo power,” causing Mr. Stinky to fly up into the rafters.

There, Mr. Stinky is pestered by a dozen remote controlled mini-helicopters until either A) the police arrive or B) he decides not to sabotage Santa’s visit, but instead becomes an elf, as Mr. Stinky learns the true meaning of Christmas.

So yeah, that’s pretty much what Mall Toddlers would consist of. You would be able to find it the very bottom selection of DVD’s on the Redbox panel screen.

Or instead of waiting for the anticipated world-wide release of Mall Toddlers, you could just check out some more pictures of when Jack, Henry, and Sophie took over the mall. Click here to check them out on The Dadabase‘s Facebook wall.

 

Leave a comment Posted on parenting, Storytelling

Planes, Trains and Automobiles… And Pooping

September 16, 2012 at 6:58 pm , by 

22 months.

If you ever fly into Nashville, you will see our house as you are landing; just look out the window, down on your left side.

Anytime I am outside with my son Jack on a walk, he looks up at the sky about every 15 minutes and proclaims, “Airplane. Airplane.”

So I guess for his sake, it’s pretty cool that we happen to live along the landing path of all planes heading to the Nashville airport.

Jack is also intrigued by trains, as I suspect most nearly 2 year-olds boys are. He can’t go anywhere without a Thomas the Train character in his hand.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that for his birthday (exactly 2 months from today) Jack will be a train conductor.

And when it comes to automobiles of any kind, Jack just can’t get enough. He even distinguishes between “big cars” and “baby cars,” whatever exactly that means.

Jack recently confirmed with us that for his first car when he turns 16, he wants a pick-up truck.

So in review, what is my toddler son into these days? Planes, trains, and automobiles.

Oh yeah, and pooping, too.

Last week during bath time as Jack was sprawled out in his Superman position, he looked up at my wife and said, “Butt? Butt.”

“Do you have to use the potty, Jack?” My wife propped him up on the toilet while embracing him.

He strained. He concentrated. But nothing happened.

Even still, he reached over, grabbed some toilet paper, and pretended to use it the right way.

I soon would learn that Jack has been observing another boy at his daycare, Troy, who is being potty trained in the 2 year-old class.

Pooping is not something that Jack is ashamed of. To him, it’s like learning to eat with a fork. It’s nothing special, it’s just the next part of growing up.

So every time Jack stops what he’s doing to say “poop?” or “butt?” we’re going to take him seriously.

We’ll take him straight to the potty and he’ll get a chance to go like a big boy.

One day when we least expect it, it will happen for real.

But it won’t be any big deal to Jack. The way he sees it, poop happens.