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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.

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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.

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What Are Your Biggest Parent Peeves?

June 2, 2012 at 7:08 pm , by 

A year and a half.

What things do you see other parents do that annoy you, even though they shouldn’t? Plus, what things should bother you, enough to speak up against them?

I have a few “parent peeves” that come to mind…

Like hearing another parent making empty threats of discipline to their obviously undisciplined kid:

“Preston, I’m never gonna take you out in public again. You’re gettin’ a butt whoopin’ when you get home and Santa Clause isn’t gonna visit you this Christmas!”

Or watching a parent give their toddler a 24 ounce caffeinated soda.

My biggest one is medicating a toddler for ADHD or hyperactivity. But I’ve already preached my sermon on that one…

When should these things bother us as compared to when it’s none of our business? How do we know it’s our responsibility to butt in and try to do something about it?

Recently I asked whether we should really care what other parents think about us. Well today, I’m asking why (and when) we should care how other parents do their job.

To help answer these questions, I have designed a system for figuring that out and I want to share it with you today:

Superficial disagreement- A difference of petty opinion or personal preference. Action required: Think to self, “Hmm… that’s weird. That’s not how I would do it.”

Personal disagreement- A difference of opinion so strong it offends you. Action required: Write a Facebook status update or blog entry generically dissin’ it.

Moral disagreement- A difference of moral viewpoint. Action required: Personally confront the parent or the authorities.

I think all parent peeves fall into one of those 3 categories and it’s a matter of sorting out which action should follow on our behalf.

To demonstrate, I’ll throw you a few examples:

A parent calls their kid an idiot in the school parking lot.

A parent slaps their kid on their face at the park.

A parent lets their kids run around and play loudly in the department store.

A parent uses the “cry it out” method on their 4 month-old.

A parent lets their now 3 year-old sleep in the bed every single night with them.

You get the idea. What’s interesting is that I’m pretty sure there are parents to defend either side of each of those examples.

So ultimately, it comes to a case of good old-fashioned relative morality.

Yes, I’ve had people defend the one of slapping their kid on the face. I was told that internationally it’s not a big deal.

Your turn. What are your biggest parent peeves?

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7 Tips On How To Start A Baby Blog

May 24, 2012 at 10:40 pm , by 

A year and a half.  It was a year ago yesterday that The Dadabase officially premiered on Parents.com with “Welcome To The Dadabase.” Today, I want to share some advice with any mom or dad out there who is considering, or at least curious about, starting their very own mommy or daddy blog. If you’re wanting to start blogging about your kid mainly just to share with friends and family, then I simply recommend going to WordPress.com and get to typin’. That’s all the advice you need from me. But if you are like I was back in April 2010, recently having found out I was going to be a parent and wanting to be the best darn baby blogger I could be with hopes of “going pro,” then this article is perfect for you. Here are my top 7 tips on how to start a baby blog: 1. Be both personal and international. You want to engage two different types of necessary readers:Friendly Followers-family and friends who read your stuff because they love you and your cute kid. And Cosmic Crashers– people who don’t care who you are but want to learn about some buzzing new topic you’re covering in the world of parenting. 2. Be different. Before I started my blog, I was determined to find my “schtick.” I wanted to be the first ever daddy blogger who documented his thoughts from the moment he went public with the pregnancy, on a weekly basis. Even now, I don’t know of any other dad who has done this. You can go back for over two years and find between one and seven blog posts each week about my son and my thoughts as a dad. What’s your schtick? 3. Be willing to be wrong. I am constantly wrong when it comes to my opinions and viewpoints regarding all those polarizing, controversial parenting topics from circumcision to raising a vegetarian child. Not only am I wrong at least half the time, I’m totally cool with it. I don’t mind being crucified one day and praised the next. I am both the good and the bad guy. 4. Be consistent. Can you commit to writing at least one blog post per week? If not, stop reading now because this isn’t for you. Just like with advertising, your work needs to be omnipresent. And just like with the news, it needs to be fresh. 5. Be egotistical. Speak with authority. Assume your story is interesting, then prove it. Ever heard of what’s called “the blogger’s ego?” Well, I depend on it. 6. Be weird. In the midst of sharing the chronologically predictable advancements your child experiences each week, make each event special by pointing out the strangest aspect about your kid learning to eat solid foods or learning to walk. “Quirky” sells. 7. Be named well. You have to come up with a really cool name for your blog; one that represents you well. Consider your kid’s name or your last name or something people won’t be able to forget. Good luck and may the force be with you.

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My Son Provides Comic Relief From Real Life Blues

April 20, 2012 at 12:07 am , by 

31 years for me; 17 months for him.

Having a kid will make your life stressful; that’s for sure. But a child also brings a certain joy and humor you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else.

Oh, hi. My name is Nick Shell and today is my birthday. I am now 31.

“Happy Birthday; may it be your best ever!” you might proclaim. And I would thank you.

But you see, April 20th is more than just a special day for pot heads to celebrate.

It’s more than just the day that Kony 2012 would have made its big reveal in the streets had society not outed the now infamous video as illegitimate.

My birthday is sort of like the cursed numbers are for Hurley in Lost. Bad things happen in the world on April 20th. Like on my 18th birthday:

Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and injured 24 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado.

Though it 3 years before I was born, in 1978,  Korean Air Flight 902 was shot down by the Soviet Union.

In 2007,  there was the Johnson Space Center Shooting: A man with a handgun barricaded himself in NASA‘s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas before killing a male hostage and himself.

Two years ago this day in 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing twelve workers and beginning an oil spill that would last six months.

And though it was the day before my 14th birthday, in 1995, was the Oklahoma City bombing: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was bombed, killing 168.

Oh yeah, and guess who I share a birthday with: Adolf Hitler, born in 1889. Seriously.

(Also, Joey Lawrence; but I guess that’s not a bad thing.)

This is the day of the year that you should hold your breath as you check the news. If we can make it through this day without some kind of massacre, I’ll be amazed. In fact, by writing all this, I’m actively trying to jinx the “420 curse.”

So why did God choose such a dark day of the year for a an arguably normal and mild-mannered guy like me to be born? All I can say is that it’s comic relief to the world. It somehow provides balance in the universe.

And as I think about this concept of comic relief I can’t help but think of my son during the past 365 days in which I was a 30 year-old man.

Never has my life been more challenging, stressful, humiliating, exhausting, maturity-enforcing and unpredictable since he was born. It hasn’t all been easy.

During my year of being 30, in addition to the culture shock of learning by immersion what to do with an infant, I was unemployed for the first part of it, then I got a job, and I also got this gig writing for Parents.com writing The Dadabase, then had to move my family back to Nashville because of financial reasons, my wife’s car broke down half-way during the move and we had to buy a new car, and our roof caved in the week we tried to move back in our house in Nashville.

We eventually got back on our feet here in Nashville. Then we became vegetarians. And not that long ago, Jack had a febrile seizure.

Um… what else? I’m sure I’m forgetting something.

It hasn’t been a forgettable year; clearly not.

I’m ready for 31. I’ll just say that.

But back to my son serving as comic relief in my life. It’s the little stuff  that gets me; in a good way.

Like when I watch him chew viciously on his toy plastic vegetables though he knows they’re just for pretending to eat.

And how he likes to sit in the fridge after he mows the carpet each day.

How sometimes on the drive home in the car, he’ll start randomly making donkey sounds after 20 minutes of silence.

My kid makes me laugh; even during some days or weeks or months I wish I could just fast forward through.

Here’s to hoping the world doesn’t end today. [Insert laugh tracks here.]

My current favorite song, as it relates to all this: