Triple The Dad

Happy Thanksgiving. The holiday season is now firmly upon us. Once the turkey settles a little lower in our guts, the football games end and the Black Friday sales start, its Christmas music season again. I get why some people hate it. But our family falls firmly in the love it category: We started listening to Christmas music on Nov. 8 this year. I relish every  Christmas decoration, every advertisement, and every song. No matter how early. And with Christmas song season comes the comedic songs, like Domonic the Donkey, My Two Front Teeth, and every single one of the Chipmunks' Christmas songs. These are mostly fun songs you can feel safe singing with your kids. And then there is Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer ; an awful song with a terrible message about codependency and alcoholism.  Seriously. The entire song is essentially an open letter smearing Santa in the hopes of blackmailing him into a settlement. Sure, there are no overt demands made, but that i...

When it comes down to it, parenting is pretty much a crap shoot. It is like rolling a 100-sided die and having to pick the exact number it will land on. And getting it wrong means you'll have poop or permanent marker smeared on your face. Sure, you know all 100 numbers backwards and forwards, but that won't help you when you have poop lodged inside your nostril or a poorly drawn mustache on your face for that important work meeting. Because outside of a steady routine, just about anything else you do can be either entirely wrong for your kid, or the best parenting choice you could make. The worst part is you don't know which is what until its done. You can set strict rules and raise a good, god-fearing and law-abiding citizen who excels at everything he does; but you are just as likely to end up with some psychopath. You can provide no rules and raise a a free-spirited rebel, Gerry Garcia type; but you are just as likely to raise the next Charlie Sheen. It has as at least...

My last few posts have been pretty down beat. There is the one about how I yell at my kids too much ; and don’t forget the one where I compare my kids to Darth Vader . So its been a rough couple of weeks. But each of these posts has had a single uniting theme underpinning it: I think every single time I butt heads with my kids comes down to my own flaws. There. I said it. When my kids are playing right up to and past their bedtime and I can’t wrangle them into bed; when they won’t get their shoes on to leave the house to buy THEIR snack ; when they want more snack than common decency dictates; when they want more TV time or tablet time; the times when they ask the most inane questions, or when they won’t get their own underwear despite standing right next to the drawer. Well, OK, maybe that last one isn’t on me. But the rest? If it isn’t time travel , I think they are all on me. When they play past bedtime its mostly a failure to leave enough time. Indeed, I’ve ...