Category: Life With Kids

Posted in Everyday Life, Life With Kids

Maybe I’m The Screen Time Problem.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Here’s a short list of common sentences that, when said, doom the speaker to spectacular failure:

“That looks easy enough.”
“Instructions are for people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
“When I have kids, they won’t spend all their time just staring at a screen!”

Every new parent has declared that last one with the kind of foolhardy confidence that would make Florida Man proud.  It’s the “Hold my beer,” of childcare.

I started with high aspirations around screen time and failed miserably, too.  A single cartoon per day just so I had a moment of quiet slowly expanded into 2 per day, then 3.  Then Covid happened and the official household policy became “No, we still can’t do anything.  Go watch 17 hours of ‘Octonauts’ and try not to think about it.”  Between remote work and cabin-bound boredom, everyone in our house started living with a screen from dawn til dusk.  I’m pretty sure my dogs were binging old episodes of “Lassie” after I went to bed.

Eventually we got to go outside again and the screens started controlling our lives a little less. That is, they controlled our lives less until a few months ago when I did something idiotic that restarted the whole problem: after a thousand requests, I finally caved and bought my 9-year-old daughter Sloan a small tablet for her birthday.

I expected her to fall face first into it, which she did, but I was also expecting her to eventually stop using the thing as much once the novelty wore off, which she didn’t.  Not even close.

In fairness, it was a really rough summer for kids activities, so I wasn’t too hung up on her spending all day with the tablet at the time.  Like most of the country, Tulsa was dangerously hot, and no one was spending much time outside.  It’s not like there was a plethora of better outdoor options for her, particularly since Sloan shares my DNA and is therefore able to get sunburnt at night under a heavy cloud cover.

…But now we’ve reached the point where I’d prefer she chance it on the sunburn, because this new screen has introduced a deluge of just the worst content.  Stuff that made me realize that the half-hour toy commercials masquerading as kids’ TV that I grew up with never went away, they just changed shape. Also, they moved to YouTube, which feels way worse, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why.

I’ll admit there’s great content for a kid to find online.  There’s art apps that really bring out a kid’s creativity, science shows that put Bill Nye to shame, games that teach while still being fun, and more.

…But there’s also the other stuff.  Once you have a kid with a tablet you learn just how much digital detritus is out there that see kids as an audience with poor sales resistance and low standards for quality. 

Endless games designed to trick kids into making microtransactions?  We’ve dealt with those.  Unboxing videos funded by toy companies?  Yup, those too.  Reaction videos TO reaction videos?  Nobody at any age needs that in their life. I don’t know what the sales gimmick of terrible kids’ songs with sped up vocal tracks is, but can’t imagine the intentions of whoever made “It’s Hailing Taquitos” are anything less than sinister.

If I have to have this in my life, you do to.

So between the unhealthy amounts of screen time and the influx of low quality media, I think the only thing that’s keeping me from just yeeting Sloan’s tablet down a well is that I’m absolutely no better about my screen use than she is.

I’m not proud of that confession, but yeah: everything she does, I do too.  Head constantly buried in a screen?  I do that.  Playing mobile games designed to show me commercials every few minutes?   Gonna plead guilty to that one, too.  Watching reaction videos to reaction videos?  No…but reading think pieces about other think pieces probably doesn’t put me in any position to be critical of their video equivalent.

Plus, unlike Sloan, I’m on social media, which my wife and I at least had the forethought to prohibit.  Comparing a few kids’ mobile games to Twitter and Facebook is like comparing the energy you get from a sip of herbal tea versus chugging a Big Gulp cup full of cocaine.  It’s digital addiction on a whole other level.

What kind of position am I in to tell her to put down the tablet if I’m saying it with a smartphone in my hand?  When I was a kid, a favorite saying of adults was that TV and video games would “Rot your brain.”  If I say that to Sloan about her tablet, what am I implying about myself?  Clearly, so long as she sees me with my nose buried in my phone, I don’t actually believe what I’m saying.  That’s no way to teach positive habits.

Maybe the problem isn’t clickbait videos or shady apps; maybe the problem is me.

I don’t intend to give up my smartphone, and I’m not implying that you should.  What I am admitting, though, is that my kids are going to take a lot of their cues about how they interact with technology from me.  Teaching my kids about healthy limits probably involves a lot more teaching myself healthy limits than I’ve wanted to admit.

…That and maybe issue a blanket ban on songs with sped up, autotuned vocals, because if I hear any more of that chipmunk voice I’m gonna be ready to dismiss all of recorded sound as a failed experiment.

Posted in Life With Kids

Maybe Supervising Kids Isn’t Possible.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

“Dad the TV doesn’t work!”
“Did it just turn off? Did you check the plug?”
“No, it’s still on. There’s just a big black circle in the middle of the screen.”

I think every parent has a moment where they feel completely inadequate because the kid has just done something so pointlessly destructive you feel that any halfway competent adult could’ve prevented it. This moment was one of those times for me.

I went upstairs to check the alleged malfunctioning TV and there was, in fact, a big black circle about 3 inches across right in the middle of the screen, like a black hole halfway through devouring Clifford and pals.  This was not the way a television looks because of an electrical malfunction; this is the way a TV looks because it has been hit by something.

For Christmas that year, Sloan had received a kit for making blanket forts. It’s a great toy: a mix of 18” plastic sticks and balls full of holes that the sticks fit into, like gigantic Tinker Toys. Combine them the right way and you can make the framework for the kind of epic blanket forts that the kids go crazy for. Each of the joints is a little smaller than a baseball, or, coincidentally, about the size of the big black spot sitting at the center of my television.

Sloan had taken a single stick and ball from the fort building kit and cobbled them into something resembling a medieval mace. She hadn’t even bothered to set it down before calling me upstairs, and was fidgeting with her makeshift TV destroyer as she claimed complete ignorance of how the damage had occurred.

The perfect toy for destroying electronics and/or reenacting the Battle of Hastings.

“So you have NO IDEA what happened to this TV?”
“No.  None. It just stopped working.”

I honestly couldn’t decide whether to be angry or impressed with the sheer audacity.  She must’ve known that I knew what had happened. This had all the gall of somebody visiting a police station to report their spouse missing while still soaked in blood and clutching a shovel.

“Sloan, I think you took that mace you’re holding and hit the TV with it.”
“OKAY BUT IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!!!”    

Honestly, I wasn’t really all that upset about the broken TV. It was a Walmart clearance set that was already crumby when I’d bought it a decade before and got hot enough to toast a marshmallow if you left it on for more than an hour.  I wasn’t gonna mourn its loss.

Even the lie didn’t bother me all that much. We expect a lot of honesty from kids that we don’t from other adults.  I might have panicked and claimed ignorance, too.  Most people don’t learn crucial life skills like “Hide the mace!” from a childhood marked by excessive honesty.

What really bothered me was the fact that the whole event made me feel completely incompetent.

Occasionally videos of stuff like this happening go viral. Some kids are running around and they knock over a TV or break a window, and the commenters all immediately shout the same conclusion: “BAD PARENTING!”

I try not to respond when I see videos like that, mainly because nothing riles up the angry internet hate machine quite like videos of unsupervised kids behaving badly and I don’t want a thousand angry replies, but also because you can’t do parenting forensics from 30 seconds of nanny-cam video.  I yearn to get into one of those comments sections and scream “Maybe mom had to go take a dump!!  Does that make her a bad parent?  Did she not have YOUR PERMISSION to take a dump?!”

There’s this spreading narrative that responsible parenting means constant, round the clock vigilance and I don’t know how anyone doesn’t immediately see the logical flaw in that.  Any accident, injury, or chaos, no matter how minor, must be the result of lax parenting to satisfy the narrative. 

There must always be blame; nothing just happens. 

A favorite chestnut of back-seat caregivers is “If mom would just put down her phone, then [destructive childhood behavior #47381] wouldn’t have happened!”  Does she also need to put down her toothbrush?  That’s 9 minutes per day of split attention.  Does she need to put down her lunch?  Should she put down the soap and comb?  Does she need to put down the toilet paper and just hold it all day to appease you, internet?!  At what point is a parent allowed 4 minutes to meet their own basic needs without gaining your ire?!

Sorry: I got a little hot there.  That paragraph had been fermenting for a while.

The overall point I’m clumsily stumbling towards is that tireless supervision is probably impossible (especially in an era of increasing at-home work) and I think parents are carrying a lot of guilt over it. 

Broken TV?  Guilt, even if you were busy doing something responsible at the time (for example, doing the dishes, like I was when Sloan destroyed the set).  Child hurt themself?  Guilt, even if your attention was only split because you were remotely working to try and keep a roof over the kid’s head.  God forbid they break something while you were taking a moment to relax.  Guilt for days even if you fully understand that time to rest is critical to your health and sanity.

I guess my big takeaway is that there’s no real point to feeling guilt over all the chaos kids create because their chaos is unavoidable to a degree we’re uncomfortable admitting.  I don’t know that it’s helpful to you or them to carry every chipped tooth and broken knick-knack as a badge of shame.

…What I do know is helpful, however, is getting one of those TV mounting kits and putting it out of reach of any improvised battle clubs.  Possibly behind a sheet of inch-thick lucite; you know kids.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Life With Kids

I Am Drowning In Childhood Keepsakes.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

I’m no stranger to playing the Tooth Fairy.  Granted, the costume would fit me a little weird, but as to the actual act of replacing a tooth with two dollars without waking the kid up, I’m a pro.  But there’s one finer point of playing the tooth Tooth Fairy that’s eluded me until now, and I finally want an answer:

What the hell am I supposed to be doing with all these teeth?

Currently, I have a baggie containing my 8-year-old’s upper right incisor stashed in a desk drawer.  I’m telling myself it’s only there temporarily, but that implies I have some grander design for the tooth.  I do not.  Sloan, likewise, has informed me that the corresponding tooth on the left side is also really loose.  By this time next week, I expect to have paid 4 dollars for used human body parts (maybe earlier if her school has another mandatory loose tooth extraction event, more commonly known as ‘Dodgeball’).

I really have no clue what is expected of me every time I come into possession of another one of her teeth.  I’ve thrown away a few and felt absurdly guilty about it.  “This is your little girl’s central incisor!” my inner monologue seems to shout at me, “Don’t you want to stash it away forever to remember this moment?!  Don’t you want to spend 275 dollars on a gold trimmed keepsake box like some kind of medieval reliquary displaying the toenail of St. James?”

Seriously: $275.  The same place also sells a 2 inch porcelain Noah’s Ark toy that costs as much as my first car.

But for all that guilt, do I really want to keep these things?  Will I ever get out the pouch of loose teeth that I’ve kept like some kind of rag-and-bone man to coo adoringly over them?  I can’t really see myself ever doing that.  Maybe if it were the little stuffed Clifford doll that she took everywhere as a toddler I could; that’s a relic of early childhood with a lot of emotional history attached.  I don’t feel that way about her second bicuspid.

Of course, the whole question of whether to keep the teeth is just one outgrowth of the fact that none of us parents seem to have any clue what we should or shouldn’t be keeping.  Forget just teeth; anything that spends more than 5 minutes in the kid’s presence feels like there’s some pressure to keep in perpetuity. 

Baby booties?  You’re supposed to keep those, apparently.  Baby blanket?  Store that thing forever.  Drawings and crafts?  

Dear god, where do you even begin with the drawings and crafts…? 

I have like 3 banker boxes worth of drawings sitting in my garage, plus smaller caches of rumpled, doodled-on paper scattered throughout the house.  None of these drawings will ever get looked at again, but for some reason it seems important that I keep them.  It might just be easier for me to pre-shred them and make mouse nests out of the remains myself. 

It’s not just vague guilt keeping me from tossing this felled-redwood worth of paper into the trash, either.  Kids also seem to have a sixth sense for the location of every doodle they’ve ever produced, and will guard this mountain of crumpled printer paper like some kind of dragon that just raided an Office Max.

At least the drawings can be stacked; it’s the crafts that I struggle most with.  The crafts take up 50 times as much space, break any time they’re touched, and shed a trail of beads and sequins like a bedazzled golden retriever.  Once the kid discovers those craft chests you might as well just accept that your entire house is going to look like a parade float just exploded and throwing away any spec of it will be met with resistance.

This kit contains roughly 2,000 pieces and is somehow capable of producing 3,000 things that you’ll be expected to store.

Now that my younger daughter is beginning to reach drawing age, I’m worried that it’s either time to make some major cuts to what I’m willing to store, or just accept that my new role in life is guardian of an ever growing stockpile of barely remembered keepsakes.  I’ll definitely need another fridge to hang all her best artwork on, and possibly a second garage for the rest.

…Anyway, my kid just walked past chewing gum, so I probably need to go hit an ATM before the end of the day.  All these teeth aren’t gonna pay for themselves.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column

Posted in Life With Kids

Who Should Plan A Kid’s First Concert?

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

A few weeks back, my 8-year-old daughter Sloan finally got to experience one of the growing up “firsts” that I’ve been looking forward to for years:

I took her to her first rock concert.

I hadn’t planned to take Sloan to a concert, but scheduling conflicts with the couple my wife and I had planned to go on a double date with resulted in a spare ticket.  You’d think that modern concert tickets costing more than a human kidney would’ve ensured more diligent schedule checking, but the result was getting to take my kid to her first concert, so I’m calling it a win.

The concert in question?  Bruce Springsteen.

Now I’ve been to like 200 concerts in my life and have the hearing of a nineteenth century cannoneer to prove it.  From my experience, Springsteen is the gold standard of live acts, and I was really happy I got to share such a cool show with her.  My first concert was very special to me: Fiona Apple opening for the Counting Crows (forever giving me the right to scoff at kids who thought mall-punk was “Emo” ten years later).  I wanted Sloan to have a really memorable first show, too.

So we got our tickets together, picked out our coolest concert clothes, got her a set of ear protectors meant for target shooting (because my wife Sara mandated it, just to establish that she is both a responsible parent and a total square), and we went to see The Boss.

The show was a blast.  Bruce still has the energy of a singer half his age, the band brought a full horn line, which was fun and unusual, Sloan identified no less than 3 songs as the new Best Song Ever™, and her energy lasted almost to the end of the nearly 3-hour show.  Pretty good for an 8-year-old.  We even had the incredibly cool luck that a friend of mine was working as a stagehand for the venue, found one of the band’s discarded setlists, and gave it to Sloan as a memento from her first concert:

This is as hard as an excel spreadsheet can possibly rock.

So bearing all that awesomeness in mind, I still worry that making this her first concert might have been a mistake on my part.

I mentioned having a memorable first concert earlier.  The Counting Crows are great to see live (or at least they were in 1996) and I still have fond memories of how fun and unique that show was, with most of the songs straying far from the album versions I was familiar with. 

…But the fact that the first band I saw was any good live was entirely by chance.  They were a band I liked, my dad bought us tickets, and everything else was pure dumb luck.   I also liked the Gin Blossoms at the time (look, it was the mid 90’s; I’m not proud of these name drops), who I would eventually end up seeing at a festival years later.  They were…less fun.  The fact that I left my first show thinking “Concerts are amazing!” instead of “These songs are free on the radio, and the singer doesn’t sound drunk,” was entirely down to luck.

What I wonder about, though, is if I might’ve still had an amazing time no matter how bad the band was.  Maybe more important than it being a good show was the fact that I was seeing a band that I liked, not just a band that my dad enjoyed.  I loved those moaning, post-grunge, sad sacks and was ready to celebrate it. 

So what’s the most important part about a kid’s first concert: seeing a good show or establishing themself as a person with their own unique tastes in music?

Sloan wasn’t much of a Springsteen fan before going to see the show.  She knew a few of the more famous songs and is certainly a fan now, but that’s a result of going to see the concert and not how her tastes developed naturally.  I’m the fan.  As much as she wound up enjoying the show, if I’d asked her what she would’ve liked her first concert to be 2 months ago, Bruce would not have come up.

Maybe the ages we experienced our first concert at are enough to justify me taking the reins on this.  She’s still shy of 9, whereas I was 14.  A young teen wants to define themselves, but at her age, being into the same stuff as your dad is still cool.

…Cool to her, I mean. As a balding, pudgy 40-year-old, things that I like actively become less cool by association.  At this point if I bought a Maserati people would be calling them “Dad wagons” within 3 months.

Cargo shorts, socks with sandals, 630 horses of raw Italian power…dads, amiright?

So all that to say, maybe I need to prioritize taking her to see a band that she likes.  I’m not thrilled at the idea of sitting through 2 hours of the Imagine Dragons concert she would definitely ask to attend, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she’d look back on hearing that stupid robot voice going “thun-DDEERR?” with a lot of affection if it was something she picked.

I’m glad that we got to experience her first concert together, but I just want to make sure that I balance sharing the cool stuff that I enjoy with learning about the cool stuff that she enjoys.

…Also I need to stop letting Sloan come in and read over my shoulder while I’m writing, because she read the last couple paragraphs and immediately wanted to hear “Thunder.”  Guess I better work on learning the lyrics to this song; If that’s our next concert, I might as well make it special.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column

Posted in Life With Kids

I Am Routinely Out-Negotiated By Children.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

The problem with trying to negotiate with kids is that they’re too good at it.

Try to get a kid to do anything they don’t want to and it becomes immediately clear that you’re in for a spirited debate.  Bedtime, in particular, quickly becomes a gauntlet of increasingly outlandish add-ons and upsells, like a used car salesmen trying to talk you into artisanal wiper fluid and galvanized floor mats.

They want just one more story.  Just a tuck in.  Just a goodnight hug.  Just a hug for their favorite stuffed animal.  Just a few minutes to use the toilet again.  Just another tuck in now that they’re back from the bathroom. Just a quick glass of water.  Just move the nightlight across the room because it’s too bright.  Just a moment to change into her green pajamas.  Just one more hug.  The extra hug would be sweet if it actually felt like the point was showing affection instead of setting back the bedtime clock another 8 seconds.

I’m beginning to think we’re sleeping on the idea of children as high-stakes negotiators.  If you gave a 6-year-old the stipulation that for every hostage they freed they could stay up an extra 10 minutes, then every police standoff would be over in under an hour, with the lead negotiator also securing 3 stories, 2 lullabies, and an episode of “Bluey.”

It extends past bedtime into everything they do.  Trips to the park?  They will try to haggle out extension after extension.  I’m not talking about “Dad can we stay just 10 more minutes?” either.  I’ve refused that and gotten progressively shorter requests all the way down to “JUST 15 MORE SECONDS?!”  Every negotiation ends with a new attempt to secure jjjuuussssttt a little more.

In fairness to her debate skill, she probably got several minutes of extra playtime while I ranted about how pointlessly trivial a 15 second extension was. Point to her.

I think kids are such hard negotiators is because they understand that they can try to manipulate every situation for their maximum gain long before they understand when they shouldn’t.  I seem to remember Jeff Goldbulm giving a speech about that attitude in “Jurassic Park.”

This isn’t the scene where he makes the speech, I just refuse to pass up any opportunity to use this photo.

When our toddler was a month old and my wife and I were subsisting on a series of short naps instead of real sleep, I remember saying that if our baby had a button that would keep the two of us from sleeping for 6 months, she’d press it twice. 

Not vindictively (though when you haven’t slept more than 45 minutes at a stretch for weeks, everything feels vindictive), babies just don’t understand that other people have needs. All she knows is that her life is easier when mom and dad are awake, so her tiny hands would happily hammer that magic insomnia button like this was a game of “Galaga.”

…And yeah: it’s obvious that a baby isn’t going to understand that other people are affected by them crying all night.  I get that.  No one expects a 2-month-old to be polite about their nighttime feeding schedule.  What I didn’t realize until after I had kids, though, is that every interaction with them for YEARS still contains some element of them not understanding that 3:38 AM is an impolite time to try and recreate the sounds of a soccer riot.

Case in point: at the moment my 8-year-old is going through some eating resistance and trying to argue down the amount of dinner she’s required to eat.  What she doesn’t seem to understand yet is that this is kind of insulting to the person who went to the trouble of cooking.  She seems genuinely confused that trying to debate her way out of eating a single unnecessary crumb of the stir-fry I just made might be a little hurtful.

Meanwhile, I’m confused at how a dish she described as being “better than a thousand Christmas mornings” last week suddenly tastes like cat litter with soy sauce on it today.

She isn’t trying to be a jerk about the food.  What she struggles with is the abstraction of people seeing their work as an extension of themselves, and insulting it is the same as insulting them.  If it were something more direct, like coming up to me and stating “Dad, you smell like if a fish died twice,” she’d recognize that would be hurtful. 

(She has actually come up to me and said that exact sentence, but I was too busy laughing at that line to ever follow up and find out if it was meant seriously.)

So every day we have the same argument: how much of this horrible food does she have to eat before she’s allowed to leave the table.  Amounts will be negotiated, counter offers will be made, food will be redistributed around the plate in an extremely bad-faith attempt to skirt under the required dinner threshold.  It feels like trying to get North Korea to eat its vegetables.

I talked about the idea of kids dealing with a lack of autonomy a couple of weeks ago and I suspect this may be a continuation of that.  So I think I understand why they fight tooth and nail over every issue, so now the big question is this:

How do I encourage it?

Yeah, you heard me: how do I encourage it?  Like many of you, I have gotten jerked around by people better at negotiating than I am all my life.  How much have I overpaid for cars?  How much have I been underpaid for labor?  If I can raise a kid willing to advocate for herself and drag every cent out of a boss who wants to short her salary in 20 years, I am FINE to put up with picky eating and hard bedtimes now.

Willful child?  No: future badass.

…just be a little more tactful about badmouthing my stir-fry, ok?

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Life With Kids

Someday I’ll Miss Chuck E. Cheese.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Monday I took my kids to the park.  I didn’t really want to.

I didn’t want to because I was sick, the kitchen needed to be cleaned, there were clothes to fold, the dishes were piled up, I had dinner to make, and I was holding some outlandish fantasy that I’d be able to do it all in time to watch Monday Night Football.

…But perfect weather is rare in Oklahoma and school was out for the holiday, so I relented and took both kids to the park.  It was a great. Sloan (8-years-old) played on the playground and Penny (18-months-old) stuffed dirt up her nose.  Then everyone hurt themselves and cried, demanded to go home, cried again because I agreed to take them home, and restarted the whole process back at the dirt-up-nose phase.  Pretty standard park trip.  4 out of 5; would recommend.

The real reason I took them, though, is the looming specter of The Last Time They Ask. 

The last time Sloan asks to go to the playground is coming.  The last time I’m handed a stuffed animal to hug as part of the going-to-bed ritual is coming.  I was in the middle of typing that the last time she hands me a plate of pretend food from her kitchen playset was coming, until I realized it’s probably been 8 months since that last happened and I WAS NOT PREPARED TO DEAL WITH THAT REALIZATION TODAY.  Time to mentally file that one away with the last time I heard what her imaginary friend was up to and the day “Daddy” turned into “Dad.” 

Kids grow up.  They grow out of stuff whether I’m ready to let go or not.  Sloan is past the halfway mark towards her ninth birthday already, and the ominous ‘tween’ phase feels like it’s right around the corner.  When I was her age ‘Tweens’ weren’t a thing, but now it seems like pre-teen-post-childhood era starts earlier for kids every year.  Pretty soon they’ll exit the womb already poking at a smartphone and midway into a K-pop phase.

I guarantee that even this thing comes preinstalled with some trendy social media app I’m too old to understand.

I feel a lot of mixed emotions about going into the tween years.  I’ve really enjoyed seeing how every new year created a kid with interests and opinions of her own, and I’m excited about what comes next.

…but, real talk?  I like doing kid’s stuff.  I like swings and stuffed animals and tea parties and pretending to be a dragon so she can chase me around the yard with a foam rubber sword.  The feelings of growing-up FOMO are hitting hard, and I’m already pretty susceptible to that kind of thing.  I mean, I had to take “Puff the Magic Dragon” out of the lullaby rotation because I can’t make it to the end dry eyed, a song I’m convinced was written as part of a cold war psych program designed to make opposing soldiers cry so hard they can’t aim straight.

Here’s the song for those who’ve forgotten it and/or want to cry every last drop of moisture out of their body.

How do you balance enjoying a time of their lives that’s painfully impermanent with living a normal life?  I don’t love going to Chuck E. Cheese, but my kids do, and the span they’ll love it is short.  Every day I don’t take them is one more day crossed off the calendar where a trip to that horrible place is The. Best. Thing. 

So should I be going to Chuck E. Cheese more?  Way more?  Should I go once now and then stop forever so it lives in Sloan’s memory as something perfect instead of the grungy child casino it becomes once you cross a certain age?  Because we’ve got maybe 200 more days before her perception of that nightmarish pizza rat goes from a magical new friend to a teenager dressed in a sweaty carpet.  Probably less if she tries to read this over my shoulder when I’m not looking, as I suspect may have happened during my spirited criticism of a certain Christmas elf (though maybe I’m not super heartbroken about seeing that holiday ordeal in the rear-view mirror).

This is not a complication of parenting I ever expected. 

At least this particular harbinger of growing up gives me an excuse to play skee-ball.

Maybe any approach to enjoying their limited childhood still leaves you feeling guilty.  Take this line of thought to its logical conclusion and everything feels like squandering time.  Keep the meals and sleep short; there’s memories to be made.  Every quiet afternoon must become a visit to the park.  Every visit to the park must become a trip to Disneyland.  Every trip to Disneyland must become a trip to that ultra-exclusive Super Disneyland where Beyonce takes her kids.

Of course that’s not sustainable.  I need rest.  I need time away from her.  Nobody can afford Disneyland every weekend.  I need to write a column about feeling like I shouldn’t be squandering my limited hours of her childhood writing a column.

So yeah: I’m easy to talk into a trip to the park. I don’t know what the right balance is with this.  Maybe there isn’t one.  I suspect that when my toddler reaches her own tween years I won’t have learned a single thing from this experience and I’ll be feeling the exact same anxiety I am now.  Maybe at least I’ll have something funnier to say on the topic.

…Anyway, I guess I’ve low key talked myself into taking the kids to Chuck E. Cheese now.  Maybe Disneyland; I’ll play it by ear.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Life With Kids

Maybe We Should Be Letting Kids Curse.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

ME: “Please, PLEASE: you NEED to take the Tylenol.  We have to bring down your fever.”

[This is called “in medias res.”  It’s where I start a scene midway into the action and you get instantly invested in the story.  For full immersion, you should know this exchange takes place at 11:30 PM, Christmas day.]

SLOAN, AGE 8, CRYING: “I don’t know how to!  You said it was really easy, but what if I choke or something?!  I’m scared!”

ME: “We’ve been doing this for an hour.  I know this is as hard for you as it is for me. Just pop it in your mouth and take a swig of your drink, then you can be done!”

[Sloan cringes and doesn’t take the pill.  I put my face in my hands.]

ME: “Look, I recognize I’m asking you to do something grown-up, so I am going to grant you a grown-up privilege: if you take the medicine, then you may say a curse word to vent your frustration at this whole ordeal.”

[Sloan’s face changes instantly.  She looks at the pill with mixed fear and longing.]

SLOAN: “…Which curse word?”

ME: “Dealers choice.”

[She takes 3 deep breaths, puts the Tylenol, partially dissolved from 6 failed attempts to swallow it, on her tongue, and downs half a bottle of Gatorade before she comes up for air.  Her eyes are saucer wide, and she shows me her empty mouth.

SLOAN: “I DID IT! I DID IT! I DID IT!”

[Deep intake of breath, like she’s preparing to yell to a passing helicopter]

“TRIPLE BITCH!!!!”

ME: [completely loses my mind laughing.]

…Christmas at the Gallagher home this year was, undoubtedly, a triple bitch.  First, I got sick, then the toddler got sick, and then Sloan got REALLY sick.  She’d eventually test positive for the flu, but we wouldn’t know for a few days because she went from mild cold symptoms to pure misery on Christmas eve when the doctor’s offices are all closed.  If the potential dates a kid could get sick were written on that big wheel game from “The Price Is Right,” then Sloan’s flu hit that little $1.00 space that makes the contestants jump around like their socks are on fire.

Like this, except instead of 25 large, his prize was ruining an 8-year-old’s Christmas.

So while my wife’s extended family met to eat a big meal and exchange gifts, Sloan and I stayed home, ate macaroni and watched the Cowboys game.  When other kids were pretending to be asleep while listening for Santa, Sloan was still up, trying to take liquid medicine and throwing it all back up (hence the pill—it was our last resort).  When other kids woke their parents up at 5 AM because they couldn’t wait for sunrise to open presents, Sloan woke us up at 5 AM because she felt terrible and also couldn’t wait for sunrise to open presents.  Hey, it’s the flu, not bubonic plague; some things are still gonna happen.

So the offer of curse word immunity seemed pretty reasonable to me.  The kid had had her Christmas thoroughly messed up and didn’t have a lot of avenues to vent her well deserved frustration. 

When I have my day ruined, I have a huge range of options to help relax and mitigate my emotions.  I don’t just mean alcohol or other adults-only vices, either.  Personally, I stay up super late playing violent video games, and at some point go to an all-night  fast food joint for the kind of gargantuan burger that cows record true-crime podcasts about.  I have autonomy to decide what I need to emotionally recover.

But Sloan can’t do that.  Her bedtime is 8:30. She doesn’t get unlimited screen time when she needs to veg out or games designed to vent anger.  If she drove to Whataburger by herself at 1 AM to order a double bacon burger, the employees would probably call the police.

There’s a whole world of major and minor vices that adults can use to help mitigate our emotions when it feels like the world is out to get us.  What do kids get?  A room they can sulk in and Daniel Tiger giving them some preachy speech about Big Feelings™?

Respect as ever, Daniel, but this was a bigger deal than your popsicle failing to meet expectations.

Maybe I’m in the wrong about allowing her to bellow profanity (I’m almost certainly in the wrong about finding it hilarious) but I stand by the decision.  I hated being her age, because everyone tells you to ‘act your age’ without any of the tools that help adults keep their cool.  Everything about a kid’s life is controlled by someone else.  I set her schedule.  Her school dress code dictates clothes and hairstyles.  She goes where I drive her and eats what I cook.  There’s no coffee when she’s tired, no comfort food when she’s stressed, and no real solitude until she’s old enough to be left home alone. 

How well would you do if that were your life?  I wouldn’t last a week.  Even a day might be a stretch; at this point I’m not even sure my heart can still beat on its own without at least a little caffeine in the morning.

So yeah, I’m calling it: so long as she keeps it away from teachers and other adults who might use it as a reason to make the kid’s life hard, I don’t mind if she says a bad word or two when life doesn’t go her way.  Nobody ever got hurt from bad language, and more than a few of my comedy role models turned their filthy mouths into lucrative careers.  If it helps the kid get in touch with her emotions without turning to more self-destructive means of coping, I’m ready to look the other way on this from time to time.

…also I’m gonna start using “Triple bitch” as my go-to curse word because that is absolute poetry.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Life With Kids

“Dad, The Couch Is Upside Down.”

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Let’s review Greek mythology for a moment:

King Sisyphus died, tricked his way out of Hades, and came back to life again. Twice.  Then he died a third time and, much like a good arena rock band, called it quits after the second encore.  As punishment, Zeus sentenced him to endlessly push a bolder up a mountain.  When Sisyphus was almost at the top, he’d slip, the boulder would roll back down the bottom, and he’d start all over again.  Repeat forever.

I bring this up only because I think that fate read a little differently in ancient Greece, an era when laundry was generally cleaned on the same schedule I use for changing the battery in my smoke detector.

My dishwasher is now running for the second time today and somehow the sink is still full to the brim with dirty plates.  Also, there’s 3 loads of laundry to be folded, I need to go grocery shopping, and the kids’ room is so messy it could probably qualify for international relief aid.  I’ve done all these chores in the last 48 hours, but somehow they went from ‘finished’ to ‘alarmingly behind’ without a step in between. 

Is it too late to get set up with a nice rock pushing gig?

I knew that the chores would be pretty intense when I became a stay at home dad, but I don’t think I realized just how intense a mess two kids and a cluttery spouse can produce.  I pick up the same dozen stuffed animals so many times in the course of a day that if my toddler had a Chucky-style haunted doll that was just walking around the house on its own, I don’t think I’d notice.  If it ever did any creepy stuff, I’d be too focused on cleaning up after it for the scare to sink in.

“Somebody wrote ‘Revenge never dies’ on the mirror AGAIN?!  I’m gonna run out of Windex before the end of the week at this rate.”

“It’s playtime… I said, ‘It’s playtime‘ … It’s playt–HEY, PUT THE LAUNDRY BASKET DOWN AND PAY ATTENTION!”

Today is the last day before the kids go back to school after Christmas break, and looking around my house feels like I’m getting ready to put post-World War II Europe back together.  The buildup of clutter seems almost unreal.  There’s clothes in the laundry hamper I haven’t worn since the Bush administration.  I think there’s a sweater in there that might’ve drifted in from an alternate dimension.

I honestly don’t know how other people keep their living spaces in order beyond just staying on top of basic chores.  Forget window-washing and yard work; I struggle enough just to keep everyone in clean clothes and eating something besides a diet exclusively consisting of Pop Tarts and Lunchables.  …Emphasis on ‘exclusively,’ by the way; I’m in no position to badmouth a Pop Tart.  I’m just satisfied if I can serve at least something in the course of a day that didn’t come out of an industrial fabricator.

How do people find time for stuff besides the baseline, though?  Like, where does the time and motivation for yardwork come from?  My neighbor across the street has 2 kids under 8 and still finds time to rake 2-3 times per week.  By the time I get down to raking on my to-do list, my trees will all look like the gray stumps dotting that sad, barren wasteland from “The Lorax.”

On the far end of town, untouched through the years,
the leaves on Matt’s lawn are piled up to your ears.

It’s not from a lack of desire, either.  I like having a clean, orderly lawn.  I like having a fridge with space for groceries instead of just old takeout containers and like 30 varieties of hot sauce.  I like a vacuumed floor.  Hell, I LIKE VACUUMING.  It’s quick, easy, it makes the dog go bananas…there’s way worse chores you can get stuck with.

…but even for being quick and easy, it’ll never reach the top of the priority list faster than kids can create emergency cleanup jobs.  Ditto the raking.  Ditto cleaning out the fridge.  A bored kid with a box of art supplies will always create a better mess.

“Dad, I was painting a picture for you and all my paints fell on the carpet.”
“Dad, I knocked over the kitchen trashcan and now there’s garbage everywhere.”
“Dad, the couch is upside down.”

That last one isn’t a joke. That happened.  I went to the bathroom, and when I came back my daughter (6 at the time) was sitting astride the defeated corpse of my couch watching cartoons.  She didn’t even offer an explanation, just “The couch is upside down.”  No details.  No preamble.  Just a simple, emotionless statement, like a column of smoke announcing the election of a new pope.

Maybe school resuming tomorrow will open up enough time to beat back the mess a little.  I’m skeptical, but not totally counting out the possibility.  Maybe I’ll fold all the clothes, wash all the sheets, sweep the tile, vacuum the carpet, and carry all the scattered toys back to their rooms of origin.

…But the perfect Marie Kondo house isn’t happening.  I won’t reorganize my chaotic kitchen cabinets.  I won’t box up all the kids clothes that don’t fit anymore.  My closets will stay disorganized, my fence will remain unpatched, and the mice in my garage will all look like the old rat from “The Secret of NIMH” before I ever get out there to set up traps.

“Our legends tell of peanut butter atop boards of death, but none still live who have seen them.”

I don’t know if I’m just way worse at keeping a house than everyone else, but I honestly suspect the rest of you are in this boat, too.  It’s probably easier to hide if you don’t write a column on the subject.  I just wanted to offer a message of solidarity and say that you’re not the only one struggling to keep-

…hold that thought, I gotta roll: I think I just heard a couch flipping over.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.