Kids

[Back2Lawrence]

We played baseball in the cul-de-sac. Rode bikes in a 3 mile radius. Played in the woods. Played in Pearl Harbor. Lots and lots of outside stuff. And I was as allergic to the sun then as I am now.

[TDub]

I lived on a muddy pond in Kansas. my summers were spent all around that mudhole all day long....fishing, finding crawdads, in the canoe, trapping bunnies and muskrats, shooting at muskrats, chasing snakes. In and out of the nearby woods. out at breakfast home at dinnertime or so.

Im not even sure you could get away with that nowadays.

Of course...our TV had 3 channels and I had no Nintendo or anything so....we made our own fun because staring a wall wasn't very entertaining. I miss those days, simpler times.

[jfish26]

A pool party in August for a four year old would sure seem to be a violation of several provisions of the Geneva Convention, punishable by not fewer than ten (10) consecutive Southwest flights with comedian/enne flight attendants.

[Sparko]

We played baseball almost every day behind Cordley School. We were joined once by some KU baseball players, one of which lost our ball after sending it into a mighty fir tree. We also played dice baseball with baseball cards. It was all outside to get out of my mom's hair. In Fall, we switched to football until it got too cold, then basketball. Rode bikes, played beebee war, and hiked all over town.

[MICHHAWK]

an outdoor pool party in august makes a hell of a lot more sense than an outdoor pool party in January.

[JKLivin]

McDonalds is trash now.
20 years ago ( I’m old ) I could get down on double quarter pounders and they were decent. Still prefer Wendy’s though even then.

Perhaps...just perhaps...they've been garbage this whole time....but your body did better at processing this garbage when you were a little younger.

I dunno.
I'd like to go back in time, with my body/mind now, and order a quarter pounder from 20 years ago, and compare it to one today.
I think the one previous would be better.

They were definitely bigger 20 years ago. The name is false advertising today.

[TDub]

We played baseball almost every day behind Cordley School. We were joined once by some KU baseball players, one of which lost our ball after sending it into a mighty fur tree. We also played dice baseball with baseball cards. It was all outside to get out of my mom's hair. In Fall, we switched to football until it got too cold, then basketball. Rode bikes, played beebee war, and hiked all over town.

what's a fur tree? is that where blankets come from?

[jfish26]

This resonated with me, having just had a kid get licensed, blessedly, finally.

https://defector.com/driving-is-the-nem ... ll-parents

Compared to other parents, my wife and I have it easy. We have three children, but only one of them plays an organized sport. And he’s only on one team, which is an anomaly when the average young athlete plays for 56 different teams simultaneously. So, relative to many other American moms and dads, we have little to complain about.

But I’d like to complain. I’d like to complain so, so much. Because fall is here, and I will be stuck in my goddamn car for 90 percent of it.

Parenting involves busywork at every stage. You know about the workload new parents have to endure: changing diapers, feeding babies, putting them down to rest, scouting out daycare providers, washing bottles, etc. I thought that that I would be free of such tedium once all of my kids were older and more self-reliant. I was wrong. Your workload as a parent never ends; it merely evolves. Once you’re done with diapers, you’re onto orchestrating playdates, scouting out preschools, asking the kids to pick up their shit over and over, doing their laundry, and helping them with grade-school homework that you yourself don’t even understand.

And once that’s done, you’re driving. You drive and you drive and you drive. Forever.

I’ve logged more miles than a fucking ice road trucker. It started when my daughter became a gymnast a decade ago. We had to drive her to the gym three to four nights a week. Pick-up was well after dinner, when daddy would have preferred to be drunk at home than sitting in a darkened parking lot waiting for the girl to saunter out. On weekends, we had to drive her to meets that were never held nearby. You have kids and discover far-flung exurban pockets of this country that you never knew existed, and then you live in them for hours at a time. You end up navigating every inch of these pockets, as if you’ve been tasked with mapping them for the Queen of Spain.

This was only mid-level gymnastics, mind you. Our daughter hadn’t even gotten to the aspiring Olympian level of competition, where you gotta drive to Toledo just to watch your kid get smoked by an army of prodigal tween acrobats. But the driving was still a bear, so I remember sitting in my Kia on those dark nights, waiting for a train to pass nearby just so I’d have something new to look at. Sometimes I’d go inside to wait for her in the lobby, but there’d always be at least two people in there on speakerphone, plus siblings playing on iPads at full volume. Worse.

The girl eventually quit gymnastics, because girls mysteriously quit sports en masse as they get further along the adolescent curve … perhaps because they’re eager to start their own worker-owned sports blog. But just as our daughter left the uneven bars behind, our older son got deep into soccer and our younger son began testing out sports that might interest him: flag football, parkour, fencing, swimming, tennis, and kung fu. Our driving schedule grew. Metastasized. More practices, many of them conflicting. More meets. More games. More nights where dinner was “just grab some shit out of the fridge cuz we gotta go.” If we were lucky, we could find other parents to carpool with (and god bless those other parents; take the keys to my kingdom forever). But many times, we were doing both legs of the trip, and we still are. Sometimes the window to go back home is too tight and I just stay for the whole practice and walk to get a decaf. That walk usually gives me reflux.

Sports are only part of the driving equation. You raise kids to have lives of their own, and for a long time you have to drive them TO those separate lives. So not only are my wife and I driving these kids to soccer games, but to friends' houses, to parties, to rehearsals, to high school football games, to the mall, and to fucking Bangkok if that’s on the calendar, too. All of it happens either right at dinnertime, during the last two minutes of any kick-ass football game, or when I’ve had a long day and need to pop a gummy. None of this driving is convenient. We live in an area notorious for its traffic, so plotting out each drive requires a logistical meeting that makes any all-hands staff meeting at WeWork look like the model of concision. Complicating matters is the fact that my daughter can now drive but has no car of her own, which means we might be down a car in key moments. If I’m not driving, I’m planning. And if I’m not doing either of those things, I’m writing a column about annoying all of it is.

No times are set in the parental automotive universe. Soccer practices run late. So do games. So do social calls. Especially social calls. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve arrived to pick up one of my kids, parked the car, grabbed my phone, and seen a text from them that says “can u get me at 11 instead” that was sent five goddamn minutes before I got there. Because if you have kids of any age, you know that they either want to leave places right away or never. Getting them out the door is often a process that unfolds in stages:

Texting them “i’m here”
Getting out of the car and knocking on the door
Making small talk with the other adult inside and yelling downstairs at them to come up
GOING downstairs to prove that I have arrived and am standing before them in corporeal form
Fighting with them because actually, they wanna sleep over now
Waiting for them to get all of their shit
Leaving
Going back because they forgot their water bottle
This is the sacrifice you make as a parent, understanding that your children’s lives are the priority over your own. But I’m only human. I want SOME of my life to myself, and that craving has resulted in some of my worst recent moments as a father. I’ve only told you about the scheduled drives I have to make. Those are hardly the only ones. Kids are always ready to surprise you with more of them. They make plans with their friends, usually in slipshod fashion (kids are worse at making plans than even their parents are), and then they announce those plans the second they have to be enacted.

I’ve been sitting in my recliner on a seemingly free and blissful evening when suddenly I get a HEY DAD and then a request to drive one or more kids to the fucking froyo stand. I have handled these moments poorly, and to my kids’ faces. I’ve regaled them with, “Oh come ON,” “Are you shitting me?”, “Your mother and I are tired,” and other loving bon mots. No matter what I said, the message was always unmistakable: your life is inconveniencing me. I have the right to put my foot down with them, and I have the right to assert some time for myself. But I can do both of those things in a gentler manner, and I can do it when I have actual plans beyond sitting there and playing phone Scrabble for the rest of the night.

My kids are no longer small (they’re 11, 14, and 17), but that doesn’t absolve me from modeling good behavior in front of them. Quite the contrary. No matter how old your kids are, you remain their foremost role model. Everything they see you do echoes through their psyches and reverberates back out of them. So when you act like a dick in front of your children, it’ll reflect back on you sooner rather than later, and you’ll forced to reckon with the wicked lessons you’ve unwittingly taught them. These moments are little failures, but they feel rotten to endure all the same.

Thus, I’ve tried to keep a more level head about driving. I try not lose my shit anytime one of my kids has the temerity to make me miss an hour of whatever thoroughly average football game I’m watching. And again, I’m one of the lucky ones. I don’t have to commute for work. None of my kids are on some deranged travel team. I can afford, both in terms of time and treasure, to the driving I do. It sucks. It will never not suck. But it’s the job, and I’d rather do my job well than do it poorly.

So I drove my son to soccer practice the other night and stayed in my car the whole time after dropoff. I didn’t take a walk. I didn’t make awkward small talk with the other parents. Instead, I watched the first half of Eagles-Bucs on my phone. No one knocked on my car. No one texted me to drive somewhere else. Everyone left me the fuck alone, and I found myself at peace. You look for peace anywhere you can find it when you have kids, and sometimes that peace happens to be in the last place you wanna drive to.

[Sparko]

We played baseball almost every day behind Cordley School. We were joined once by some KU baseball players, one of which lost our ball after sending it into a mighty fur tree. We also played dice baseball with baseball cards. It was all outside to get out of my mom's hair. In Fall, we switched to football until it got too cold, then basketball. Rode bikes, played beebee war, and hiked all over town.

what's a fur tree? is that where blankets come from?

Ha! It is a fir piece from grammar. Yow. These weird substitution errors plague me as I age. Too reliant on spell check to look closely too.

And great piece, Fish

[jfish26]

It occurred to me this morning that my house, which is on a hill, is essentially equidistant between two school bus stops.

Meaning, my kids have a golden opportunity to claim victory over their own children forever, by actually walking uphill both ways.

[jfish26]

My youngest kid's birthday was yesterday.

Pro tip for those with presents under the tree: do not, under any circumstance, give your child something called a "Fluffy Stuffy".

Light it on fire with your menorah, run it over with Santa's sleigh, tell your kid Rudolph took a sick day, blame the Elf on the Shelf.

Giving it to the children of your worst enemy should be a felony in every state, and a war crime if delivered abroad.

Read the one-star reviews Mrs. Fish failed to find. They are right, everyone else is wrong. This thing is an abomination and a Christmas ruiner.

https://www.target.com/p/fluffie-stuffi ... A-88760057

[jhawks99]

Allsome, I ordered one for my grandkids.

ETA: Our youngest's birthday was Sunday. Sucks for kids to have a b-day this close to Christmas.

[jfish26]

Allsome, I ordered one for my grandkids.

ETA: Our youngest's birthday was Sunday. Sucks for kids to have a b-day this close to Christmas.

I'm dead serious - your daughter (?) will not forgive you by Easter if you don't warn her off.

[jhawks99]

Worse than Easter grass? I was still picking that stuff up at Halloween.

[jfish26]

Worse than Easter grass? I was still picking that stuff up at Halloween.

Think that, but fur. So it's even stickier and vacuum-cloggier.

And there is no payoff for it.

You're just left with - spoiler alert - a smaller and dumber stuffed animal than you started with. One that sort of looks like you should wonder if it's polite to ask how chemo is going, or if that's too presumptuous.

[jfish26]

I went to the KU game last night. I bought my teenage daughter a sweatshirt. I gave it to her this morning.

And she genuinely liked it.

This is a 2- or 3-seed parenting moment.

[pdub]

That store ain't cheap.
I visited two Xmas's ago and got a Jayhawk stuffy and a sweatshirt.
I think it was just barely under 200 dollars.

Gotta pay to play though - otherwise we're looking at a bubble team.

[jfish26]

That store ain't cheap.
I visited two Xmas's ago and got a Jayhawk stuffy and a sweatshirt.
I think it was just barely under 200 dollars.

Gotta pay to play though - otherwise we're looking at a bubble team.

It’s not cheap, that’s for sure. It’s nice that it’s a Rally House (chain merch store) so that you can just return things to brick-and-mortar stores in KC. Thankfully that will not be needed for this sweatshirt!

[TDub]

I went to the KU game last night. I bought my teenage daughter a sweatshirt. I gave it to her this morning.

And she genuinely liked it.

This is a 2- or 3-seed parenting moment.

I grew up in Kansas, in a household of generational Kansans and alumni, my liking the Jayhawks wasn't optional.

My daughter though, who has never been to Kansas, will come in when I'm watching and say Go Jayhawks and watch with me and last night if we could find a women's Kansas game to watch sometime....which, of course we can.

I feel your pride. ha

[jfish26]

I went to the KU game last night. I bought my teenage daughter a sweatshirt. I gave it to her this morning.

And she genuinely liked it.

This is a 2- or 3-seed parenting moment.

I grew up in Kansas, in a household of generational Kansans and alumni, my liking the Jayhawks wasn't optional.

My daughter though, who has never been to Kansas, will come in when I'm watching and say Go Jayhawks and watch with me and last night if we could find a women's Kansas game to watch sometime....which, of course we can.

I feel your pride. ha

I mean, she already likes KU. That was the easy part.