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“A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.” – Ben Franklin
Disclaimer Note: I’m posting this as my submission to the DadsTalking $100 Date Night giveaway, where one lucky dad (and his spouse) will receive $100 for a much needed date night!
Why we need a date night and escape Chaosville (yes that is a real place)
Well if you lived in our house you’d know why we need a date night, Hell, we need a date week! I see my wife every day online when we chat via Google Talk or call each other to ask if we paid the bills this month. When we come home we are like daycare teachers and each have one child in our sights and care. Wife who?? Husband who?? Hell no, we only run around the kitchen like manic chefs that ordered too much seafood for kids that only eat see-food! Make ‘em mac ‘n cheese, they want nuggets, make ‘em nuggets they want mac ‘n cheese (but only EZ Mac). Good Lord kids! I remember when I had to eat chicken (ON THE BONE!) or hard-as-leather pork chops (ON THE BONE). And MILK was the only dinner liquid allowed.
Sometimes during this chaos my wife and share glares of disgust and sometimes bump into each other which usually results in us disagreeing about something. The tension levels skyrocket and that is like mixing up a Long Island Ice Tea and chugging it…the end result either way is that someone is gonna get ca-raaa-zzyy!
[If you do not believe me I can post a video if I still have it, I’ll hunt for it and post it if I do!]
What Will We Do On Date Night?
Most likely I will chase my wife around and offer her the $100 to to get a kerotin hair treatment if we could spend 20 seconds in bed! Maybe 10 (it’s been 4 years – read above for reason why!)
But in all honesty, my wife and I LOVE our kids and our alone time! We used to spend Friday nights at Barnes & Noble reading books, magazine and sipping Starbucks Cappuccinos. It was great. We would read articles and share what we were reading and even have a REAL conversation with the person sitting across the table, sometimes we would even interlock our fingers! It was a good ‘ole time and we have done that one other time in the past six years and it was amazing and weird that we got to be like “pre-kid” again.
We also enjoy peaceful dinners alone, at a restaurant, where we can ask for more sauce if the waiter brings us too little – just like our kids do. We’ve found a great BYOB place (which helps save us money as we’ve been putting two kids through daycare – one just moved onto kindergarten, but it’s been like a second mortgage) that is very quaint and romantic and it’s great to sit across the table from my beautiful wife and hold hands and talk about things we enjoy – our kids – without interruption. And yes we do, we do talk about our kids and how we can win at least one battle against them! Haha
Here are some other other #DadsTalking $100 Date Night entries that I felt like sharing so my readers can find new Dads to follow and read.
How many of you think your kids are smart? Right, everyone does! How many of you have a child that asks a question that traps you into a NO-WIN response? Well I do! Or so it seems like that is what KBop did to me tonight. In case you’re a first time reader, KBop is our soon-to-be four year old daughter. Well tonight she posed a question to me after I wrapped up reading books to her. Ready for it?
“Daddy Are You Tired?”
How the F am I supposed to answer that? I think it’s her version of a trick question! If I say “No, I’m not tired, I have to go downstairs and pack lunches, clean up and then blog and tweet until midnight,” well….you know what she’ll say, “I wanna go with you!”
So I said, “Yes, Daddy’s tired and needs to get to bed.” Her smart ass response, “Good, you can sleep next to me!”
UGH!!! Not what I had in mind, but what a cute response and totally well played! I did chuckle and said, “Oh alright peanut, but I can only stay for 30 seconds.” (I know, what a mean daddy I am! haha, but she thought that was a long time, whew!)
So I’m keeping this blog post rather short for once, but my question to you, how would you handle this? Have you had similar incidents?
Ok folks, here is a list of fifteen more Dads that I follow on Twitter. I’ve been tweeting my #FollowFriday #FF list of names for a while now, but really wanted a way to capture the lists of great Dads out there in the Twitterverse. Click this link for last week’s list of Fatherhood Friday Dads on Twitter.
Here’s the alphabetized list and if you’re NOT yet following me, here’s my Twitter account @DaddysToolbox.
Stay tuned for more great Dads to follow next week. If you know of a Dad that should be included, please leave me a comment or tweet me @DaddysToolbox.
The other day I was asked to write a guest blog post on ChesterCountyMoms.com on the topic of What Dads REALLY Want for Father’s Day. Writing like I do, long winded sometimes, I brought more of my thoughts and feelings of Father’s Day and then some cool gift ideas.
So I’ll keep this post short and have you stop over the ChesterCountyMoms.com to read the full post!
Happy Father’s Day to all the other Great Dads out there!!
First off…I’ve taken a few months off from blogging and have been wondering how to get back into it. I guess I need to start by just letting my fingers touch the keyboard for longer than 140 characters since I’ve been “micro-blogging” my life over the past 6 months via Twitter (Follow me @DaddysToolbox). Sometimes I only have enough time between work, making dinner (I’m the cook that is also neglecting our recipe blog at TwoTonguesUp.com), and then spending some quality time with our two kids before rushing them off to bed, then tackling bills and other house chores, just to wake up and start it all over again. Such is my life!
Using Twitter to release some of my negative thoughts (yes, I said it and admit it) has been much easier than “setting up shop” in my basement and drafting a full blown blog post to unwind. So tonight, I’m going to tackle that feat and relax with some good tunes (a mix of Mark Knopfler & Death Cab for Cutie – random,eh?), a newly poured glass of Red Truck Merlot, and a lot of thoughts running through my head.
Tonight I’m going to write about my week as Mr. Mom (1983, shit that is an OLD movie) as my wife is on a short 4-day business trip and I’m doing double duty with two kids that miss Mommy.
Now if I didn’t have to head off to work in the morning, I think I would resemble Michael Keaton in this photo from the movie, when he’s seeing his wife off early in the morning and says, “Honey, if you call and I’m not here I’ll be either at the gym or the gun club.”
Onward with my Mr. Mom week…
Monday
So my wife left on Monday and it was me and our two kids (since the last I wrote, they’ve grown and are 5 1/2 and 3 1/2, boy/girl). The week started out pretty good, the kids and I came home on Monday and all was good. Simple dinner in front of the TV since they were like little zombies (tired from a FUN weekend). After dinner and shows we headed upstairs to get ready for bed and read lots of calming books. When it’s just one parent putting both kids together there needs to be rules stated. “Ok, I’m going to read ONE book to you then ONE book to your sister and I’ll be back in for another book and lights out.” So that’s what I did, shared my time between both of them, leaving their my iPhone with the one sitting alone in their bed. They like to send emails check Facebook play games on it. No problem, it makes putting both to bed so much easier!
Accomplished bedtime in pretty close to Solo Daddy record, I think it was 8:30pm, but then again, the kids were still exhausted from Sunday.
Tuesday
Easy morning, kids up and out of the house in record time. Weird. Faster than if Mommy were home…hmmmm??? Does that tell ya something? It does to me!
Tuesday evening headed over to a friend’s house for a quick after school playdate and dinner, then a small meltdown and home for the “Four B’s” — baths, brush teeth, books and bed. Pretty easy going. Mommy had called and talked to our son and told him to sleep with her pillow. That made things SO much easier. Bed by 9pm – a little later than normal.
Wednesday Morning
Today started off S—L—O—W and I sent a cross post to both Twitter and Facebook. I’ll spare a long drawn out explanation, this should do just fine.
Wednesday Night
Tonight was my “night off” and kids were going to stay at my parent’s house and I had a few movies planned. Not sure what happened, could be the alignment of planets, or that all the focus is on the huge environmental disaster in the Gulf, but for the past two weeks our kids haven’t wanted to stay with my parents. (Sorry folks, my wife and I do get a weekly date night and free sitting courtesy of Mama and Papa.) This same freakish thing happened about six months ago when our son decided he didn’t want to sleep over at Mama & Papa’s house anymore. We worked through that and after a few weeks “off” he and his younger sister were back over there having a ton of fun! And it is fun for them, they get to eat a good dinner, Mama likes that, and then play outside, ride bikes, walk to the fish pond, and even watch a movie or quick show.
So anyway, tonight the dreaded phone call came at 7:32pm and they wanted to come home. It’s understandable, they miss me!!! No, they miss Mommy. Papa drove them home since I wanted to quickly clean up the house so it’s all nice for tomorrow when Mommy gets home. Once the kids were home the whole after school routine starts. They tell me about their day, what happened, find some old Cheerios on the floor, go pet the cat, tell me the same thing over and over like I’m the one NOT listening. And all this time I’m thinking, “Get them upstairs for the “Four B’s”.” It’s 8:00pm and we head up and they want to color pictures of birdhouses. Not sure where that idea came from but what the Hell, go for it. I figured coloring was relaxing and gave us a little time to talk about the day since that is a routine thing to do. Also during this time I was misting the room and pillows with the calming fragrance of Lavender oil.
Ahhhh…soothing bedtime…F NO!
The kids were tired…and tired kids mean their ears don’t work, just their mouths. So a little whining and non-listening really frustrates me so I had to put myself in timeout to relax. It’s funny when you stick yourself in timeout because my kids started wondering WHY DADDY IS IN TIMEOUT. They told me I could get out and that I was being good. Too funny!
After two minutes of timeout/ignoring them I read one book to each of them, it’s typically three books each. I read the first book to my son, then went into my daughter’s room and read one, then back to son’s room to hug and kiss. He was asleep in a minute! “Energizer bunny” on the other hand, she could stay awake all night I think. I’m surprised she’s not sitting next to me at 12:50am as I type this! But anyway I did finally get her to sleep after rubbing her legs, and scratching her back. I have NO CLUE where and when that shit started but it better stop. She’s like “No, scratch to the left…no..up up up…on the skin!!” Yeah, and she’s 3 1/2! Great, look what I have ahead of me!
Alright folks, let me know you actually read this post by leaving me a comment. I appreciate it! I’m going to try my hardest to write shorter, more frequent posts and get back into things. I think it will be a great soothing thing for me to do each night. Oh and I have to stop typing now or go open another bottle of wine…better save that for next time!
Ok folks, so how many of you have posted the “Facebook Alert!!” that Facebook is going to allow Google to index your profile?? I know about 38 people that posted it which is all fine and dandy, but it does cause a viral panic that isn’t 100% accurate.
Facebook posted this on the top of my Security Page when I went to review my already “locked down” profile:
“There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile.”
Verify your profile indexing settings by clicking on Settings (at the top of the page) –> Privacy Settings –> Search –> then UN-CHECK the box that says ‘Allow indexing’.
The Allow Indexing button reads:Allow search engines to access your publicly available info and any information visible to Everyone
So in other words, Facebook is going to allow search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, whatever) to search PUBLIC INFO (i.e., your name, profile pic and anything else you’ve left unprotected). Facebook released an announcement a week ago about changes being made to your Privacy Settings, so this isn’t something they tried to “hide”.
Ok, so back to the point…hopefully you’ve already “locked down” your facebook profile so that only the PEOPLE you WANT to be able to view “that you don’t like when it rains because it makes your hair look bad” can see that and no one else.
Now…there are steps you MUST take to secure your profile. It seems that most profiles are already pretty secure, but when the latest Facebook New Privacy push came out a few days ago it did raise a few eyebrows of Security Experts.
a snippet and quote from the article:
A spokesperson from security firm Sophos says in a statement to Mashable:
“These could be the most important clicks you ever make on Facebook. If you don’t read carefully you could find that every post you make on Facebook, and your personal information, is visible to everyone in the world who has a computer rather than just your Facebook friends.
Let’s make this clear. If you make your information available to ‘everyone,’ it actually means ‘everyone, forever.’ Because even if you change your mind, it’s too late — and although Facebook say they will remove it from your profile they will have no control about how it is used outside of Facebook.”
SO ACT NOW!
I’m not going to scare you by posting that Google is going to index your Facebook profile (enough of your friends have done that already).
But I will say, “Make sure you review your Facebook Privacy and Security Settings and adjust them to suit your personal level of privacy.” I can’t stress enough that YOU have to ensure your privacy settings are how you WANT them to be set. It takes just a few minutes to get in there and review your security/permissions and figure it out. Start small…start with photo albums of your kids. Only let those people that you really know see your kid’s pics. That’s how I’ve set things up.
Now, I’m a rather OPEN person and social media junkie and I’ve pretty much locked down my Facebook Profile to allow only certain Lists (groups) to see different parts of my profile, photo albums, status updates etc.
HELP!! HOW DO I SET MY PRIVACY AND SECURITY???
Well there are a few ways to do this. First I would start off by creating a few Lists/Groups of friends. Take my example, I have lists named:
Business
College
High School
Kids (all my friends that have kids that we know)
Limited Profile (restricted profile settings)
No Status Updates (DON’T GET ON THIS LIST! HAHA!)
Friends (a growing list of close friends)
and more…
If you add a user to more than one Friend List, and those Friend Lists have conflicting privacy settings, the more restrictive of the privacy settings will always be respected.
So for example, you don’t want people to see your college photos except a select few college friends, you could customize the permissions for a specific photo album to only allow the select college friends to view. Or maybe you don’t want your business contacts to see your status updates, pics, etc. Just set up a Friend List for Business and set all the Privacy settings to not show to Business. It’s actually VERY SIMPLE once you get started.
CONTACT ME FOR HELP FEEL FREE TO ASK ME QUESTIONS ON SECURING YOUR FACEBOOK PROFILE. You can post to my wall, or message me on FB or get me on Twitter @DaddysToolboxOTHER LINKS TO READ Facebook Friend Lists: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=768
I always get a laugh out of watching this video from Man Stroke Woman, a British comedy show. And it’s perfect for this week, as I’ve come down with a “Man Cold” which is more like the flu. I’m all achy and running a low-grade fever. Nothing a few Advil can’t take care of.
Way to go Buddy! I’m so proud of my son for becoming comfortable jumping into a swimming pool!! Of course, I still freak out when I see him do it and go underwater for 8 seconds. But it no longer seems to phase him.
Today, both of our kids spent the morning and most of the afternoon over at my parent’s community pool while I did some work on my basement project and my wife did her things. I think it’s best this way since I tend to overreact to small things and get freaky when the kids don’t listen to me at the pool (or anywhere for that matter). I think if I was with them today at the pool my pre-K son wouldn’t have had the courage or confidence to jump in without someone holding his hands or catching him and he also probably wouldn’t have learned to swim with his face in the water.
I think my parents do a good job of watching and teaching the kids things at the pool and tend to me way more relaxed that myself and my wife. Probably since grandparents have already raised children (us) and no what to expect.
So anyway, I’m very proud of my son for what he accomplished today. He’s been going to 1 hour swim lessons with this Pre-K class every Friday for a few weeks and has been learning how to blow bubbles and the instructor has them do back float and then pulls the kids in the water. Guess this helps to build confidence!
Today my son wanted to show Mommy and me what he’s been learning and then some! I wish I had my camera to snap photos to remember. Guess I’ll just have to read my blog posts in a few years to remember this day!
My son has said a few words that just freaked me out.
And these words were not “shit” and “fuck” — those would have been nice!!!
What he said was “I’ll cut you in half” and “I’ll kill you” during his “no-nap, long-day-running-around meltdown” from 7:30-8pm tonight. And he was saying that directly at his sister since he wanted Mommy to put him to bed. My wife heard him say that an immediately asked him where he heard such words. His response, “[name removed] from Pre-K2 at school.”
Great!!!
Well the unnamed child is the same one that less than a year ago was talking about guns and stuff — and he was only 3 years old then! This is going to be A PROBLEM! And one that I am addressing with my child’s daycare immediately via email to the Director as well as on Monday morning with a phone call or face to face. Something like this needs to be addressed immediately by the school and a resolution to the issue by removal of the problem student and any siblings. Harsh? No, not at all…it’s a private daycare, one where I’m paying $1200 for both kids to attend. This situation calls for an immediate and appropriate response from the school’s director. If not, then I’ll have to go to the corporate office for satisfactory resolution….which in my mind is the immediate removal of the problem child.
Not only were these words just awful to hear…I also find out that the same child is making all of the boys in the pre-K room speak like robots or people with traceotomy tubes. Ok that isn’t anywhere near as bad as cutting someone in half, but still it’s an annoyance I, and my son, don’t need. My wife learned about the annoying voices while at soccer practice today. There is a child in the earlier soccer class, and that goes to my son’s same daycare, that came up and said hi to my son in that weird voice. My wife looked and said to the other child’s mom, “Your son does that too!??” And the mom said, “YES! It’s annoying and he’s learned it from another boy in his daycare class”…ends up being the same child that is alleged to have said the bad words and phrases.
Anyway…Over the past two weeks my wife and I noticed that our son just didn’t seem himself at daycare/school. I even emailed his teacher directly to ask her if everything was ok. She replied and said everything seemed to be ok and that my son was playing with all of his friends like normal. For all of you…my son is very affectionate, caring and considerate and while talking with my wife before writing this post we think our son was acting the way he was because of things going on at school. He knows not to say bad words and stuff and if he was hearing those things he might have felt out of place and unsure of what to do.
My wife finally got my son to calm down and like I said, he told us where and from whom he heard “cut you in half” (just say that like 3x to yourself and think about those words coming from your child’s mouth) it’s sickening. He’s never said anything bad like that.
Do any of you [other parents] reading this have any advice for me? Do you have children in daycare and pre-k that are learning inappropriate phrases or behaviors? I’m not sure what to do?!? Any thoughts?
Awesome contest over at Dad-Blogs.com where they’ve teamed up with Kid Creations to giveaway a kick-ass wooden swingset / playset to one lucky family (living in Chester County, PA). Oh please let it be me! Otherwise I have the long, drawn-out task this spring to build a playset for my kids. We already have 2 slides, the rock wall, but NO wood…like as in NO actual tower, landing, and swing bar. I guess I could always find a low hanging branch and bungee the rock wall and slide to it.
Does that work??? Hmm, probably not safe, eh?
So if I don’t win the playset then there goes 7 minutes 38 seconds of each weekend to build one! My wife WANTS me to do projects like finishing my basement, or “hey honey MOVE that plant from there to here…no the OTHER here!”, and “can you plant me a garden”, and oh I forgot…”you can’t do this stuff during the day!” So….my kids will be 22 years old by the time I’m done and wondering why the Hell I built them a swing/play set!!
Anyway, Kid Creations is a manufacturer of wooden swing sets and accessories and located smack-dab in the middle of the US, as in Kansas. Good for shipping to the east and west, I guess. Which is perfect for shipping down Interstate 70 or whatever road is close by.
In any event, what a kick-ass contest to be running in time for spring and summer fun, barbeques, playdates, my annual Autumn Pig Roast, etc.
Why Kids Love Swingsets and my time as a kid
I’m not sure why all kids LOVE swingsets but they do. “PUSH ME!!!!!” “No!!!! Not that fast!” “Faster!!!!” oh sorry, i had a relapse back to a few nights ago… Well I might have an idea as to why they love it. When your kids are young they enjoy having Mommy and Daddy there with them, pushing, pulling and laughing with them. As kids grow up a swing set could be a way to boost a little confidence…i.e, jumping off at eight feet high!
I know when I was a kid we had one of those old Rusty-Pole-with-Metal-Chainlink-Swings swingset. We also had some rickety old metal-tetinus-causing jungle gym to climb on. But guess what? My friends and I loved it! Wherelse do kids learn to be afraid of heights? haha…I am and it’s probably because I used to swing fast and high and then jump off. Who didn’t!?
Ok, wow, I was just going to write a short paragraph about all of this, but then my fingers just kept typing and I got to remember my youth! cool! time to get some sleep.
Now if I didn’t have to head off to work in the morning, I think I would resemble Michael Keaton in this photo from the movie, when he’s seeing his wife off early in the morning and says, “Honey, if you call and I’m not here I’ll be either at the gym or the gun club.”
And all this time I’m thinking, “Get them upstairs for the “Four B’s”.” It’s 8:00pm and we head up and they want to color pictures of birdhouses. Not sure where that idea came from but what the Hell, go for it. I figured coloring was relaxing and gave us a little time to talk about the day since that is a routine thing to do. Also during this time I was misting the room and pillows with the calming fragrance of Lavender oil. ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=1309148d-4b36-40e9-868b-cea7ea473237)
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