Da Youngsters

Let's preface this post with, 'I love my kids.'  There, now I can talk about anything I want with impunity; free from any quick intakes of breath (GASP) or accusations of terrible parenting.

One of the funniest thing about parenthood is that unless you are the older sibling in a large family or worked with kids your whole life NOTHING PREPARES YOU FOR IT!!  No one takes you aside when your wife is pregnant and says, 'Hey listen, this raisin' kids business is really flippin' hard and you will start aging in dog years about 15 seconds after your first kid is born.  You know that life thing you have now?  It's gone.  Say goodbye to your friends and disposable income for the next two decades.  Having sex?  HA!  Don't even think about it.  You are now a slave to miniature humans! '

Maybe it's our displaced family lifestyle now or many of our parents are from the 'didn't talk about it much' generation but damn, raising a family has got to be the craziest on-the-job training known to mankind.  I'm sure I could wear my fingers to the nub going on about the highs and lows of being a parent but maybe I'll cover a few things that might have been worth knowing 'BC.'  That means, 'Before Children.'

-Where you aware that getting out of the house is probably a 3 hour ordeal, all told?  I used to be able to grab my stuff and split at a moments notice, now I have to get up at 6am to get me and two kids out of the house before 10.  Who knew putting on shoes would be such a major point of conversation?  This could have been useful knowledge.

-Cooking is one of my joys in life, but did you know it could actually be done semi-successfully with one arm?  I might have called bullshit on that one but I surprised myself here.

-Did you know when baby girls poop, it goes straight up their vaginas?  I couldn't have imagined this fact back when I frequently fantasized about the female's anatomy 'BC.'  It's like some indomitable law of physics or something.  A girl poops, and then it goes up their vagina.  A really big drawback to having a daughter with a big appetite is that I get to relive this fact over and over and over again.  Maybe if someone filled me in on this ahead of time I'd would have been prepared to see this body part defaced on a daily basis.

-I wasn't aware that furniture isn't just a place to sit, it is now just a fort waiting to happen.  If a couch had feelings, it would just be biding it's time before our son appeared and stripped it of it's cushions and transformed it into something much cooler.  I'm sure the couch would be okay with that unless it was an uppity couch.  No one told me!

Oh man, I've gotta stop before this can of worms gets out of hand.  Kids are crazy; they're all weird and funny and grumpy and silly and stoic and snuggly and pouty and etc etc etc.  It's nuts.  Kids, wha?

But talk about unconditional love though, hey?  Amazing.  I love my kids.

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