I wish.
That’s why summer camp was invented. 
And grandparents.
As much as I’ve loved her at every stage of her life, sometimes the Kid and I just need some time to miss each other. That’s when my folks are more than happy to have her for an afternoon/ weekend/ school holidays.
I’ve said it before, but the best parenting advice I got was about the cute baby stage: Sometimes, when they’re still crying after you’ve fed, cleaned and bedded them down, you just need to gently close the door and take a cup of coffee to the furthest part of the house and sit quietly, all by yourself, for ten whole minutes.
Now she’s turned 13 and I tend to go to bed and have naps more often than she does. That works too.
This article was getting a lot of play on my Facebook friends list a bit ago … I got a kick out of it:
I’ve always thought of “enjoy your kids while they’re young” as one of those meaningless social interactions one has with strangers – like an older lady will say that to me when I’m in the checkout line at the supermarket with my daughter, and then that’s my cue to say “oh, how many children do you have? how old are they now” and then I hear that one is in college and one just got married, and then I say “wow, it must go by so fast” and then I pay for my groceries. Scene.
That is awesome. Thanks for sharing it. I suspect it will be making the rounds of my Friends today. 
I avoided this thread for a little bit, because I do feel guilty and sad about feeling this way, but then decided to come in to post that same article. It helped me a lot.
No kidding. I have a daughter who is 3, and a son who is 4. I don’t know what in the holy hell WhyNot is talking about. I’d hit the pause button right now if I could.
And I’m very, very glad you enjoy them. Honestly, I am. I struggled a lot, with both of my kids 12 years apart, at that age. The boy wasn’t so bad, but he had his moments, mostly because he was completely impermeable to logic at that age. With my girl (the second child) it was constant power struggles from the moment she woke up until the third time each night I had to send her back to bed.
Someone wrote once on another message board about 4’s, and it totally matched my experience (not just as a mom, but as a professional babysitter for many years) that the problem with 4’s is that they feel everything so keenly, and their problems are often problems with no solutions. “This honey is too sticky!” they wail, and I’m sitting there trying to figure out how to solve the “problem” of honey being sticky.
Maybe it’s because I’m a logic driven person who wants to solve problems. That’s why I do better with older kids who are capable of both logic and solving problems.
I’m just unwinding (at 1:00 am) after cleaning up the vomit from one toddler, and spending another 45 minutes getting the other back to sleep. Is this particular moment fun? Not really. But Beta-chan and I spent a good half hour this evening mixing food colors and looking at the water with a flashlight in the dark. “Daddy, add more yellow.”
So, yes, I get some fun times, but also my share of the crappy ones as well. We both work and share the child duties fairly evenly. Our younger one is going through a phase where he only wants me, and is quite vocal about it, so I do more of his care at the moment, including all the diapers, feeding and bathing.
However, I do wonder what the expectations are for the different parents. I have heard far more mothers express guilt about parenting than fathers. Just today my wife and I were having a conversation about our youngest, and my wife worried if her working was affecting the children. I’ve never considered if my working was affecting our children or if they weren’t getting enough love because I have an outside job.
I read an article once in the New Yorker from a mother who wrote that she was tired of talking to other parents at the playground. The mothers always talked about how guilty they felt and the fathers always bragged about how well they were doing.
At our day care, we had a PTA meeting (yes, for daycare, but this is Japan) and we went around the circle talking about our kids, concerns, etc. One of the fathers was telling what a great job he was doing. Then his wife showed up and negated everything he said. It was pretty funny.
Beta-chan is almost 3 1/2 and the kids in her daycare class range from 3 to 4. We have plenty of play dates with various ones, and while some of them have a few meltdowns here or there, I don’t see what is the problem.
I see a world of difference between the advice to enjoy your kids, which can be overlooked at times, and the asininity of enjoy every second which isn’t possible in any aspect of life that doesn’t involved unlimited hookers and blow, or so they say.
I donno. I’ve a logic driven person and I don’t have the same issues, but I wonder if the difference is that I see a different problem.
On Saturday, we had bread, and Beta-chan wanted her bread cut up into little pieces. Then after they were cut (are you sure you want them this size?) she decided that she wanted them larger and had a fit and wailed away. But since I can’t solve that problem, it doesn’t bother me. My response is that she doesn’t have to eat the bread which is now in bits too small for her liking, but she has to sit at the table. After a while, she was fine.
I see this as a period in which they are learning about the world and often get very frustrated because they don’t know what they really want, or can’t articulate it or they whine because they’re three. I know adults who whine when they don’t get what they want.
Sometimes I can help her found out what is wrong, and we count that as a victory. Other times, we work on getting her to learn how to process her feelings. And others, we take her to the crying spot so she can cry for a while. None of these are that frustrating for me. I think it also depends on the temperament of the child. Beta-chan is pretty easy going. If she were thowing tizzy fits daily, that may be a different story.
But the is also a magical age in which they are between two worlds. They can make some sense of the world (Daddy and Didi both have a penis but Mommy and Beta-chan don’t), but are clear out in left field on some things. (Does the bicycle go to sleep at night?) and the world is divided into “yesterday,” “today” and “tomorrow.”
I think mothers have more pressure on them because they are expected to be the one closest to the children. A woman who decides to have a child and then have the father be the primary caregiver while she climbs the corporate ladder with long nights and business trips is considered cold and a bad mother while a man that does the same thing is considered to be the usual. So there’s more guilt for working mothers. Many fathers give themselves a pat on the back for watching the kid and changing its diaper while the mother runs errands.
I consider my brother to be more involved than most working fathers but I still see a dividing line set by society. He’s the one who will do a late night run for diapers and rash cream, but my sis-in-law tells him what brands and she shows him how to apply the cream because it’s assumed as mommy she knows best (and learned first).
Even with stay at home dads, the difference in stress seems marked. I have two different friends where mom stayed home for a while and dad stayed home for a while and they both reported similar experiences…he thought staying home was great, they went to the park, they played with play doh… In there he managed to feed them lunch and throw in some laundry that was still in the basket. She thought staying home was stressful, by the time they got back from the park, the kid was starving and so she fed him hotdogs instead of the wholesome balanced meal planned, she only got a load of laundry done all day which is still in the basket. Play doh got stuck in the carpet and it took half an hour of nap time to get it out and there is still a stain. His expectation was spend the day with kids, keep the house from getting condemned. Hers was raise kids who are bilingual while having a wholesome dinner on the table each night when my husband walks in, and keeping a house that would make Martha Stewart proud. And in my spare time I’ll garden, quilt and cure cancer.
This may be shocking for you to hear, but different people have different experiences as parents.
For example, I’ve heard people complain that age 7 or 8 is when kids can turn really bratty, snotty and obnoxious. Whereas in my case, I’d much, much rather have an 8-year-old that tells me about the interesting things he’s reading or some invention he thought of or whatever, than a 3-year-old that spends an inordinate amount of time throwing tantrums and spilling food on the floor. Yes, there are things to like about each age. But I do better with the kids as they get older. Your mileage may, and obviously does, vary.
I think the Dutchman got into this earlier, but there’s fun, and there’s joy.
Lord knows being a parent is hard work. You come home from work exhausted, and there’s a little boy saying, “Daddy, can you play with me?” with that look in his eyes, and you try to give him as much time and energy you can, around doing the things that need to be done just to get dinner on the table and keep the house from being a wreck. You’re always tired, often frustrated, never have any time for yourself.
Nobody could have adequately warned me about how much of a load parenting puts on you.
But they couldn’t have told me about the joy, either. OK, the Firebug is only four and a half, so no telling what things will be like in a few years, but so far, each stage has been better than the last. There are all the light-bulb moments, when he figures something out for the first time, or the times when you’re doing something together, or just the times when he says, “I love you, Daddy,” and I say, “I love you too, punkin.”
I always knew I wanted to be a daddy, but I didn’t have any idea how much it would mean to me until I actually became one.
Oh, and this:
Absolutely. The kid is counting on you to be the grownup, and part of that is not dumping all your shit on them, unless it’s something that’s unavoidable, and even then, it’s something minimal along the lines of “Daddy had a rough day, can you play by yourself for ten minutes?”
And of course, you can be their friend as long as their behavior is within appropriate bounds, but when they do things they know they shouldn’t, you’ve got to step back, be the parent, and enforce the boundaries rather than be their friend. You owe that to the adult they’ll eventually become, not to mention to your own future self.
Not only do parents have preferred ages, but with my kids, they hit horrible at completely different stages in life. My mother says it was nice of me to put off horrible until I was eighteen and nineteen. But I was a great toddler, a wonderfully preschooler, a joy through my school years, a reasonable teenager.
That eight year old might not tell y interesting things and invent stuff, that eight year old might only speak to you when smarting off and have all the intellectual interests of a cabbage. And that three year old might be my son, who never had a tantrum and almost never spill, he was a very tidy child until he hit late elementary.
Yes, exactly. Not only are all parents different, but so are all kids.
This phrase always strikes me as similar to “Enjoy high school/college/your twenties/etc.; it’s the best time of your life!” I always thought that was both a huge bummer and a load of crap whenever I heard it, and I’m inclined to feel the same way about this. I had some fun in high school, but it mostly sucked really badly. College was better, but I was thrilled to be done with it. My twenties were fine; they had their ups and downs, just like my thirties do. I have wonderful memories of all of those periods, and I’m glad that I’m now free to enjoy those memories without having to relive the difficult times as well. I think there’s something to enjoy about every stage of life, and the best time of anyone’s life is, ideally, the one you’re currently in. If not, then hopefully, it’s the one you’re about to be in. If you’re spending your present and future wishing for your long lost past, you’re doing it wrong.
My kid is now the ripe old age of 1 1/2, and already, I miss him being a little baby. I do. But any sadness I feel about not having a tiny infant anymore is far outweighed by the relief of not having a tiny infant anymore, plus the fact that I now have an awesome little toddler. And though I love him to bits and wouldn’t change him for the world, I’m already looking forward to when he can talk more, and understand more, and do more, and I can’t wait until tantrums are a thing of the past. I’ll always look back and enjoy those memories of him at younger ages, but that doesn’t mean I want to actually go back to that time. It seems like some people view their children’s growth as a series of losses to grieve: “I don’t have that tiny baby anymore, or that sweet little toddler, or that charming child… they’re all gone now.” I don’t see it that way. To me, it’s an accumulation of experiences that I can never lose. Each stage is an addition, not a subtraction. I got to see him as a baby, and now I *also *have him as a toddler, and so on. I love him best the way he is right this very minute, and I will love him even more tomorrow.
There are some things that you have to enjoy when they’re young, because they just won’t happen again. Taking one example from last night: I was reading the little Torqueling a bedtime book about dolphins. She asked, “Daddy, are dolphins nice?” And I told her that they’re very nice, and funny, and that they sometimes help people in danger, and even scare away sharks. She was wide-eyed with wonder.
The world is only that new for a short time, and it’s a privilege to be there to witness this little person realizing that there really is magic to be found.
Nope. Absolutely not. I’ve changed, oh, roughly 3,000 diapers in my day, and have a son with major ADD.
If I adore him, it’s NOT because I haven’t seen how rough he can be to deal with, or because someone else is doing all the hard stuff behind the scenes and leaving all the fun stuff to me.
Like ANY adage, “Enjoy Your Kids While They’re Young” can seem either overly obvious or trite. If you’re the type who just doesn’t LIKE kids, obviously, the adage doesn’t apply to you, so feel free to ignore it. But if you DO love your kids… well, don’t miss out on the good stuff! If there are things you’ve always dreamed of doing with your kids (or that THEY dream of doing), try to make it happen before they’ve outgrown their current age or phase.
Right now, my 8 year old son loves going fishing or hiking with me (I was NEVER an outdoorsman before he came along, and never went fishing or hiking until HE took an interest in those things). Sometimes, he’s even clingy. I HAVE to enjoy this time, because it’s inevitable that, in a few years, he’ll want to spend his spare time with his buddies or with his girlfriend(s) rather than with me.
This may be shocking for you to hear, MsWhatsit, but ** Labrador Deceiver** is saying the exact thing you’re saying. He was basically responding to **WhyNot **who said: