My lovelies

As a parent, I’m obligated to say that I love my children. I have three of them and just looking at their lovely faces fills me with joy. However, there are a few drawbacks to being a parent. Let me itemize my top five for you.

5 – Restaurant selection - We select our restaurants by what is on the children’s menu. Pre-children, I would go to a restaurant simply because I had never been there. I’ve been to restaurants where menu could have been in hieroglyphs as far as I could tell. I would order third from the top and eat whatever came to my table. Those days are gone. Instead of checking the internet for up and coming places to try, we now look at the menu online and make sure they have mac’n’cheese.

4 – I’m shrinking – I’m a big guy. I used to be 6 ft. 3 inches but now I have to round up to 6 ft. 2 inches. The cumulative weight of carrying a child or two or three with all of their accessories really weighs a man down. Each kid comes with an assortment of snacks, wipes, diapers (for the little one) and distractions. I insist on the distractions, which are a series of things mom or I can give the kid to entertain themselves for 5 minutes so we can catch a breath of air. My little lovelies don’t carry much of their own accessories. The really difficult part is that those who can walk only want to walk at the beginning of the day when I’m fresh. Near the end, when I’m worn out and tire, they’ve allowed themselves to get tired too. That’s when they want to be carried. My kids weight approximately 45 pounds, 40 pounds and 16 pounds, plus car seat (about 8 pounds) and accessories (about 12 pounds). The child weight addition to the grocery store is 121 pounds.

3 – Honesty from 3 feet and below – My oldest children’s new favorite game is sitting behind me on the couch with their legs wrapped around my hips. Then I have to stand up. Their legs are still wide open to where they wrapped around my hips. Then they show me exactly how big my butt is by pointing to the space their legs had to wrap around. That is enough on that topic.

2 – Body excretions – There is fluid (or something) coming out those kids non-stop. When my girls were younger, they could not be woken up. Believe me, we tried everything. So in the mornings, I would just carry them downstairs and put them on some cushions we had while I got ready for work and my wife showered. At the time, they still wore diapers but their bladders where up to the challenge. The diapers were able to contain their bladders’ work enough to keep the bed dry. When I picked them up, however, the diaper got squished and stale pee would drip down my stomach every morning. We had a name for it. It was a pee-through. Thankfully, they finally out grew that. This morning I hopped into bed with my eldest to wake her. I got enough movement that I called it a success and when to the middle child. I hopped into bed with her and I heard a splash. It was like a Nestea plunge. I got her cleaned up and got dressed. I picked up the baby to go down stairs and he pooped around his diaper onto my shirt. Not a lot but enough. I’m so used to it, that I didn’t even change. All day today I can look at the little brown green stain on my arm and think fondly of my little lovelies.

1 – Lack of sleep – My middle child, the Nestea plunge girl, was born with a shortened ligament in her neck. It made it so she couldn’t look left. All that rightward looking as an infant started to cause her skull to flatten. She kind of looked like some primitive tribe in National Geographic. We had to put a helmet on her for 23 hours a day. It provided a rounded surface for her skull to rest against so it could grow normally. Normally as defined by the readers of National Geographic as apposed to those pictured inside of National Geographic. Everything is fine now but between the pain in the neck and the uncomfortable helmet, she woke up four or more times a night as a baby. The eldest isn’t really that much of an elder and was still waking up once or twice a night. My wife and I looked like zombies for that first year. It got so bad that I wasn’t paying attention while I was driving and turned in front of an oncoming car. Totaled the car and kept me out of work for a week, so it wasn’t all bad. Check out “The life and times of Malady” on my blog list to the right for her experiences with just one kid. I encourage you to share it with anybody you to scare out of having babies.
To be fair, I should mention that there are positives to having kids. I can think of one. Wherever I am, what ever I’m doing, there is a bucket of wipes around. When I travel for work and don’t have the kids around, I’m terrified of spills and random icky things. Granted there are a lot fewer icky things without the kids but I don’t have my wipes.