Benefits of Parenting: Getting sick sucks a little bit less

I spent much of my pre-parenting life dreading being sick. I bought my Purell at Costco. I would turn off television shows where the characters were sick -- worried that the mere suggestion of illness might trigger some kind of psychosis-induced flu. (Watching "Angela's Ashes" in the theater with my wife was torture.) Before I had kids, it occurred to me that I would have fared extremely poorly as a pilgrim, a peasant in the Middle Ages or another medically dicey time in human history.

I was thinking about this as my fever spiked to a miserable level last Wednesday night. Despite being attacked by a sudden illness that turned out to be the worst I had in two or three years, I felt almost grateful. At least the rest of my family wasn't sick. As I spent much of the next 36 hours in bed -- occasionally working with a laptop to fulfill a couple of deadlines -- at times it felt like something close to vacation. After the Benadryl kicked in, I dreamed of the ocean. Usually I only dream about being late to school ...

Not caring about getting sick is one huge benefit that came when I became a parent. Since my children were born, I've become more emotional, more fearful and more like my own parents in almost every way. But I'm generally more appreciative of the smooth times, more accepting of my mortality and definitely way more tolerant of physical discomfort.

I've listed a couple of parenting illness observations below. Please add yours in the comments.

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Posted By: Peter Hartlaub (Email, Twitter) | September 13 2010 at 12:16 PM

The best kid smells of all time

One of the most bitter comments section exchanges in The Poop history was sparked a year and a half ago, when I had the audacity to suggest in a post that I liked the toddler smell combination of Cheerios and pee. That won't be a problem in this best kid smells of all time post, because I'm only naming four -- and Cheerios/pee is No. 6. Dodged that bullet ...

When we talk about great child smells, it's always a chemistry experiment, with the kid acting as a catalyst for something completely new to my senses. When I stick my nose in a jar of peanut butter, it's not a particularly wonderful experience. But when my 2-year-old's head smells like peanut butter, I'm really smelling Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter + Pheromone X, which is a slightly different and infinitely more awesome scent. (Pheromone X, I suspect, is nature's way of making sure I don't throw my children out of the house when they break my iPhone. "I'd sell him to the gypsies if he didn't smell like Play-Doh ...")

As my kids grow older, and I realize we're not going to have more children, each of these kid smells become a little more heartbreaking. In a few years, as my boys approach puberty, Pheromone X is going to be replaced by whatever pheromone makes teen boys smell disgusting most of the time. Hopefully by then my plan to develop and market Baby Head Cologne (see below) will be finalized, and I can douse my children with that each morning.

My four favorite kid smells are below. Yours in the comments ... Read More 'The best kid smells of all time' »

Posted By: Peter Hartlaub (Email, Twitter) | July 23 2010 at 08:15 AM

Benefits of Parenting: It's like having a sherpa

I'm well aware that this blog is an effective form of birth control. I think we reached our low point last week when we started listing all the things we get excited about since we had kids, and about half the commenters said "folding laundry."

This approach could completely backfire about 30 years down the road, when I really need the current generation of babies to be paying into Social Security. So I'm going to step up the Benefits of Parenting posts for the next couple of months.

I began a post about how great it feels when a child tells a parent "I love you" for the first time, but no matter what approach I tried, it was like I was writing a bad Stevie Wonder song. Instead, I'm going to focus on something hopefully everyone can relate with: Distribution of labor.

Having kids, I've been pleased to learn, can be like having a little sherpa.

When you look at sheer volume, I still do way more work than my sons. And they're not particularly enthusiastic about tackling certain tasks. (So it's really like having a sherpa who needs to be told to pass the oxygen tank 14 times.) But even at 5 and 2 years old, I'm surprised how much work I've been able to delegate to my children.

My 5-year-old son is at the perfect age, because he's starting to be able to complete complex tasks, but he has no idea the value of money. Imagine if you could hire a day laborer to clear all the weeds from your backyard, and all you had to pay him was a popsicle. For about a month earlier this year, I paid my son a quarter to make my bed every day. (Since we're one of those couples with about 125 decorative pillows on the bed, this is at least a $1.75 job.) I think I could get away with paying him a nickel. The real payoff for him is being able to heard something clink to the bottom of his Tyrannosaurus Rex coin bank.

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Posted By: Peter Hartlaub (Email, Twitter) | June 30 2010 at 11:32 AM

How has raising children changed you for the better?

I recently read an article about how some athletes experience performance gains after giving birth. I won't go into the reasons why, but there was an interesting rumor about East Germans in the 1970's experimenting with impregnating female athletes and aborting for exactly this reason.

My workout performance has certainly gotten better since I had my baby, but since I barely did anything remotely athletic pre-child, I'm hardly a good test subject. However, I have noticed that despite the memory loss and shorter temper, I'm better at a few things now than I was in my carefree, childless life. Here are a couple improvements.

I'm better at my job. This has been true for all my jobs, in fact. I think before I had a kid, I thought more about what I felt like doing in a given moment, so I had to pump myself up to take on tasks. Babies don't give a crap about what you feel like, they just want what they want, and since they have some pretty good strategies for getting them (like that cry my ex dubbed, "the fury of the goat") I got used to just doing things as quickly and efficiently as possible regardless of my desire to do them. I probably multi-task better too, something about folding up one of those strollers that's supposed to collapse when you press a button but never does while simultaneously locating my car keys while holding an infant who with a leaking diaper gets that multi-tasking thing to become second-nature.

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Posted By: Kelly Mills (Email) | April 07 2010 at 07:03 AM

Benefits of parenting: kids have no sense of time

I've found that as my son gets older, he's becoming increasingly harder to lie to. I've never told him elaborate lies -- like I fought in 'Nam or I'm good at chainsaws -- but I'm guilty of a little fib now and then, mostly in the name of keeping the peace. If it avoids a tantrum, I'm totally OK with saying things like "Oh, sorry, we can't go there, it closes early on Sunday" or "We'll look for your squirt gun later" or "Winston is in doggie heaven." I doubt he'll be sitting down with a therapist later, trying to sort out his anger at daddy for telling him that Home Depot closes at 3 p.m.

As he gets older, though, he's starting to figure things out. First he would ask the occasional follow-up question, which eventually led to hard-core interrogations. Several times in the last month, I've had to abandon a ruse and just tell him the truth. "Hell yes, son, I called the code red. ... You want me on that wall! You need me on that wall!"

But there is one area where our son still has no clue: When it comes to the concept of time.

Even at 4 1/2 years, with the ability to count to 30, he seems to have no ability to discern whether five minutes have passed or five hours. I can go to the park at 4:04 p.m., tell him it's time to go at 4:06 p.m., and he will blindly follow me as if we spent the whole afternoon there. Other times we'll spend an hour and he'll gripe that we just got there. And even though he will bargain over time -- 4-year-olds seem to bargain over everything -- he's just throwing out numbers, with absolutely no idea what any of them mean.

Below a recent conversation between my older son and my wife, which she transcribed and sent to me at work a few minutes after it happened: Read More 'Benefits of parenting: kids have no sense of time' »

Posted By: Peter Hartlaub (Email, Twitter) | September 02 2009 at 07:02 AM

Benefits of Parenting: not giving a rat's a**

Before I had a kid, I was what you might call tightly wound. I worried about my future, and what people thought of me, and about bad things happening. Everything needed to be just-so most of the time or I'd start to feel stressed out.

Now that I have a kid, I have real problems.

This sounds like a benefit of parenting, doesn't it? But I've actually become more easy-going and less righteous post-child than I was before, for a couple reasons. And God help me if this sounds like one of those mass e-mails on the miracle of being a mom. If it does, just forward it to a mom you love, ewwww.

1. I learned to let go of some of my fears by reaching a critical point with them. I essentially now have anxieties so overwhelming that I had to learn to put them into a little box or I'd lose my ever-loving mind. For example, before I had a kid I was afraid of flying, I worried that there would be something on the wing, or the pilot would be on roofies, or the in-flight meal would be tainted with salmonella and I'd be stuck in the bathroom without a seatbelt when we did a crash-landing in the Bermuda Triangle and die there, alone on the toilet, like Elvis. Now? Look, I have a child I have to send out into the world, and the prospect of her death or injury is so much more profound than my own. If I think about it I could be paralyzed with fear, so I taught myself to let it go of anxiety, to just tell myself she's going to outlive me, because I would like to be functional from time to time. The fear of losing her now mostly just rears up when, say, she has a school field trip to Lake Anza, but I still tell my brain to hush up and take deep breaths into this handy paper bag. And then I order her to stay on dry land the entire time. Read More 'Benefits of Parenting: not giving a rat's a**' »

Posted By: Kelly Mills (Email) | June 10 2009 at 05:05 PM

Benefits of parenting: kids aren't pretentious

I had an interesting conversation with my 4-year-old son after pre-school the other day. I had just come home from work in the late afternoon, and approached him as he was playing with some tools at his toy workbench, so he was kind of distracted as we were talking. The conversation went something like this:

Hey buddy. How was school?

Fine.

What did you do today?

We had a dance party.

Really? Who did you dance with?

I danced with Tyler. ... He's a good dancer.

I'm guessing that any child-free The Poop readers out there are now rushing out to have unprotected sex, because that's just about the cutest thing ever. How can you not want to conceive right now knowing that they say stuff like that? (To negate this urge, just read this post. Or this one.)

For me, our conversation reinforced something that I discovered not long after my first son reached an age where he could communicate with us: Little kids aren't the least bit pretentious. Read More 'Benefits of parenting: kids aren't pretentious' »

Posted By: Peter Hartlaub (Email, Twitter) | June 05 2009 at 07:36 AM

Parenting myth No. 427: Little kids are expensive

I hear a lot of good reasons for not having children: Whether you live in a 300 square foot apartment, feel like nieces and nephews are the perfect dose of kid or just want to focus on other things, there are no bad excuses for not reproducing. But I do protest when my younger friends tell me that money is the big reason why they're not having kids.

In most cases, I don't think kids are very expensive.*

Notice the big asterisk at the end of that sentence? I reserve the right to compose a completely different post 18 years from now, when my sons are freshmen and seniors at Middlebury College. Other parents' results may vary, especially if you're already living on Top Ramen before the kid comes or raising a child as a single parent. And heavy-duty day care needs can render my argument moot. But I'm guessing that most middle class couples who have kids will be surprised how inexpensive they are in the first few years. Even though my wife and I are working with a slightly smaller combined income than before the kids came, my family's standard of living hasn't appreciably changed since the birth of either child.

Larger-than-we-expected tax breaks are a small part of the equation. So is a child's relatively simple food needs in the first year or two. But mostly our basic lifestyle changes have allowed us to adjust to two hungry semi-destructive boys in the house. When we had kids we stayed home a lot more, and became more organized. (Going out and being disorganized are probably the two biggest ways I was blowing large amounts of money.) We travel less, eat out less and place less emphasis on giving each other expensive gifts.

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Posted By: Peter Hartlaub (Email, Twitter) | May 22 2009 at 07:04 AM

Benefits of Parenting: kids are optimistic

One of my favorite kid-related memories, bittersweet as it was, happened a little over two years ago. It was our first family birthday after my grandmother died. She had been the center of our family in a lot of ways -- my grandparents on my mother's side immigrated from Mexico, worked very hard and set the value standard for our family -- and her last few stroke-addled months hadn't been easy.

So we're sitting around a table on my mother's birthday, going through the motions with food and a few forgotten presents in the corner, but mostly feeling lost and a little depressed. Then my sister's son, 3 years old at the time, broke the silence. He said the following with complete enthusiasm, and no hint of sarcasm.

"This is the best birthday party that I've ever been to!"

I'm very aware that people without kids read this blog, and some of the subjects that we tackle function as a form of birth control. So this is one of those "little things" that make parenting totally worth it: Kids are optimistic.

My oldest son just turned four, and I notice this all the time. His life outlook can be so positive and unsullied that it actually has healing powers. Yes, my 4-year-old can be a complete pain in the ass. But you can also sit him on a bench at a park with a leftover half of a crappy Subway five dollar footlong, and he will inevitably start saying, "Are we having a picnic? This is a great picnic!" Read More 'Benefits of Parenting: kids are optimistic' »

Posted By: Peter Hartlaub (Email, Twitter) | May 06 2009 at 07:32 AM

Benefits of Parenting: Kids smell good

I have several friends and colleagues who don't have kids, and I often wonder if The Poop has become a pretty effective birth control. When parents here get in a discussion about what we've given up because of parenthood, the worst tantrum or the last time we've seen a movie in a theater ("Point Break"!), it should go without saying that it's all worth it. But that part doesn't always come across.

So I thought I'd start the week by focusing on some good news for scared potential parents. Go ahead and throw away the condoms again! Whatever you think of the odorous qualities of other people's children right now, yours are going to smell great.

Having bad smelling kids was something that I was worried about long before my wife and I decided to have children. I had heard horror stories about what our cars would smell like (if our vehicles smell any different with a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, I haven't noticed), and I was concerned about having a brood that would constantly make me gag. I'm one of those people who has to avoid entire sections of the Farmer's Market because of the assault on my nasal passages -- would I be capable of parenting at all?

While it's true that changing diapers isn't like skipping through a field of jasmine, I barely notice that any more. And 90 percent of the rest of the time, my kids smell fantastic. I often wonder if passersby in the grocery store or at the park think it's weird that I'm constantly smelling my kids' heads, as if looking for another fix.

I'm now convinced that my children will always smell good. I'm even looking forward to that bad 14-year-old phase where they start experimenting with cologne.

Below are the three best kid smell phases I've experienced so far. Your contributions in the comments ... Read More 'Benefits of Parenting: Kids smell good' »

Posted By: Peter Hartlaub (Email, Twitter) | April 20 2009 at 08:12 AM