I don’t think of myself as particularly racist. Sure, I’m a little bit racist, just like everybody else, but I roll up my windows and lock my doors when I drive through poor black neighborhoods, poor white neighborhoods, and poor Hispanic neighborhoods. There is no one race that I feel scared of, or badly about. […]
Category Archives: Bad Parenting
How Ruby Got a New Bike
Yesterday I decided to do something ambitious. I had taken the kids biking several times before, down to the lake, around the block, down the street to get slurpees, and to a couple of different playgrounds, but all of those trips were relatively short. For some reason I got it into my head yesterday that […]
Uncle Bear
I don’t know exactly at what point Ruby’s favorite toy became her teddy bear, but once it happened there was no looking back. A gift from her aunt and uncle at her baptism, the bear slowly but surely moved up the ranks to emerge as the number one toy in Ruby’s life. When she got […]
Disaster in Diapers
Let me give you some backstory before I dive right into this tale. The first thing you should probably know is that we have been trying to potty train Edward in an extremely unsuccessful manner, but the important thing to know is that he has been wearing pull-ups instead of diapers. The only problem is […]
Poems At Children
There are many wonderful books of poetry out there for children, but these poems all seem to have the same problem of validating their atrocious behavior and/or teaching them a life lesson in a gruesome manner. None of these poems seem to be telling the children what we actually want to tell them. And then […]
I Think We’re the Weird Family
For a lot of my life I didn’t even bother trying to fit in. I was clearly weird and I kind of liked that about myself. As I grew up, I learned, at least partially, to adjust my weirdness levels to fit whatever group I was in, so that even if people thought of me […]
A Debilitating Love of Semantics
Hello. My name is Tenor Dad, and I am addicted to semantics. The problem is so bad that I didn’t even realize that it was a problem until my wife pointed it out to me. I went through life thinking that people wanted to know correct word usage and wished to be clear when speaking. […]
Why I Fell Off of the Swings
We finally had a nice day yesterday, full of warm weather and the promise of the coming Spring, and so I decided that it was time to emerge from hibernation and take the kids to the playground. The first playground visit of Spring is always an exciting time. You get to see what new skills […]
Breakfast Cereal
I am a terrible parent. I routinely break one of the cardinal rules of parenting handed down to me by my mother over many years of hearing cardinal rules of parenting. I know that I cannot be a competent parent, because Ruby’s favorite cereal is Lucky Charms. This is a big no-no, which I know-know, […]
Swear Words For Parents
So there you are, living your life, happily cursing like a sailor, when suddenly, it happens. Boom! You become a parent. Now, completely out of the blue, you have to drastically change your speech patterns so as not to scar your children for life, or worse, get the dreaded phone call from the teacher asking […]