Parenting Magazine

Here at WTF Are We Going To Do Now we have decided to expand our horizons and allow you to share your own experiences in our new forum. This is the part of the Parenting Course where you can ask and answer questions, give your opinion, and just hang out with other parents.

100 Entrecard credits will be given away to each of the first 50 people to make 3 relevant posts to the forum.

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In the course of nearly ten years of being a stay at home dad by default I have learned a few things. Call it a parenting course based on my on the job training.

5) You are Dad. That means a lot, don’t shirk your responsibilities. You will have to turn off your xbox or step away from the computer to watch Sesame Street and smile when you would rather strangling that fucking Elmo. Putting on the right face is part of the job.

4) You are Dad. Don’t try and be Mom. It will never work. It doesn’t matter if your child has no mother or even another Dad, if you try and be Mom you will fail horribly. Be Dad and be a good Dad, it is all anyone could ever ask or expect.

3) You are a stay at home dad, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to work. Don’t put up with any crap from people who think you don’t work. If you are doing your job right, you will work your ass off every day. If you happen to have a secondary job to being the stay at home parent, remember that it is always secondary to the job of being the stay at home Dad.

2) Show your respect for the person going off to the job that lets you be a stay at home Dad. Don’t, however let them get away with shoving off all their responsibilities of being a parent and living in the house off on you though. You are a stay at home Dad, not their personal servant. Even if you are into that sort of role playing, remember it is when the kids have gone to bed and you are allowed a temporary reprieve.

1) Realize until your kids are in school all day long five days a week your free time is limited, so make the best use of it you can. i recommend napping every time they do.

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So there was a second ultrasound done this morning.

I took Liam along because I promised him that I would last month. He was really excited about getting to see his little sister.

We got to see Sarah’s face and Liam was in awe. She has all ten fingers (the technician didn’t get around to counting toes so I can only assume they are all there). Everything else checks out with her, and it was confirmed that Sarah is a girl, so that made me happy. Liam said the whole thing was “very awesome”.

So without further ado I present to you, Sarah Felicia Hart.

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How young is too young to start your kids on the internet? I keep thinking I need to run a parenting course on this subject. Unless I can some how find a way to charge for it though I am not sure I can afford the time to do it. It needs to be done though. Someone needs to put the internet into perspective for parents who just don’t get it.

With a new baby on the way and a nine year old I am forced to visit the question of how young is too young all the time. Katy and I are rarely separated from out computers when we are home. They both sit in the living room. Everything we do is for household consumption. This is has been a way of life since we got broadband replaced with streaming television, clear radio broadcasts from around the world replaced the crap we could pick up locally, and last but not least the plethora of interesting information replaced most of our non-fiction reading materials. It is lots of cheap entertainment in one package.

Liam knows we are always connected, and is really starting to take an interest in it himself. His interest right now isn’t so much socializing as it is a substitute for traditional television. He loves the available online games almost as much as he loves my Xbox or his old Sega. The cartoons on Disney, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network sites have the potential to keep him occupied and out of trouble. Where the television was my babysitter, so be it the computer for this generation. There will come a time when those interests grow beyond that.

There are those who criticize electronic babysitters, but I usually tell them to kiss my furry ass. There was a time when parents could spend more time with our kids, and didn’t have eighty million other things we have to be doing. You take what you can get, wherever you can get it. I can look across the room, see where my son is sitting, and know what he is doing. If I am working, yes blogging is a full time job even if it isn’t bringing in a full time income yet. The same can be said of the short stories I write and send out for professional publication regularly or the novels at various stages. Writing anything, be it code or prose, is work. If I ever hope to make more than my disability payments, I have to devote time to that work and use any babysitter I can.

This brings me back to the question of how young is too young to let your kids go online and do their own thing. I am not talking about staying on half a dozen sites with no social interaction. I mean letting them explore for themselves, finding their own cool stuff, making their own friends? When do you do you start letting them create their own identity?

I am not suggestion that we abandon all supervision; you can’t ever do that if you are going to be a responsible parent. If your kids are going to use a site, service or the any new technology that comes along, it is your job as a parent to make sure you learn it too. As a twenty year internet veteran, I don’t have a problem with this. This isn’t the case with a lot of parents. While some kids might be too young to get involved with internet activities, the fact remains if they have an interesting in it, being too old to get involved just isn’t an excuse.

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But it certainly feels like one right about now.

For a while there I was a bit worried about not feeling much movement from Sarah. I shouldn’t have been. She’s currently performing acrobatic feats and generally making me uncomfortable. I don’t remember Liam ever being this active until much later on. I guess it goes to show how different each pregnancy can be. I just wonder if I can survive the next 18 weeks while still staying sane. I did it once before……

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