The Benefits of Parenthood

~ conleyhunter ~ Leave a comment
Recently, several of my close, child-less friends have learned they are having kids. My first thought was, “you morons”. But my second thought was “I should say something actually helpful.” So as a slight departure from my usual self indulgent blog posts describing all the first world problems within my life, I’ve decided to give my friends the greatest gift of all. The gift of unsolicited advice. Yes, I know that is also incredibly self indulgent, but I am kind of a selfish shit so there you go.
I didn’t want this to be me vomiting up the standard bullshit advice that every soon to be parent hears. I also didn’t want this to be “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” but with more swearing and less gross descriptions of stuff.
What I would have wanted (what I did want) in this situation was some reassurance. Reassurance that my formerly awesome life, while certainly different, could continue to be awesome (or at least not too shitty) after a kid.  So…
Here is my Top 8 list (cause nobody makes a top 8 list) of unexpected benefits of being a parent.
1. You have an infallible excuse for getting out of any work and/or social obligation. “Oh, I would love to come to your wedding in Iowa, drive you to the airport, attend your mocktail party [insert any horrible task here]. The great thing is you can use it forever and there are endless combinations. Kid is sick. Kid has a play. Kid is sick in a play. It’s perfect and no one questions it, even if they know you are full of shit.
2. Kids make you a better human. I want to set a good example for them so I actually try to behave like a caring, responsible adult. Weird right? There is real food in the refrigerator, I don’t live in filth and I give a shit about the environment now. I still don’t like most other people, but I hide it much better. “You are just faking it” you say??? Kind of, but so is everyone else, right? Do you think any “grown up” actually knows that they are doing? No. They don’t. Your buddy from college who threw up on a dog and is now a VP at Goldman Sachs? Your friend from high school who once broke his arm playing Wii but is now a director at a PR firm?? They didn’t just get more responsible they realized they needed to fake it.
3. Kids make you worry less about dumb stuff. Because you spend so much time worrying about the kid, you devote approximately 0% of your energy to worrying about dumb shit (work, other people’s opinions, etc.). It’s wonderful.
4. Kids make you smarter. Literally. When the kid gets old enough to talk he/she will ask you a million questions. And you will realize how little you actually understand almost everything. I have no idea how anything works. Daughter 1 asks me, Dad, how does an airplane fly? No fucking idea. But I looked it up so I could try (very simply) to explain it. I couldn’t, but I tried. As a fun aside see if you can explain how anything electrical actually works. Television was invented nearly 100 years ago and yet I could not come close to explaining how it works in a credible way. “There are waves of sound and light that fly through the air, are collected by this flat screened box, and transformed into moving, talking images.” What?!?!?! That sounds like total bullshit. Another example courtesy of Wikipedia, did you know that cars are basically powered by a continuous series of tiny explosions. Maybe you knew that. Maybe I am mechanically retarded and everyone else knows this stuff, but it blew my mind.
5. Kids make you want to spend your free time more wisely. Because you are responsible for their childhood/their memories you will try to come up with something interesting to do with your free moments. After all, you don’t want their childhood to be entirely made up of memories of watching you watching sports. Pre-kids I used spend my Saturdays drinking beer and seeing how long I could go without getting up to pee (pretty long time for the record). Also fun, but maybe a little less rewarding in the long run.
6. They let you act like a kid again. Squirt guns, poop jokes, laughing at people who fall down…it’s all back on. I made a couch fort last weekend. It was fucking awesome.  As a grown up, you don’t do shit like that. Now you can.
7. It is amazing to show them the world and watch how they react. Museums with kids are great or even just walking in the woods. Life is like a drug and after a while you build up a tolerance, so it’s harder for something to really be impressive after about age 30.  But a kid will be impressed by a large pile of dog shit, literally. The kids will say things like, “Whoa Daddy, look at that giant pile of poop. It’s HUGE.”. It’s like resetting your own bar for being impressed. It’s great. Note : The aforementioned pile of poop is often not that large.
8. They are fucking hilarious. We were at a restaurant a few weeks ago and a little girl (probably about 3) came over to say hi to my kids. She trots over with her mom in tow. Mom kneels down to kid level, introduces her daughter (Madison? Kennedy?Filmore? It was a president’s name, not Bush, but not sure which one) and asks the girls their names. Daughter 1 smiles a huge smile and proudly answers. Daughter 2, pauses a moment, smirks (who would have thought a 3 year old could smirk) and says “Mrs. Poop”. The mom, confused says, “excuse me.” My Wife hurriedly rushes to correct her. But not before Daughter 2, who presumably assumes the woman didn’t understand her, stares right at this woman and says very slowly in a voice dripping with annoyance, MRS. POOOOOP.  It was awesome

The Grocery Store is Fucking Weird

~ conleyhunter ~ 1 Comment

So we are here. “London Towne”. It’s February, not the best time to move to England it turns out. It’s cold, rainy and the “sun” sets at about 2:30 every day. But we are living in another country and that is exciting.

My kids have no idea what anyone is saying. They are 4 and 2, and also rude little shits, so any conversation with a local in front of them is met with a simultaneous “What’s that man saying” from the older one and a mixture of confusion and annoyance from the younger one. General annoyance seems to be the dominant emotion in the younger one, I am slightly terrified about what happens 10 years from now.

So we’ve been here nearly a week and we are running out of food in our temporary apartment. Much as I like, prawn flavoured crisps (I DO NOT LIKE ANYTHING FLAVORED LIKE SHRIMP, EXCEPT FOR ACTUAL SHRIMP) someone needs to go to the grocery store. I immediately volunteer for this task.

I have a secret fetish. I love going to grocery store. At least when we are outside of the US. It’s always fucking weird and I love it. Going to the grocery store in America is horrible. I would rather deliberately walk through dog shit than go to the grocery store, especially in New York. In New York you basically have the bodega, great if you want to purchase a $20 six pack of Miller Lite, rancid milk, or pork rinds; or Whole Foods, great if you like spending $600 on mango fed heritage pork and waiting in line for 2 hours. But grocery stores in other countries are awesome, full of exotic foods and things I neither understand nor know the names for. So, color, me excited when I headed out. Not only do I get some very rare time alone (when you have kids even a chore can be great if it comes with time to yourself) but I get to look at some weird shit, which is one of my favourite things to do.

Now, I know what you are thinking. “You are in the UK, not Uzbekistan why are you so excited about the grocery store.” Some of you, might even be saying “I’ve been to the grocery store in Swaziland (insert any relatively obscure and possibly made up country name here) and it was truly bizarre, they sell candies made from goats heads, nothing in the Western World could possibly compare”. And the douchiest of you are saying, “Most of the world doesn’t have that level of food security, you should be feeling fortunate that you live in a society with such plenty. You ungrateful shit.” Well shut up dipshits, I was excited.

Upon arrival, it looks pretty much like any chain grocery store in the US (outside of the aforementioned NYC nonsense). Big aisles, lots of tired, sad looking humans and …well…food and such. First decision, push cart or basket. Now, I normally avoid the push cart like I avoid anyone collecting money for children’s charities on the street. Firstly, I am used to NYC where I have to fit all of my groceries into a space the size of a toddler (I know this is the size of the cupboard because I used my own toddler to check and yes it was safe. As an aside I love the idea of alternate systems of measurement. The foot (or meter whatever that is) is pretty arbitrary why couldn’t we have a unit called the toddler. “Oh, look at all the space in here, this must be at least 12-15 square toddlers”.

Secondly, I am a dude and I therefore genetically predisposed to hate shopping of all sorts and want to spend as little time as possible in the store. This of course is a terrible plan and I end up dragging a basket that must weigh at least 4 toddlers (see what I did there) around the store.  But I digress…

New country, new rules. Fuck it. I’m getting the cart. Whoa! I am so free. “I’m the king of the world”… And then… The carts were locked together with a chain and you need to deposit a coin (a pound) to release the poor cart from it’s chain overlord. I don’t carry change, it’s heavy and annoying and you sound like someone’s grandpa walking around with a pocketful of change. In America, there would be handy change machine placed nearby. It may be out of change or may charge a 12.5% service fee for the privilege of converting your real paper money into stupid metal money but it would have been there. Here not so much. Also, what the hell, am I really going to steal the shopping cart from the West London Tesco. It’s not like we are in an episode of The Wire, or something.

Screw it, I’ll carry the basket and commence my magical mystery tour of the land that American brands forgot. And what wondrous delights I uncovered. Long Life Unrefrigerated Milk…What is that? Why do I need that? How do they make milk long life and not refrigerate it? Science is amazing. A host of new craptastic cereals (Shreddies, AlphaBites, something with little soccer balls on it, Sugary Balls?). Unrefrigerated eggs with feathers in the cartons.  But my favourite thing was on the last aisle, where the keep the American staples like Peanut Butter, the sign on the aisle read Ambient Fruit. That literally means fruit from the surrounding area. What the fuck is that? Is that fruit grown in the grocery store? In the parking lot?

Store Employee: “These apricots were grown in the dental care aisle while the apples come from the feminine hygiene section”

Customer: “Wow, I can really taste the fluoride in these apricots. And the tampons are really coming through in the terroir of these apples.”

And with that my journey to the exotic land of the Hammersmith Tesco (and my break from the family) was done. I bagged up (you have to bag your own groceries here, more on that later) my long life milk, and my ambient grapes and headed home.

 

 

 

 

A Little History

~ conleyhunter ~ Leave a comment

Hello there,

By way of introduction, I am shitty at doing stuff in any sort of a timely fashion. When my family and I moved to London, I thought, “Self”… I often talk to myself in the third person, like a crazy person or a character from a Judy Blume novel, “Self, now is a great time to start that blog you’ve talking about writing for the last 5 years.” My next thought was, “Wait are blogs still a thing? Or is this like the time you finally resolved to buy that laser disc player only to discover upon walking into Best Buy that Laser Disc players only existed ironically at that point”. After some research on the world wide web (you really can find anything on there) blogs are still a thing. What a time to be alive.

But back to the procrastination. We moved to London from New York about 9 months ago and in that time I have seen and done many things. Moved into a semi-affordable “flat”, learned I have an appreciation for but no understanding of non-American football, eaten and drank stuff, watched some comically bad television (gardening is actual show here), and started to say “mate” with a disturbing frequency. But one thing I have absolutely not done is start a blog.. So here goes.

As I have been here for 9 months already, I am well behind on writing about our European Vacation and the ensuing hi-jinx (I’ve always wanted to write that word) so the first few posts will serve to catch up to real time. Just like a really slow, somewhat awkward time machine, lazily moving towards present day. I like to imagine the Back to the Future Delorean but as a recumbent bicycle. It is very hard to look cool on a recumbent bicycle.

Anyway, starting the blog….now.