For my husband’s birthday this year, I took the cheap route and had the kids make homemade cards for him. Because, for one, have you seen the price of cards these days? And, for two, who doesn’t love a thoughtful, hand-crafted birthday greeting from their own child?

I’ll tell you who doesn’t love homemade birthday cards from his kids: the dad on the receiving end of this card. The front looks innocent enough:

But the inside reveals how his daughter really feels…

Here’s hoping that Amanda didn’t grow up to be a motivational speaker.

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Because there was never actually any ‘cool’ for me to lose, losing my ‘cool’ since becoming a parent has had little impact on my life. This is not to say that becoming a parent automatically means that you are required to hand in all your cool street cred. In fact I know a whole pile of cool people who are also parents. I’m just not one of those people.

Anyway. The following video riffs on a stereotypical rappin’ posse boasting about their exploits, which is a difficult thing to fake if you ain’t cool. It’s especially hard when you’re a stereotypical suburban dad who wears socks with his sandals and drives a minivan. Trust me, these Bad Dads are not really Bad Dads except maybe, just maybe, in the eyes of their pre-teen kids. (ed. note: ever met a tween? MAYBE NOT.) Dudes definitely are not leading a thug’s life, that’s fo sho.

Roll up to the splashpad 10 am
My whole entire entourage hops out the minivan.
We splishy-splashy for an hour or two
Then it`s back to the house where we be prepping for the BBQ.
Brauts, dogs, rack of ribs, whatever,
Get me on the Weber man, no one does it better.
Call me the Lord of the Grill, I`m King of the Coals,
Nana`s secret recipe, you know how I roll.

It’s A Dad’s Life – Watch more Funny Videos

I can’t even remember how I found this guy, because I don’t usually read sports sites, and he writes on a sports site, but I did, and then I had to read his whole freaking archive, because, oh my god, SO F*CKING FUNNY.

To wit, literally:

No one becomes a parent because it’s fun, unless you’re a naïve idiot. You become a parent because most people have an instinctive drive to reproduce (like animals do), and because parenting is rewarding in the long term. I read a book by Frank Bruni, in which he details having to go on some shitty Outward Bound trip. Bruni wants to quit the trip and go home, because he’s out in the woods and it fucking blows. Then his team leader says to him, “There are things you enjoy doing, and things you enjoy having done. The latter is better.” And it’s true. That’s what having kids is. It’s worth doing, but not terribly fun to do.

But it beats doing Outward Bound. Sleep in a wet tent? FUCK THAT.

EXACTLY.

Trust me, you do not need to understand French to know what is going on in this video shot by a father starring his young daughter.

You probably will feel bad for this little girl but you probably also will laugh when you see what the dad gets away with during an seemingly innocent afternoon snack.

This is tough love done with kid gloves. Personally, I’d be a little scared to try this on my four year old. Nothing should come between her and her sweets, lesson learned the painful way.

That will teach her to never leave her stuff unattended. At least not around her dad.

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Ever go back and read your own archives? I found this entry from October, 2006, back when my kids were one and three, respectively. It’s a good thing that I blog – I’d forgotten all about the effing pretty rainbow. Please to enjoy.

Every day around lunchtime Julia starts asking if she can wait on the porch for her father to get home from work. She asks me about six thousand times between then and four-fifteen, when I finally let her go outside to listen for his truck as it chugs its way up the street.

Last week was rather long and arduous and by the time 4p.m. rolled around on Friday I was ready to jump on the weekend like a fat kid on a Smartie. Oliver was cranky and clumsy, on an all-day mission to wind up in a body cast and Julia, at her whiny and emotional best, had been crying for goddamn ever because she wanted to wait on the porch for Daddy. Like he does every afternoon, he called from his cell to tell me he was on his way home. I could hardly hear him over my screaming children and barked at him to call when he was close to home before abruptly hanging up and running to catch Oliver as he fell backwards off the couch. His head bounced off the floor before I made it to him and a goose-egg started to swell, complimenting the one sticking out of his forehead from an earlier altercation with the fireplace. I sat down in the middle of the floor, rocked him as he howled and started the Bedtime Countdown in my head:

three more hours until they go to bed three more hours until they go to bed three more hours until they go to bed…

Julia came over and stood beside me, red-eyed from crying. “Can I go on the porch now?” she whimpered.

“Not yet, sweetie. Daddy’s going to call when he’s close,” I said over Oliver’s screams.

Her face crumpled and she broke into heaving sobs. Again. “I w-w-want to w-w-wait for d-d-d-DADDY!” she wailed.

I was just about to rip clumps of my hair out and start screaming with them but the phone rang. Dave. My salvation. He’s close! I can send Julia outside and then I’ll only have one screaming child to deal with! I lunged for the phone.

“Thank god you’re close,” I sighed.

“Oh, no, I’m not close at all,” he said.

“What? Where are you?” I asked before turning to Julia to tell her that no, Daddy wasn’t close and she couldn’t go out on the porch yet. Cue sobs. Again.

“I’m not even on the highway yet. There’s an awesome rainbow outside, babe! I’ve never seen anything like this before! I pulled over to take a picture of it! I’ll bet you guys can see it from there – get the kids and take them outside to see the pretty rainbow…woah…what’s going on over there? Why is everybody crying?”

Now, I could have sprung forward and herded my hysterical children outside to hold hands and admire the pretty rainbow while thanking my husband for alerting us to the natural beauty arching across the sky, but does that sound like something I would do?

Hell no.

Instead, I shouted, “A rainbow? A pretty rainbow? FUCK the pretty rainbow, Dave. Get yourself back on the highway and come home. NOW.”

Actual picture of the rainbow...which *was* pretty nice.

The love. It’s flooding out of my house.

“They’re just crazy. Listen, everyone says to us, ‘It gets better. It gets better.’ That has not been my experience. It seems to be worse and worse. My wife and I were talking about splitting up but neither of us want to take the children – that’s our joke.”

~ Jerry O’Connell, on raising 19-month-old twin girls Dolly and Charlie with his wife, Rebecca Romijn

Perhaps those parents of twins that gave both their children the middle name ‘Danger’ were on to something?

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Celebrities nowadays have got to know that they can’t say or do anything without it becoming headline news within seconds. Britney Spears walking in to a Starbucks sporting a broken-down weave and a pair of Daisy Dukes? Angelina Jolie itching her nose at Comic-Con? Laurence Fishburne’s teenage daughter doing porn to get famous? That’s front-page news, y’all.

So really, Paul Rudd should have known better than to go on television and talk about his own personal experience as the Tooth Fairy. As it turns out, parents don’t like it when their kids see Paul on the Regis Philbin show talking about slipping a twenty under his son’s pillow in exchange for his first lost tooth.

Poor Paul. It’s tough being the Tooth Fairy and an A-list celebrity at the same time.

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Full confession: I somewhat enjoy celebrity gossip. Gossip about people that I don’t know and probably will never know is a personal outlet that helps me NOT gossip about people I know in real life or at least I think it does.

A recent celeb gossip story that keeps popping up on my radar is that one about Mel Gibson and Oksana Grigorieva and Mel’s inability to not rant and say stupid things into recording devices. That dude is not the same guy I crushed on back in his Mad Max / Gallipoli days. Mel may have made, directed, and produced some interesting movies but the man has also morphed into something I. Do. Not. Like. To be fair we do not know what the real story is surrounding the alleged abuse of his new family with Grigorieva but something about this story stinks for sure. So just like everything surrounding Lindsay Lohan’s recent incarceration (if she’s even still in jail at the time I hit publish on this post), I just stopped following the story because watching train wrecks is not the same as watching celebrity gossip. Even gossip mongers have limitations.

Anyway, I had pushed all Gibson Grigorieva stories off my radar because regardless of what the truth is? I’m off all the celebrities (major, minor, and otherwise) involved and just hope that the child is sheltered from all this bullsh*t and being put first before anyone’s careers, fame-addiction, or financial concerns (please, please, please.)

But then I watched Jimmy Kimmell and wouldn’t you know it, Mr. Kimmell found a way for me to digest the latest round of Gibson recordings while making me laugh. And I know I shouldn’t laugh in relation to this story but trust me, it’s really hard to not giggle during an episode of Mel Gibson Says The Darndest Things. Mel Gibson has transformed into a ‘Bad Dad’ and it’s not the good kind of ‘bad’ but the other kind. What happened Mel?

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From stand-up comic Juston McKinney comes a rap video about the trials and tribulations of fatherhood (up to and including product recalls, potty training and Play-Doh jungles). It’s called New Dad State of Mind and it’s kind of awesome, in that ‘it’s funny ’cause it’s true kind of way’ (though it does err a little NSFW side).

Please to enjoy.

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Sometimes, it’s not enough to just be bad. Sometimes, truly awesome parenting calls for being despicable.

Just ask Steve Carell:

Okay, ‘letting them know who’s boss’ sounds good, but really, if you’re not a criminal mastermind, how does that work exactly? Because my four year old is out-thinking and out-plotting and out-evil-geniusing me at every turn, and that’s kind of getting in the way of the whole ‘ WHO’S THE BOSS’ thing.

So, Steve, call me. You can test out your mad parenting skillz on my little despicables. And we’ll just see how that goes.

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