Tonight was…not great. Mommy had work to be doing, daddy just wanted to finish his dinner, and Miles was trapped in that hellish point in the day where he’s too tired to stay up but too unwilling to go to sleep, resulting in crying fits where nothing we did, regardless of how explicitly we conformed to his requests, was good enough. Difficult to manage in terms of parenting, self-care, and maintaining a healthy marriage.
But it ended up as a lesson: there’s nothing that pretending a Kleenex is a hat and your son just covered it in boogers won’t fix. Miles’s persistent sobbing led to a runny nose as we finally got him into bed, and in my never-ending (and exhausting) quest to lighten the mood and make him happy, I snagged a tissue and came into the bedroom with it on my head. “Good day!” I said, tipping my hat to him. After he wiped his nose, I took the tissue back and looked at it, horrified. And Miles completely lost it. As we went back and forth about how badly he had ruined my hat with his boogers, Miles laughed as hard as he ever does.
The tools of parenting seldom make sense. Sometimes you just have to think like an absolute maniac to solve simple problems.
The Perils (& Pride) of Paternity 