- When taking a four year old boy to a “you pick it” strawberry field, it is probably a good idea to add a couple of dollars to the total when you check out to cover the cost of the produce the child has eaten in the field.
- If you have a problem with my child going to the grocery store dressed in a cape and mask, keep it to yourself. I don’t tell you how to raise your children, so please don’t presume to tell me how to raise mine.
- On a side note, I think some of the people I ran into this weekend need remedial training on the fact that properly disciplining your child is not automatically classified as abuse. Taking your child by the hand and forcing them to move from the traffic lane of a grocery store parking lot while verbally reminding him of his age and expected behavior is not abuse. Allowing your post-toddler child to stand in a lane of traffic and cry huge tears because of some issue or another while you kneel down and try to sweet talk him into acting like a human being is abuse.
- I went with Irish Woman to help tear down and clean up from a fund-raiser at the zoo on Sunday morning. Out of a group of 10 to 15 adults, I was one of two who carried a multitool and the only one with a toolkit in the car. Not sure if that makes me weird, but it sure opens my eyes about some of the people in our social circle.
- What is it about an event that requires a nice dress, make-up, and a hair-do that turns a normally sensible woman into a nervous wreck?
- Follow-up question – Why is it that when a normally very self-confident woman is dressed up to go to a formal event, telling her she looks wonderful can make her want to run to the bedroom and change everything about how she looks, including hair color?
- Is it possible that my lack of personal fashion sense scares hell out of Irish Woman when I look at her and say she looks great?
- Trying to explain a Northern Plains, Scandinavian, Lutheran outlook on life to your Irish Catholic wife from Kentucky is a lot like translating a foreign language. There isn’t enough common ground to just talk about it, and you spend a lot of time defining terms.
- Today, I used both 550 cord and WD-40 to do maintenance on the riding lawnmower. If I’d find a way to use duct tape, I’d have had the testosterone trifecta.
- There is nothing like dropping your kids off at a family reunion with your ex-wife’s family to remind you why you don’t regret the divorce that much anymore.
Thoughts on the Weekend
Posted by daddybear71 on June 11, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/06/11/thoughts-on-the-weekend-10/
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DaddyBear
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julie
/ June 11, 2012Your story about being the only one with a multi-tool and toolbox reminds me of one Saturday morning at Little Athletics. I needed a knife to open something NONE of the guys in my immediate area (approx 15 of them) had a knife on them. I was most surprised – generally the guys in my social circle have at least one on them at all times.
Oh and on the clothes things I wore a pair of khaki jeans for the first time the other day – I asked Miss 10 if they were okay (she’s my fashion adviser), her reply was “Yep” followed several seconds later with “Can you get me a pair of fluro orange jeans please” … now I’m not sure about my choice of fashion adviser …..
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LabRat
/ June 11, 2012What is it about an event that requires a nice dress, make-up, and a hair-do that turns a normally sensible woman into a nervous wreck?
…Serious answer actually desired?
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DaddyBear
/ June 11, 2012LR, seriously, this is one of the great mysteries of life to me. My wife is a confident, self-assured woman in just about any other circumstance. You put her in a pretty dress and heels and she gets as nervous as my middle-schooler did the first time she dressed up for a school dance.
Julie – Well, you have to decide if her personal fashion sense has any bearing on her sense of what looks good on you 😉
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LabRat
/ June 11, 2012Making a couple of rather key assumptions- that her normal life doesn’t require “dressing up” and the exceptions are infrequent, I’d guess it’s that dressing up part that’s it in a nutshell.
Dressing up for men is bad enough, but at least it’s all clothes, the hairstyling doesn’t go much beyond a trim and a comb, and the uniform is standardized. Even if you don’t normally do it, you either already know what to do or you can find out really quickly, and you know pretty closely about what you should look like when you’re done.
Dressing up for women usually involves an outfit that adheres a lot closer to the lines of your body- and thus requires much better fitting, for a style of clothes you may not normally wear at all, painting your face so it looks you’re wearing a lot less of the face paint than you actually are (underdo and you do effectively nothing and look plain, overdo and people make jokes about shotguns set to “whore”), the hair styling is usually, even if not elaborate, more difficult to do and to control throughout the evening, and if you add heels on top of that when you don’t normally wear heels (a lesson I had to learn exactly ONCE), you literally feel like a toddler because you’re off-balance.
If you’re experienced with the outfits and the makeup and the styling, it’s great, because you have a thousand options to look great in. If you’re not, and you’re not sure you’re doing it right, it’s like dressing up for a Halloween where everyone will judge your costume based on rules you don’t necessarily know. (In reality, no one really cares that much, but it’s what it can feel like looking in the mirror.)
Add on top of that the fact that if you’re dressing up it’s probably for an event involving people/institutions/whatever whose good opinion you value, so you can’t go to the normal self-confident person’s default attitude of “because I don’t care what you think, that’s why” either.
And that’s how dressing up for a nice evening at a nice event can reduce a normally self-confident woman in control of every other aspect of her life to crippling insecurity. 🙂
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daddybear71
/ June 11, 2012Thank you, LR. That makes a few things clearer. You’d think that after all these years I’d have more insight into women.
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Six
/ June 11, 2012“If you have a problem with my child going to the grocery store dressed in a cape and mask, keep it to yourself. I don’t tell you how to raise your children, so please don’t presume to tell me how to raise mine.”
Amen. This got driven home for me when the grandkids were staying with us recently. The Boy wants to be a Cop like grandpa was. I mean, he’s 6 fer crying out loud, of course he wants to be a cop or a smoke eater. So I make him up a duty rig from some of my old castoffs; belt, holster (complete with wooden rubber band gun), radio holder, a black leather ticket book and a baseball cap. He was in little boy Heaven. Until we got out in public. You’d have thought I dressed the boy in razor blades and poisonous snakes.
Hey, it’s a rubber band gun that is obviously made out of wood. Having it in a real holster does not in fact magically transform it into a weapon of mass destruction. He’s dressed up as a cop not because he wants you to think he is one (though he’d probably think that was pretty cool) but because he’s 6!
It’s the lack of common sense and belief that they simply MUST SAY SOMETHING about everything in the general public that I fear the most.
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Evyl Robot Michael
/ June 12, 2012I’m always shocked when I find that I’m the only one in a group with a flashlight or a knife or whatever. And usually, the person who points out the oddity that I’m carrying any such tool is the one who I’m loaning it to because they needed it. I want to shake them by the shoulders and say “THAT’S PRECISELY WHY I’M CARRYING IT!!!!!”
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DaddyBear
/ June 12, 2012Six, that was my take on it. My son was otherwise properly attired for going out in public, he just wanted to wear his cap and mask and be a superhero who was helping Dad get apples. A lot of people can’t handle a child being a child, even if said little person isn’t bothering anyone or being obnoxious.
ER – On the one or two occasions that someone has asked why I would carry a knife, I put it back in my pocket. Obviously if they can’t imagine why I would carry a knife when they’re asking me to loan it to them, they can’t imagine using the knife they can’t imagine me carrying.
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