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Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Friends I cannot stress this enough: have kids.

People talk about loss of meaning and loss of rigid rites of passage that take you from being a child to being a man.

It's kids. It's always been kids.

Having kids is really hard (I apparently phrased this poorly since people are responding to it as if I am saying the opposite. My point is that you will find that the following things are the things you end of loving, and you will find the idea that these should ever have prevented you from having kids to be childish): your house will constantly be a filthy mess. They will keep you from sleeping, they will make it impossible to go out to dinner or to go to parties, and they make travel really difficult. Any of the dreams of adventure that you had before you had kids will be pushed back by 10 years.

And NONE of that will matter once you have them. You'll find the idea that you ever cared about any of this stuff laughable.

People say having kids is really hard but i strongly disagree with that. It's pretty easy, your life is just different.

If you're hellbent on travelling and partying then, yes, it's going to be hard, but if you're intending to care for your kids it's pretty easy, especially if your not trying to force them to become something they're not.

I think an issue is that some people don't actually want to have kids and they whine loudly and incessantly, with some other parents jumping on the bandwagon for clout. In my friend group there is one person that's actually had a hard time and a fair bit of that is self inflicted, and none of us were really aiming to have kids. In reality almost every single parent I know (including myself) are very satisfied with being parents.

Don't let the whine brigade fool you into thinking having kids is some kind of herculan endeavour, it's not.

How many do you have?

Not that guy, but I have four, and I more or less agree.

Maybe I’m just in a different phase of it then. I said above but I have 4 kids under the age of 5.

One of them is teething and having a sleep regression, and she wakes up at night quite a bit.

We recently all got norovirus from an indoor playground we went to.

We also recently took a trip to Oregon. Travel is’harder with that many kids.

Finding a babysitter for that many kids at that age is difficult.

I don’t know I guess if somebody tells me that having kids wasn’t difficult, I wonder if we just mean different things. Most meaningful things are difficult.

The hardest part of parenting (in a practical, non-poetical sense) is the sleep deprivation. That will get better with time, but with 4 littles under 5 I imagine it is a struggle to get sleep. But just think of how great it will be when they're all old enough to sleep properly!

And having just traveled with a preschooler and a toddler on a 4 hour plane trip, I concur that travel sucks. They want to run around! They certainly don't want to wear their seatbelts.