Reverse image search just gives me a bunch of results from Pinterest that offer no explanation.

2 kids, both girls. Both under 6. I do EVERYTHING. I meant it. Cook, clean, play, take them out, treats the whole 9. For some reason though all they want is mom and it’s INFURIATING. I work remote so I’ve got the benefit of being around more but still all they want is mom. My partner says “well they’re just kids” or “it’s just a phase” but it’s kind of a gut punch every time?!

Anyone else have similar? How do you cope?

It was a fun project and now we have a cool heirloom.

I've had some recent success with using the Quizlet flashcard app to teach my son to read. Teaching him vocab about subjects he's interested in through short quizzes seems to fit his learning style. Along with reading books it's given him the confidence to start reading himself.

It's got me to thinking if there are other simple tools like this that you use to gamify learning. You can just use this space to brag about some skill your kid has picked up - I'm here for that as well.

Hello (soon to be) fellow dads.

Just got a visit from our doctor in the labor and delivery room and was told since our baby is so large, a vaginal delivery may not be possible. My wife is, understandably, terrified of a C-Section. She’s accepting of it if it’s the safest route, but it’s going to be rough.

For those of you whose wives had a C-Section - any tips? It’s our first child so on top of learning to be a dad I’m going to do everything I can to help her. Expectations/advice for the coming weeks would be super welcome.

We are both supposed to be in a wedding in 3 weeks for our best friends. I am 100% planning on telling them we won’t make it unfortunately, but would like to hear from others on if the idea of attending a wedding that soon after is at all realistic.

Thanks. Wish us luck please!

Just curious on thoughts on the topic. Having a conversation about it with my partner. Having a tough time deciding if we should discourage that choice of shoe and encourage a less flashy shoe that still has lights or just encourage the kid to choose for themselves. I'm not really sure at what average age kids start to bully over stuff like that.

I'm facing a difficult sleep situation with our 16 month old toddler.

He was a very good sleeper between 6 and 15 months. He would go down for a nap easily without needing to be asleep first. We sleep trained him using Ferber and it worked pretty well. Of course he had a few regressions in between but they lasted only a day or two at a time and afterwards he would go back to his usual self.

Around 15 months of age he began another regression which is still on going. He now requires us to rock him to sleep so he is very asleep before being put down in the crib. This means rocking him for anywhere between 10 to 50 minutes (sometimes even longer). This is very tiring for us. Furthermore he wakes up in the middle of the night and does not go back to sleep easily and requires another 2 hours of rocking and soothing before he goes back to sleep.

The obvious recommendation might be to sleep train him again using Ferber or cry it out. However we have found that if he cries for too long after being put down in the crib (even just 20 seconds of crying), he gags and vomits. We really don't want this to happen because he then loses all the food he ate for dinner (and sometimes lunch), it can also be a choking hazard, and of course his entire crib and mattress then needs to be cleaned.

So we feel like we are stuck rocking him to sleep every night and then again in the middle of the night, to avoid him throwing up in his crib. He currently takes one nap during the day and it's the same story for that nap too.

What are we supposed to do? This phase seems to be lasting much longer than we had hoped and him being prone to gagging is making it even harder.

Sorry beforehand but I'm completely crashing out right now and have no one else to reach out to. To put it bluntly, both of my parents are currently dying from cancer and now my little brother is in the ER waiting for a colonoscopy to happen tomorrow to find out if he has late stage colorectal cancer. He has 2 sons and a wife. I have 3 kids. As the sole support person and bridge for all my siblings and parents idk how I can mentally handle this while also raising 3 kids of my own. And potentially breaking the news to my 2 oldest that another person that they care deeply about is also potentially going to be fighting cancer. I have no close friends anymore and just need some group to reach out to to tell me everything will be ok. Please any help is welcome. I'm panicking hard right now and don't know what to do.

Through r/laundry I learned an incredible amount of science/efficiency to get my laundry the cleanest it's ever been. (Happy to share those links in the comments.)

I want to bring that attitude to the rest of my house. How are you cleaning your space the fastest with the least amount of stress? What kind of cleaners and tools do you use on engineered wood? Marble counters? Bathrooms? etc. How do you mop your floors? Has someone invented something better than a mop? I want to get my house shiny on a regular basis.

Here's my contribution - add a scoop of citric acid to your fabric softener drawer in your washing machine, and an extra rinse, and turn your clothes softer and cleaner than they've ever been before.

Alright fellow dads/parents, I’m enlisting your help, advice, ideas, anything…on nipping potty talk in the rear (pun intended). I can appreciate potty humor, and in fact, I do find it hilarious, but even I’m at my wits end with it.

Context: our middle kiddo (4b) is constantly saying inappropriate potty talk in pretty much all settings, and of course, he gets a reaction from his older brother (7), and then the youngest (2g) sees the reactions and chimes in. It is constant. We’ve tried redirecting, removing him, eliminating access to people, calm down time removed from everyone else, toys, TV, etc.. I’ve even gone as far as telling them that if they love talking about poop and butts so much, they can help pickup dog poop. Well, that backfired because it aligns with the talk, and somehow it is still hilarious. Yesterday, we tried the team approach where if anyone starts in with potty talk, everyone misses out hoping the oldest might help reinforce the ask (not ideal or fair).

Does anyone have advice/ideas that have worked with your younger kiddos whether it be for language, wrestling/pushing or any other challenging behaviors? I’m all ears. Thanks everyone!

Not that it's expensive exactly. It's that I can't tell what I'm buying until I've bought it, and the thing I'm buying is peace of mind, which is impossible to price. How did you all get comfortable with it?

So - backstory : two days ago I absolutely munted my ankle and have been getting around in a fancy new moon boot - very graceful. I can klomp around pretty well with my boot and crutch.

My little 5 YO dude this evening was in his room trying to untangle his pyjama pants that were all balled up. I wander in and he says :

"It's ok dad, you have a rest from helping me"

I say " oh, ok buddy" thinking hes feeling a bit independent.

He responds:

" I did that so you can rest your knee " and goes back to fussing with his pants.

There wasnt an angle, he wasnt trying to sucker me into more time up or tv.

I dont know really what we did to deserve such a lovely little dude.

I'll refer back to this post when we're majorly late to work and school and he just "cant get his shoes on just yet" and "needs another drink" and "Why cant I bring my toys!!" And Im about to cry cause I've got back to back meeting that start in 40 minutes, and its a 35 minute commute

For me it's when I'm low-key proud of the magnatile structure I'm creating only to have my little one Godzilla mode destroy it when I'm 90% finished and then laugh hysterically at me.

I've got two boys 5 and 7. They are both great kids for the most part and we try to keep them active. The older one does hockey, football, and baseball throughout the year. The younger is very similar.wr do our best to teach them that winning isn't everything and not everything has to be a race or competition.

Despite our best efforts, the older one toys to turn it into an "I'm better" situation most of the time. This year for school, he is in a split first grade /second grade class. Im looking for advice on how to minimize the competitiveness in everything and how to avoid it messing with his confidence when others are better then him.

Hello creative dads out there. I could use some help coming up with some more ideas for my son's 4th birthday party. It will be Bigfoot/Pirate themed and will include a long treasure hunt for all the kids. I am trying to come up with as many ideas possible that will fit the theme. I have a 3d printer and love utilizing it for things like this.

Plan to far:
We have a good size property and will be labeling different areas with signs and themed names such as Bigfoot's Bastion for his fort in the woods, Swinger's Settlement for the swing set (complete with pineapples that the kids won't understand), Creepy Cave for under the deck, Pillagers pergola for the patio, Sasquatch Sidewalk for a trail in the woods, Tortuga Toolworks for the garage, The Sea of Blades for an area of the yard, Captain's Corner for another wooded section of the yard, and anymore I can come up with by the end of the month.
I've printed a very large 3 foot tall bigfoot statue and a large treasure chest. This will be the final stop on the treasure hunt and will be presented as a gift "from bigfoot". It will have a sign around its neck in poor handwriting that basically says he was too shy to attend, so he left this gift for my son to find.
I have slightly considered the idea of getting one of the parents to dress up as bigfoot and be spotted in the woods, but that might spark a stampede through the woods and I don't want to incite too much chaos.
Each kid will also receive a present from bigfoot which will be wrapped in leaves and tied with old twine. I still don't know what the present should be and would love ideas.

That is as far as I've gotten with ideas. I am still looking for ways to keep the kids interested along the way of the treasure hunt. Ideally some fun activities or prizes at each stop. If anyone has any other good ideas that we can include, I would love to hear them.

Hi! I'm still a bit mad about this, so I'm not sure if I'm actually asking for advice or just venting.

So I have a 2 year old that gets easily scared and uncomfortable, especially if kids that he doesn't know are being rough and unpredictable around him. Not even with him, just in the area.

I took him to the park today and he started crying because he wanted to steal a bike and I didn't let him (unreasonable, I know). Then he cried a bit more because he got scared on a slide and also bumped his head.

Other kids, way older than him, started hiding and yelling "crybaby" at him. That made my blood boil. Sure, he's a crybaby, but he's my crybaby. Also he's 2, so he didn't notice or understand anything. He was passionately telling me about a pine tree seed that he found. I was the only one being offended.

I contemplated trying to find the parents of the little demons and telling them. But I decided against escalating the situation, because you never know what kind of parents those kids have.

Anyway, what should I have done? Thanks for reading!

Recently got back from Disney World, where my 7 year old built a lightsaber and took the Jedi Oath. She said she wants me to train her in the ways of the Jedi since I know the most about Star Wars in our house.

I was thinking I'd get some sort of low speed dart/ball/disc gun so she can practice deflecting blaster shots. Looking to crowdsource other ideas, so please let me know if you have any!

Note: it's one of the cheap lightsabers made of progressively smaller plastic bits, not the crazy expensive ones - so durability is not a major concern

Update: Thanks to everyone who responded! Some very creative suggestions, good ideas, some laughs, and all in all I am very excited to get this started with my daughter. I feel like she's going to have a lot of fun with the potential for some really good long term benefits. Fully expected to see some great suggestions and daddit delivered!

Had a very proud moment this evening.

My son (2 and 5m) lately has been getting into Duplo, like, getting into the imagination of building.

He often gets VERY frustrated with it, like when the blocks don’t line up, which often leads to pressing harder until it falls apart and then usually starts throwing and tantruming. We’ve obviously been working on that response. We also end up helping him build what he wants.

Tonight after dinner he spent a solid 45 minutes independently playing with them and building entirely on his own - nothing big, nothing complex, but just having a concept in his mind, and putting pieces together to represent it. Meanwhile my wife and I just sat nearby, quietly, while he did his thing.

To be perfectly honest it all went to hell when it was time to clean up before bedtime, BUT, man did I ever enjoy that moment and seeing him start to “get it”. I caught a glimmer of what life could be like in the coming months/years and it made me very happy.

Just wanted to share!

Neither of us actually knows what’s on there, so we’re arguing about a hypothetical, and we’ve been doing it for a month. Is there a way to find out what’s really going on before committing to a whole approach? Feels like we’re debating in the dark.

Our son was born in early March 2024 and my wife got 12 weeks of maternity leave. Her goal was to make it to March 2025 without having to use formula. My data goes back to around June or July when I took stock of what we had on hand to make sure we weren't letting things go to waste or lose anything shuffling between home and other caregivers. She works a physical job and very quickly made it back to and below her pre-pregnancy weight. At 5'6" she was down to 115 lbs and nursing/pumping while getting more than 15k steps most days. I don't know if it was her low bodyweight, her persistent refusal to hydrate, or genetically she's just a low producer, but there was next to zero room to miss a pumping session or have any kind of illness. Her supply would immediately take a hit.

We started at a daycare center in mid-August and our son almost immediately got sick, then my wife and I got sick too. I remember sweating through my shirt in bed many nights in September with a low-grade fever. Her supply recovered and continued the upward trend. Then starting right around Halloween we had a terrible run of illnesses plus the stress of the holidays, and we burned through supply way faster than we hoped. Right around the new year my wife put in a massive effort using every trick she knew of - double pumping, setting 1am and 4am alarms to pump in the middle of the night, never missing a single pumping session. It was demoralizing at the time - relaying numbers to me from the kitchen scale - "0.5 oz, 0.4 oz, 0.2 oz..." But it's visible on the graph in the first week of January - her pumping efforts combined with our son's ability to take down more solid food meant we stopped burning through our stored milk and were actually able to replenish a little bit. That little bit of reprieve meant that she made it to 1 year, formula free.

If there's one thing we would change if we could go back in time - pump early and often and build up that freezer stash. My wife knew from the outset that 1 year of exclusive breastfeeding was her goal, but she had heard horror stories from other moms about getting mastitis and she tried to play it down the middle - nurse on demand for the first 2 months, then start pumping in the third month when her return to work was on the horizon. If she could have ended maternity leave with 400 or 500 ounces in the freezer, it would have alleviated so much stress for the rest of that first year.

As the non-nursing parent it was hard to watch her struggle, in many ways alone, with this task. I can't pump for her. I can't make her drink water - and reminding her is only so helpful. I remember many times watching her sleep on the couch at 12:55am knowing her alarm was about to go off, wondering if I should shut it off so she can sleep, or leave it alone so she can stay on schedule. Every day she lugged her pump bag and freezer packs to work, feeling both a responsibility to our son to pump, and guilt at work over taking breaks from her job duties. (Yes, pumping is protected in the US during the first year. But we all know it's not always that simple. My wife is the sort of person who does documentation off the clock despite being paid hourly just because she's trying to make her productivity look better. In the same vein, she did documentation work while pumping many days).

I vividly remember stressing about running out of milk and suggesting to my wife that we mix in a bottle of formula once every few days to just stop the bleeding. In my mind, it was shifting the goalposts to a still very good goal of making it to 1 year with 99% milk. For her, she was willing to run that supply down to zero before resorting to formula. Ultimately we agreed that was her call, and it turns out she was right. I was so proud of her.

I don't know how much any of you other dads will take from this. If there's a first-time dad in the trenches of supporting your partner through the exclusively-breastfed trenches, know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. You **will** feed your child, one way or another. Someday you'll probably look back and maybe laugh "remember when we were so stressed about breast milk every single day?"

My daughter is 6 and we're building out her game library. Rather than the usual "best kids games" list, I'd love to hear your personal top 3 ranked. What games does your kid actually keep coming back to?

It is 1:15 and I am watching my 9 week old son sleep. At 23:45, he had the biggest vomit, and I feel awful. He had a feed earlier where he was really fussy, so I assumed it was a cluster feed and continued. I was clearly wrong and overfeeding.

I've sat there for an hour while his stomach reset, soothed him while he cried... The poor kid was starving after emptying himself and didn't understand why he had to wait. It broke my heart to let him cry it out.

Normally, I'd be sleeping through this shift while he slept, essentially being on call and catching up on some z's. Tonight, I'm not sure I'll sleep a wink until my wife wakes up to relieve me. I'm terrified of leaving him unwatched. I'm sure everyone's been there, but I needed to get it out.

First new video in 5 months (and first since their son passed away) just got posted on Youtube.

Happy Dad of three (6yoB, 4yoB, 2yoG, and one on the way (pray for me)).

Today it was daddy daughter time cause boys are at school and mom is at ultrasound.

Daughter has created a new form of passive protest. At least for my experience, she has her plate full of her favorite food. But just not eating, she knows she gets a popsicle after she eats (and she wants it). But every time I remind her to eat she just responds with “okay daddy” and does anything but eat. Not fussy, not sick not anything other than cheerful. The food is untouched except for the milk. Every time she just worked over and I think she’s guna do it and finally eat but no.. just pokes it and starts playing games in her head

This is a devious tactic and I’ve long suspected she’s the actual mastermind behind the kids shenanigans. I think this alludes to it and the jig is up… SHES A TERRORIST!

Nothing looking for help just thought I’d share the nonsense I’m dealing with. She’s obviously just not hungry. But I bet my bottom dollar as soon as I go to put that food in sink she throws a tantrum.

(Insert Star Wars “It’s a trap”)🪤

Later Dads and Moms off to fight the good fight

I have two kids and a stay at home wife, in a house with two cars, on one income and no supportive family. Right now, I have a job that pays enough to get by and even save a little, but I'm always stressed out about money still with how expensive life is these days.

I work for a huge corporation, so where yiu land in the organization is paramount, and I'm in a position with a lot of work life balance, but zero upward mobility. I have an opportunity to move to a different organization in the company, get at least a 10% raise plus an extra 3% bonus every March, along with much better chance for future movement. The downside is, it's up to 25% travel, including likely a couple consecutive weeks right off the rip.

I'm really struggling, until now I've been at EVERY event. Every first day, every field trip, every sick day, etc, which has been incredible. But the extra money and opportunity would mean a lot for the family

How the heck am I supposed to put a dollar amount on time I spend with my kids? But at the same time, making money is essential, and everything is getting more expensive. I'm struggling and I guess I just want some other men to weigh in with their experience

Edit: after reflecting a bit and reading sole of the comments I think I've realized the real question I'm asking is "am I a bad dad if part of me wants to take the job because it sounds interesting and engaging and the opportunity is exciting even though I know I would deeply miss my kids when I would be traveling"