What Annoying Parents Say… And The Truth

I can’t help but be impossibly annoyed by competitive parenting. I would much rather hear about your daughter barfing on her gerbil than how well she can roll her “r’s” when speaking Spanish. Here are some more grotesquely braggy statements I’ve overheard, followed by what I think (or at least hope) is the reality of situation.

“My son just loves to eat raw chard.”

He accidently ate it once because he thought it was some kind of lime-flavored Fruit Roll-up. Child cried himself to sleep while the parent updated Facebook status to “BAXTER LOVES CHARD”

“Our kids don’t even like TV. In fact, we don’t even have one in the house!”

Their kids watch videos on the computer and iPad incessantly. Probably more than they would if there was a TV in the house.

“Our son’s favorite country is Liberia.”

He said Liberia once, but what he meant was Siberia because he’d just watched (on the iPad) the episode of Super Friends where Lex Luthor traps Superman in a Siberian ice block. The kid’s favorite country is actually, “I don’t know. Is a country the same thing a mountain? Because my favorite mountain is Canada.”

“Well, we recently discovered that gluten…blah…gas……IQ score…” (Sorry, I tend to lose focus after hearing the word gluten)

The parent is allergic to gluten and doesn’t want it in the house because he or she doesn’t trust him or herself not to eat it. Full disclosure: I might be allergic to gluten, but will never find out because my love of bread far exceeds the discomfort and hassle of farting and being tired all the time. Of course, my Karmic fate for this joke will be that my kids are gluten-intolerant and I become that which I mock.

“You should switch to cloth diapers.”

They bought two-hundred dollars worth of cloth diapers and regret it horribly, but they’re stuck because they told everyone they cared about the environment. Now they want everyone else to ruin their washing machine, just like they did.

“My children both slept through the night at four months old!”

Their child sleeps through the night because a) They have a night nurse who’s nice enough not to tell them when their child awakens at night or b) They put on noise cancelling earphones and “sleep trained” him. There’s nothing wrong with either of those, but stop telling half-truths and making the rest of us feel inadequate because a three year-old sleeps in between us.