Getting older - part 1

So what's the biggest difference in parenting two kids ten years apart? Well the main difference is that I'm older. Ten years older, roughly. So it's similar except now I'm sore, exhausted, and have a general overall feeling of physical shittyness. Is that a word? Spellcheck just said no; I say yes. When my daughter was a baby and would take naps, I could get some things done. When my son takes a nap, so do I.

Also, I've been amazed at how many baby safety and health rules have changed in ten years. It turns out that pretty much everything we fed my daughter is now considered baby poison. And keep in mind I was pretty "by the book" with her too. Apparently as it turns out, anyone can write a book, legally. The current list of foods the experts say you should not give a baby before their first birthday is pretty much all she ate her first year. Somehow she pulled through, but now we know it was nothing short of a miracle. It's amazing the human race didn't die off before these discoveries, but I guess miracles happen everyday (snort, chuckle, cough). Hmm...yeah sooooo, what else....

I'll tell you something that changed from my daughter's birth to my son's birth- I was better looking then. Not much, but I assume my peak must have happened somewhere in the middle. Ya know, someone should really let you know when you reach your peak. I don't know what I expected. Maybe balloons and confetti to drop from the ceiling and a photographer to pop out and take one last good picture before everything went to shit. Yeah, and if you don't mind, use that magic "Glamour Shots" soft-focus lens. You know- the one that makes ugly people blurry and shiny? The older I get, the more I consider carrying a big piece of frosted glass in front of me so that I'm always in soft focus. The bonus would be that the world would be in soft-focus from my perspective, which would be good considering the way the world seems to be increasingly harsher and crappier with each year of gained clarity and... I guess we'll loosely call it wisdom, but we know better, don't we? It's can't be wisdom because we don't learn from most of it until it's too late. And hindsight is usually too simple and embarrassing to be revered as wisdom. I mean really: what good is learning from something when you're too old and/or your life has become too boring for that situation to ever occur again? It's harsh, but you know I'm right.

Yeah, I don't think anyone really knows when they're at their peak. But there comes a day when you look in the mirror and realize you've gone downhill and you have no idea how long ago it happened. I guess part of the problem is that the optimist in me (who has long since been beaten down, silenced, and eventually imprisoned on the grounds of naivete and just general silliness) was hoping that I was just a really late bloomer and that at some point I would be pretty good-looking dude. So it came and went unrecognized and unappreciated. But that's what getting older is all about, right? Looking back at all the different ways you had it good throughout your life, but didn't realize or appreciate it at the time. Youth truly is wasted on the young. I guess what I'm saying is: Go ahead and make out with as many hotties as you can as soon as possible. Next year you might look like shit.