re #3: uhh, yes there are.

oops. I meant: re #6.

Thanks for pointing out these trials. I will have to remember them when I become a father.

You could always put racing stripes or flames on your mini-van to butch it up! :-)

It;s SO MUCH easier to be a Dad:

Who matches clothes?  If the legs fit in the inverted sweatshirt, he’s good to go!  It’s CLEAN!

“OK Billy, this is a “Hot LZ” mission - when I pull over, STAY IN THE MINIVAN, just slide open the door and go - 2 points if you can hit something!”

Dad - “Throw their shoes in the car - I have coats in the back - honey, we’ll dress them if we need to”.

“You wont eat olive loaf?  Well those aren’t olives boys, them thar is BUG GUTS!  Bug Guts Boloney!  Yeaaaaa! Coool”  And they’re chomping away.

Had to have the wife explain #7 - still not sure what a Garanimals is, but matching tags seems to make sense.  Wonder if there’s a market in men’s clothing for tags.  You know, tie to shirt, shoes to belt, etc.

“11) If you’re out with a buddy along with your kids out somewhere, people come up to you to tell you they support your right to adopt children and they love Elton John’s music.”

My son’s godfather came to visit once and we were taking a walk with the little guy. He wanted to swing between our arms. So there we are, swinging him in the air between us, when we pass a construction crew. They started snickering. My son’s godfather didn’t notice. I said, “they think we’re an item.”

William - I’m sticking with Matt on #6.  We’ve got to keep up the cover - no there is not a changing table in the men’s room - EVER…  Matt, I think you’re on to something with this list.  It makes me laugh—I’m a father of 4—wouldn’t trade it for the world.  7B - playing with Barbies is the same issue.  Can’t match the clothes right!

I have all girls and it is awful taking them into a men’s public bathroom.  They can be very disgusting.  Especially on road trips!

“Sweep the leg Johnny”

Get her a body bag!!!

This article is going on the fridge so when my fiance becomes a husband then a father I can remember that it isn’t easy for him. No matter what I have trouble with I will always look cooler in a minivan, know how to match clothing, maneuver buttons with ease, and ALWAYS find a changing table….
Dad’s of the world, I salute you!  May you never run out of stories starting with “once upon a time…”

I read this and started to cry—-who’s not sensitive?

I’m the mom of 11 couldn’t agree more as I recover from the hiccups due to laughing right out loud (as did my husband as I read it to him).  He’s particularly fond of #2 as we have 7 girls, one of whom was good enough to make the ‘boys’ soccer team.  Our addition to your almost perfect list:

#13 - when a dad announces wife is having baby #6, 7, 11 or more - he’s seen as a knuckle-dragging backward chauvinistic prig however if the mom announces another blessing she’s just seen as crazy.

#9 My stay-at-home husband drives a 4 door pickup, but then we only have 2 kids, both boys.

#11 We were in San Francisco with friends and the 2 husbands went out sight-seeing with our 1st son who was a toddler while the wives were at a conference.  Someone asked them, “So,are you guys like . . . buddies?”

So sad, everytime I see a couple guys with kids I automatically assume they’re “together”.

How to disguise a diaper bag?  Silly daddy, carry a backpack!

And #11?  LOL!

I love #11.  Hilarious.

I’ve got an LA Police Gear Bail Out bag as a diaper bag.  It’s awesome!!  Durable too. 

This list had me laughing!

I love this list.  And yes, i keep plenty of advil and bengay around for my hubby, because tickle fights are now wrestling matches, and the kid is only getting bigger…

A few more reasons:

1. Young men of questionable character cry out to young women of indiscriminate taste “Who’s your Daddy?!” and it’s somehow cool. If we did that, it would just confuse the kids.

2. When children have nightmares, they want to sleep in bed with mommy… And we all know that once a toddler is in the bed, it’s impossible to sleep, what with their bony knees and elbows in your back. So dads end up on the couch.

3. Dads NEVER get to see the cool movies in the theatre anymore. It’s an endless parade of “family friendly” drek (Cats vs. Dogs anyone?) or chick-flicks. Would you take the kids or your wife on a date night to see Aliens vs Predator? Didn’t think so - both get you a night on the couch.

I have a camo diaper bag.  But who are we kidding?

And who gets to walk her down the aisle.  That is going to be though if I am going to do a Boehner.

(More parenting and spiritual stuff <a > here </a> )

I dispute that 5) “Wait until your Mommy gets home…” does not instill fear. Obviously, he doesn’t live at my house.  Bwahaha.

Also, no one looks cool in a mini-van, although I do grant that it would be emasculating for you.

Funny list.  :)

The timing of this article couldn’t have been better for this dad who just observed his youngest of four’s 20th birthday on March 4th. But one of my biggest mysteries of being a parent is trying to figure out why kids will put things in a dish sink when the doggone dishwasher is situated right next to the sink?
  Thank God I’m Catholic because there’s no proof-ready text I can turn to in the Bible and say, “Aha, now I’ll know how to straighten this out!”
  Oh, and the ones that are in there and close, such a lot of Proverbs and the Ten Commandments, or Mary’s explicit orders to Jesus at Cana ... (my mom LOVED that moment as her Scriptural “don’t even go there” backup)...guess what? They don’t sink in with today’s kids ... unless you email or text it to ‘em in advance. In the meantime, the sink’s piling up with dishes.
  Not always being a dad, but it sure as (you know where) beats NOT being a DAD! And for you new dads, or dads who haven’t experienced the turn around the bend into their teen years ... take cheer, eventually they’ll be speaking to you again other than grunts, “keys, please,” and other “requests.” Then when they begin to have their own kids, you sit back and say, “Hey, it’s easy ... just say “Yes Dear” to your wife and do as she says. You’ll get a happier kid and a deliriously shocked wife.”

I’m in full agreement on items 3, 4, 5, 10 & 12.  Regarding #6, about 1/2 the places I go have changing tables in mens’ rooms (maybe that tells me something about what my life has become) and #7 - “Guy Rule for Matching Clothes”... if the color combos work for the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL, then they work for me (as I told my kids who said black doesn’t go with either yellow or purple… of course it does ==> Steelers & Ravens).

Along with not getting to see cool movies anymore, we don’t get to watch the few cool TV shows (like Military Channel) or read the newspaper in peace.

I have to agree with the dishes in the sink.  Every now and then, thou, she remembers to rinse off the plate.  Just not often enough.

Oh, and we’re human garbage disposals.  “I’m not really that hungery but I’ll order the 12 taco dinner.  Dad’ll eat the rest.”  Maybe it’s a corallary to #1.

“Had to have the wife explain #7 - still not sure what a Garanimals is, but matching tags seems to make sense.  Wonder if there’s a market in men’s clothing for tags.  You know, tie to shirt, shoes to belt, etc.”

Here’s your fail safe, Marty:
4 Sport coats: black, navy, brown, tweed.
Dress shirts:  white, light blue, cream.
Ties: unlimited.  Solids, stripes & patterns.  Go nuts.
Dress trousers:  black, gray, tan.
Dockers:  black, gray, tan.
Black shoes = black belt = black socks.
Brown shoes = brown belt = brown socks.

A leather messenger bag makes for an eminently cool diaper bag.

All of this can be had on the cheap at Goodwill.  $5 for a sport coat in every flavor known to man.

Sorry for the OT post.  My mom worked in a haberdashery for years and I am forever bound to answer the call of those in distress. O:-)

This was awesome.  Although I do have to agree, NOBODY looks cool in a minivan.  Minivans are the epitome of uncoolness.  I cried when I got my first one.  Crying makes it even less cool.

I loved number one, as I exploit this at every chance.

Hey, I love my minivan! It was the car I always put into those “cootie catcher” things we girls made in school.  LOL.  Now, I want an upgrade—a 15 passenger extended wheel base fully loaded van…of course, if you hang out in my circles (homeschooling Catholic moms, most with 5+ children), you’d understand the appeal!

Diaper bags are awesome for sneaking contraband into collegiate sporting events.  I’m not talking alcohol, but stuff like that water bottles and snacks.  On the other hand, my team’s stadium does not changing table in the men’s room.  We have to go back to the minivan (I think my Sienna is pretty cool) and invariably miss most of a quarter. 

On the other hand, I’m much better at picking out clothes for the children than is my wife.

And yes, in my zip code people are always assuming an intrinsically disordered lifestyle when I’m out with a guy friend and his or my children.  I always make it a point to work in a mention of my wife if I’m speaking with anyone.  They’re usually so disappointed.

#8 - Oh yes you can!
http://www.maxpedition.com/

I’ll never ever forget the time when my son was about 2 years old and walking. My husband got him ready for us to go out one day-which was not typical. Anyway, my son was walking really oddly and then I realized my husband had put his shoes on the wrong feet!

#10: anytime I’m out somewhere with any of my kids but not my wife, I’m afraid people think I’m the non-custodial Dad on “his weekend.”

I read these to hubby and here are our comments:  1.  Yes-there are many more men’s bathrooms with changing tables.  We even went to a restaurant that only had a changing table in the men’s bathroom.  Score for mom!!
2.  Minivans are awesome.  We LOVE our minivan.  Husband recently said it was his favorite car….EVAH.  I doubted it but he said Yes evah!

WWW.DIAPERDUDE.COM ... check it out moms & dads!  I’m going to be a dad for the first time in two months and my wife and sister are excited to hook me up with these cool diaper bags designed for guys.  Since I’m going to be a stay-at-home dad ( a rare and elite group ), I’m looking forward to hiking around the trails and malls with this stuff.  On another topic… My son Liam is due May 1st.. the same day as Pope J.P. II Beatification…I hope that will hold some special significance in the future…maybe he’ll be a priest!  : )

#11 is so true!!

I met a friend of mine through the adoption community. We’re both married guys who adopted kids from China.

We met at McDonalds one day for a play date. We were chatting and the three kids were running around. I was complaining about my sons hair being all fuzzy and matted at the back. A woman sitting nearby jumped into the conversation with suggestions of how we could sew a piece of satin on “our” sons pillow when we get back home and that would fix the problem. I was shocked at first, then I laughed. I told her “I don’t live with this clown, I live with my wife, and I definitely can’t sew.” It was funny but kind of sad in a way.

I’ve also had a police officer stop and question me at the playground when I was there with my son. He assumed I was a pedophile because I’m white with red hair and my son is Chinese. God help us. What a world.

I tried to be helpful to my husband! I would even match up an outfit, fold it together and put them away like that! But still!, he managed some of the worst outfits. He would unfold the outfits take pieces from the separate sets and put them together! I finally gave up:) if someone looks at her funny with her mismatched outfit weird shoes and Afro (she has curly hair) i just say her dad got her ready and the other lady gives me an understanding nod. :)

I get the deer-in-the-headlights look when my wife asks me to get #5 dressed…all of her clothes have crazy patterns, and I despair of ever successfully matching things up. So I can completely agree with the Garanimals item.

LMAO!  I epseiclaly liek the bit about tickle fights.  My kids are endlessly having tickle fights with their daddy. :)

uggh to #11

My friend and I went to go open a business account for an apostolate we founded, but I was on daddy-duty that day.  Imagine two 20-something men coming into the bank with a baby carrier needing to open an account together! 

The looks were priceless!

God bless husbands and fathers everywhere!

Dude I so wish they made Garanimals for men. Any way I’d like to invite any dads reading this post to come take the DADvocate Survey. It’s worlds largest privately conducted survey of dads. You have until March 31, 2011 to take the 2010 survey. http://www.TheDADvocateProject.com/survey

A few thoughts:
1. When I was still doing diaper bags, the black backpack one was the closest you could get to manly. I recommend it to new fathers. Oh, and I WISH that men’s rooms didn’t have diaper changing stations. Around here they do.

2. Pregnancy does cause a guy to gain weight if he has to take his wife out for Mexican food every night because that’s what she’s craving.

3. I don’t care what the many van looks like on the outside as long as it’s packed with all the latest tech gadgets on the inside.

Re: the van
That’s what we thought, too. I remember rolling up the first party after our twins were born in our Town N Country. Sure, everyone snickered.
Then they said things like ‘Wait, so those seats go ALL THE WAY into the floor?’ Yup. ‘Are those DVD players in the back?’ Yup. ‘That sound system, it sounds good, is it factory installed?’ Yup.
So, you might THINK that vans aren’t cool, but then all of a sudden people realize that having a friend with a vehicle that can EITHER transport 8 comfortably OR that sofa you got off craigslist, suddenly the cool factor goes way up.
My hyusband is also bad at matching clothes. It’s so odd. Like, 90% of their clothes just match naturally. Somehow he finds the ONE pair of goofy plaid pants and the ONE shirt with flowers on it and brings my children out of the bedroom looking like clowns.
I actually thought you were going to go a different direction with this post. I think what’s hard about being a dad is:
1. The world (at least in America) seems to think dads don’t matter. They seem to think that raising kids without dads can work out just fine. What they don’t realize is that kids without dad turn out just fine IN SPITE of missing their dad, not BECAUSE they didn’t have a dad. YEAH for dads!
2. Everyone thinks you’re stupid. I don’t know why. Everyone was shocked when they saw my husband first change a diaper. Dude, it’s the same shape as the kid’s butt! It’s pretty self-explanatory how it all works! The man’s got a PhD. He can handle a diaper.
3. I’ve done my own survey of men’s rooms diaper changing tables. It goes like this. We were out with the twins, and I take one into the bathroom to change her, and he takes the other to change her. I come back out and he tells me that he can’t, there is no table in the men’s room. I didn’t believe him. I checked. Indeed, no changing table. One shocked man, but no changing table (don’t be too hard on me, I was on like 12 minutes of sleep that day)

Hahahahaa:) please do explain why men are so bad with clothes? you seem to be able to dress yourself perfectly fine but when it comes to your kids somehow you can’t distinguish a pant from a t-shirt

I can’t the blame for selecting what my kids wear when I get them dressed.  Typically I let them pick out what they want to wear and just go with it.  It develops their sense of style.

My number one pet peeve: If Dad is out with the kids (without Mom), people will often assume he is “babysitting”.  I don’t babsit, I father my children.

You forgot my favourite - little girls dresses on back to front.
And, dad with the kids in any public place on the weekend - obviously “access.”

Our shopping mall has a bungee jump/trampoline thing.  Any time I go past it, there’s some kid in it with other kids waiting, and all of the adults with them are dads.  I always assume it’s divorced dads on their “weekends,” getting back at their ex-wives by letting their kids go bungee jumping.

This website stole your funny and is claiming it as it’s own.  Just thought I’d let you know! 

http://www.neatorama.com/neatobambino/2011/03/07/12-reasons-its-harder-to-be-a-dad-than-a-mom/

By the way, I LOVE what you wrote, put it in a fathers day card for my padre!

My husband suggests using a laptop bag as a diaper bag.  Pity the poor thief who thinks he’s stealing a laptop…

And for the list: It’s harder to be a dad because men have a tendency to remember and describe the contents of the worst diapers they’ve ever had to change in terms of the attributes of various condiments (e.g., color, viscosity/consistency, general appearance, etc.).  Even years later.  You will hear dads exchanging war stories, and someone will pipe up “I remember the time I had to change little Billy, and he was plastered in this mayonnaise-goop that leaked out of the diaper and up his back, only it was mustard-yellow and thicker than barbecue sauce—not that wimpy stuff in a bottle, but that homemade recipe that Grandpa Ned used to make—and of course there was no changing table in the men’s room…” and so forth. 

Nobody ever expects moms to remember diaper content details, or describe them nearly so colorfully. :)

My wife and I raised four (now adult) children, oldest son, followed by two daughters, who were followed by our youngest son. We both agree that sons are “less challenging” to raise, even if they’re of opposite temperaments and interests at times. Boys, by and large ... until they become teenagers, are easy to please, clothe and “manage.”  Girls, however lovely, can be a volatile force to handle, especially if they’re in the “middle of the birth order” as ours were. Think of a nuclear reactor that you’ll do almost anything to keep from an explosion or meltdown. Well, sometimes they pulled “meltdowns” and sometimes they succeeded. (Must’ve caught us in a mutually exhausted moment, LOL.) As my mom, who only had one brother, observed from my dad’s large family (he was the oldest and had one younger brother and five sisters!) the girls tended to be more “possessive” than boys. And it wasn’t just my dad’s family, she noticed. She saw it in others living in the other apartment “flats” as well. I think she was trying to forewarn me since my wife hailed from afamily of three girls, and she was the youngest, (as I was the youngest by five years in a family of three boys.) I ran that past my wife and she (laughingly) admitted it was true!
  Regardless of the order we received His blessings, or the timing, each one two years/two mos. apart, (and no, we didn’t even attempt to try our own hand at “timing,” they just arrived that way ... we would never trade all the possible more material “riches” or “benefits” that are usually available when money doesn’t have to be “spent on kids” as some people might put it; and a lot of ‘em have children, too.
  How many times have we heard during the past 27 years since my wife gave me a sampler she sewed saying “Anybody can be a father, it takes someone special to be a dad” ... with a papa bear holding a child on his shoulder who’s grabbing tight to a trio of balloons—about how much “it costs to raise a single child, ‘Are you ready for $100,000’?” That was then, now I hear it’s double.
  Okay, to take a page out of our more cynically inclined beancounting parents and non-parents in the media who trot stories like this out every year or two ... let me ask one simple question for them:
  “If indeed your math is correct, and I have no reason to doubt it, hasn’t it ever dawned on some or all of you that maybe there’s a reason even all the math and demographical whiz-bangs keep overlooking?  D’ya suppose that perhaps the Father of us all is trying to say something ... maybe something like, ‘Hey, all my kids are valuable and if you’re failing to see why they’re becoming more valuable, not just pricier, that there’s a reason and you should turn to ME to find out first before you publish these big dollar figures to scare people off from having more children or worse?  And do I have to come down and explain what I mean by ‘worse’?”
  Though I’ve admitted that my wife and I sometimes feel daughters cn be more challenging to raise at times, both of us have been on a high ever since our youngest daughter came home unexpectedly last night from her demanding career in baking elsewhere to spend Father’s Day with us and our family. Best yet, I suppose that even though it’ll be a disappointment to see our youngest daughter have to return to her job, we’ll relish the time spent together and the memories coming out it ... giving us all the more to look forward to for our next family reunion.
  That’s what’s important, whether we’re together on Father’s Day or another day (I felt awful for my wife she couldn’t have gotten away that weekend) ... the time you spend with your children, be they little ones or adults ... that’s the truest measuring value that all the beancounters in the world seem to leave out when they “calculate” how much it costs to raise children. While it never hurts to remind your kids to “return with the full change” whatever you give them to run down to the local store to buy a gallon of milk,” I’m afraid that the beancounters who stress these big six figure sums are the ones most often who’ll expect and demand far more times than not to see the full change every time.
Sigh, they never get it, besides, the full change, do they?

What a delightful article, Matthew! I quoted from and linked to it in my Father’s Day post at my blog, here:
http://zillablog.marezilla.com/2011/06/dads-treasure-beyond-measure.html

On #6, no there aren’t.  That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

I believe moms don’t understand when they leave the little ones with dad that for the most part we engage in dangerous stuff like mowing the lawns, working on the car, cleaning the pool, activities that can kill and maim.
When mom is watching the most trouble a toddler can get into is if they spill their sippee cup or bump their head

My husband and I loved this. He has been at home with our 2 boys for the past 13 years and he said the diaper bag comment has to be the best out of all. I loved the chit chat comment - man, you are so right on!! Thank you for the joy you brought to us with this blog!