OMG am I Sharenting?
Will my Son Be Deleting this in the Future
Hello Parenting is a Jokesters! My apologies once again for being a day or two behind. Did you notice? Maybe Friday will become my new Wednesday. I’m too tired even to tell if that makes a lick of sense.
Do you know who makes perfect sense? AJ Jacobs! He’s the guest on this week’s Parenting is a Joke podcast! He’s also the author of a brand new book, The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning, and he hosts the daily podcast, The Puzzler with AJ Jacobs. We talk about how to be calm(er) parents, but part of our conversation I can’t stop thinking about is his response to finding the light at the end of the tunnel…
Before I go any further, can you help me by taking 90 seconds to let us know what we can do to give you more of what you want? I’m an endless people pleaser, so Please Help Me Please You! Just click HERE for this quick survey!
Once again, I’ll keep it short. I just wanted to share a quick and pretty funny little kid thing that happened in our house this weekend, but then I read an article about little kids who are now adults and are super mad at their parents for sharing about them on social media or otherwise – Sharenting as it’s called, and god I don’t want to my kid to ever feel that way when he grows up, but somehow I think this small anecdote is okay...
Over the weekend, while I was at shows in the night, my husband sent me a photo of our son who fell asleep with… slime in his hand, and his hand was touching his head so there was slime on his hand, hair, pillow, and curtain. My first question was to my husband was, “how could you let him fall asleep with slime in his hand?” I’m still waiting on that answer.
I immediately consulted a mom friend who smartly directed me to TikTok, where a wonderfully wacky woman, Rainbow Slime Girl, demonstrated putting slime in her hair and then easily rinsing it out with white vinegar. I thanked my mom friend, I thanked this slime influencer in the comments, and I pulled out the bottle of white vinegar that had been collecting dust from under the kitchen sink.
The next morning, I placed my son in the shower and told him this would take no time at all as the TikTok lady rinsed her slime clot out in seconds. Well, that was not the case with my kid’s head of green goo. I doused the gummed-up hair, and the vinegar just seemed to bead off. I tried combing it out a bit, which started the blood-curdling screams from my son, who yelled, “It’s like you're sticking knives in my skull!” After 30 minutes of torturing him with vinegar and a comb, I found that using about half a bottle of conditioner helped get it out, but it was not easy, and it was done entirely to the score of a small kid screaming and sobbing. I felt terrible and shell-shocked as I rinsed the clump of hair that I combed out of his head down the drain. I kept telling him that I was sorry and the TikTok lady made it look so easy, almost like the vinegar almost liquified the slime, and that’s when my son yelled, “It wasn’t slime mom, it was THINKING PUTTY!!!!”
He is completely right; that substance has an entirely different chemical makeup. Olive Oil would have done the trick. Sorry kid. That little bald patch should fill in soon.
There is no light at the end of the tunnel, but there might be less slime (THINKING PUTTY!)
Enjoy this new episode with author, humorist, and puzzler AJ Jacobs, and look forward to a great one next week with Liz Tenety, mom of five, host of the Motherly podcast, and a super interesting, smart, and funny person all around.