This is not a daddy blog....this is not a daddy blog.

Welcome to yet another blog, written by a parent you don’t know about kids that would likely irritate you if seated next to you at a restaurant or airplane. Why another daddy blog, you ask? Exactly.

I hope to offer a bit of honesty here, at the very least. Most father blogs are pretty dull affairs. BackPack Dad. Coffee Drinkin’ Dad. Stay at Home Dad. Perfect Dad. While there are some fair writers out there, the content is shit. There is a lack of honesty to most. Parenting is tough stuff, and most of us make poor choices, at least some of the times. Reading how Biff climbed Mt Everest with his two darlings and bonded over s’mores at the summit doesn’t do much for me. I am more interested in how some of you are working out the tougher issues. Money. Morality. Jealousy. Parental preference. Selfishness. Aging. Death. Hopefully we can work some of these out together. I am hoping this becomes interactive, and it’s less of a blog and more of a dialogue.

So here’s my scenario. I am in my early 40’s, live in the suburbs of Boston, married, with a 7 year old daughter A and a 6 year old son M.  To help with the kids, we have a live-in au pair from France. Let’s call her Z. I plan on keeping all names anoyomous here due to a number of reasons. It will allow me to remain much more honest, while protecting my family from you creeps.

I am going to start the blog safely, with a non-confrontational topic: religion.  We simply don’t have one in our house. We celebrate Christmas as a cultural event for the kids, but it’s all santa, egg nog and Rankin-Bass dvds. Recently, we  found out that while on a grandmother sleepover, the kids got big doses of Christian prosletyzing in the form of nighttime reading.  M came back with questions for me such as “Well, when did God create the dinosaurs?”. 6 years old and he’s already finding fault in the logic. Not the point really, as this is not a theological blog, but one on parenting.

What really pisses me off here is the presumption that it’s acceptable grandparent behavior to push religious view onto my kids. Isn’t that firmly in the parental camp? I don’t mind them sliding an extra cookie to junior on a non-dessert night. That is to be expected. Sneaking around trying to preach religion (with no mention to us parents, despite a nearly blow by blow description of the week) is a different story. It’s deceptive at the very least. A more dramatic interpretation, though, leads one to believe that Grandmother believes we are somehow doing an injustice to our children by leaving the religion at the door. You had your chance, Granny. She had a 50% conversion rate on the kids withhe  religion so really didn’t do that poorly. That’s all you get though. My kids are not your next experiments.

My wife and I were both pretty hot on this and have to readily address it with the offending grandmother. Any conflict is always tough with her, even if something minor. This one should be interesting.