Hilarious Stay-at-Home Dad’s Post-It Note Chronicles Show What Parenting Is Really Like
People tell you all about parenting. They’ll tell you how messy it is, how busy it is, how stressful and rewarding it is. But it isn’t until you acquire a small human being of your own that you learn that parenting is really, really weird. Kids are sneaky and snarky and wildly illogical, and it makes no sense at all that if they get too tired it becomes impossible to get them to go to sleep, because all they do is scream and scream, even though everyone knows damn well that sleeping would fix the problem. But noooooo, the kid insists that screaming is the only answer. That’s why everybody is absolutely loving the Post-It chronicles of Stay-at-Home Dad Chris Illuminati, which are basically like VH-1’s old Pop-Up Video series, but for real life.
Illuminati started his Post-It notes as a joke shortly after the birth of his first kid. He’d already decided to become a stay-at-home dad for the same reason many parents do: Daycare is expensive, and it makes more financial sense for him to stay home with the kid rather than to go to work all day and then hand his entire paycheck and then some over to the daycare. One day, early on in his son’s life, his wife left him with an enormous list of all the things he had to do while she was out of the house, and he jokingly said he’d better write it down, then proceeded to cover his bulletin board in notes about every single thing he was supposed to do, even the ridiculously obvious stuff.
He started annotating his daily life with funny observations via Post It notes, and sharing the photos on Tumblr. People loved it.
Aw, poor kid. But also he’s totally right. Being a parent is just like monitoring tiny little frat people.
I genuinely have to remind myself not to say “Fucking chill, bro,” to a screaming toddler just about every day. What else can you do when a kid is shrieking and wailing because she wants to wear a diaper with Big Bird and Elmo on it, but not the diaper with Big Bird, Elmo, and Grover on it. You can only say, “Sweetie, this is the only kind we have right now” so many times before the real you in the back of your head is like, “Why won’t this bro just fucking chill?”
As a parent, one is always conflicted on the subject of fire alarms. We should have them everywhere, and surgically attach them to our children for optimal safety. But also we want to pull the batteries out so they stop making that goddamn noise every time we cook bacon.
Illuminati is completely hilarious, and the rest of his notes are all on his blog and his Instagram page.
