1. Drive anything but a minivan. It doesn’t matter how much Honda tries to get people to respect the van, no one will ever respect the van. And you can’t feel cool in one. Trust me on this–we have one. Put yourself in this scenario–you have a big night out, the kind for which you (or your wife) bought a new dress and had your nails and hair done and booked an overnight babysitter. It’s nice out and the windows are open. You take an hour to get ready, listening to your favorite music on 10 because the kids are gone. You look hot and you feel fantastic. You’re ready to get out there and knock ‘em dead. You open the front door, take your (also looking hot) spouse’s hand and head down the front path to your minivan. Poof! The carriage just turned into a pumpkin and your glass slippers just fell off. You get into the van, sit on some goldfish, turn it on and Preschool Classics blares from the CD player. All semblance of hotness has just washed away. Now you are just middle-aged parents driving to a party in the minivan.
2. A really important thing for parents to do if they want to stay cool is to have Date Night. This is because if you don’t plan to have a date night, and budget for it, you might never go out without your kids again. For those of you who are pregnant for the first time, or just thinking about being parents, Date Night is harder than it seems. First it requires hiring a babysitter. No problem? Yeah, well, 15-year-olds charge between $8 and $10 per hour now. Bet you didn’t know that. Plus, some people find that they have major issues leaving their babies with random people. That’s what grandparents and nanny cams are for. Nanny cams are not a violation of privacy, they are smart. Plus if you casually mention to the kid that there are nanny cams all over the house, I guarantee that she’s not going to neglect your baby. So you got that part down, now there’s the fun part–going out. Believe it or not, this might not be so much fun. When we started trying this (when our daughter was 7 months old)it was actually awkward. We were scheduling to try to get in as much as we could; sitter comes at 6:30, out the door at 6:45, dinner reservations at 7:00, movie starts at 9:30, movie is 2 hours 10 minutes, be home by midnight. Thing is, before kids we never knew where we were going to eat (much less at what time) and we had never been to a movie at all-we had always just waited for the DVD. So we were having these extremely orchestrated dates that were more stressful than fun. And they were costing us between $100 and $150 depending on where we ate. After several months of this, we decided to have a “No Plans Date Night” and the sitter came and we said we’d be back before whatever time and we got on our bikes and rode off and did whatever. That’s when we started having fun again.
3. This one is from my experience as an elementary teacher. Don’t be the parent who is at school everyday. Don’t get me wrong, every school loves volunteers, and they love good parents. It’s nice to have parents come in once every week or once a month to help with filing and copying and, especially, one-on-one help for the kids who need it. It’s nice to have great relationships with parents and to have parents who are comfortable talking to you about their kid’s situation; after all, teachers are there for the kids. What isn’t cool is the parent who is in the school every single day, worried about every thing that’s going on, gossiping about the staff, going over the teacher’s head and demanding special treatment. The teachers will think that you have no life, that you are a weirdo. They will dread the prospect of having your child in their class because they don’t want you in their face all of the time. They will talk about you in the teacher’s lounge. You don’t want to be that parent.
4. Remember the people that don’t have kids. Whether they are childless by choice, are waiting awhile, are having trouble conceiving, or you don’t know what in the heck their deal is, the bottom line is that they don’t have kids. They probably don’t want to hear you talk about your kids all of the time. Their interests and intentions might not lie in child-rearing at all, in which case it would be a good idea to give an “all’s great with the kids” and move on to subjects that everyone is interested in. This is especially hard when you are in a group of, say, 3 mommies and a non-mommy; conversation just keeps going back to the kids. Not everyone is as straightforward as my sister, “Okay, STOP talking about kids, no one can talk about their kids for the rest of the night!” Think back to when you didn’t have kids, did you really want to sit around at dinner and hear about spit up and speech development? Save the all-kids-all-the-time talk for your mommy group.
