I feel like I'm really pushing the fourth and fifth H's in HHHHHHH a lot lately, but the blog police haven't shut me down yet. This post's topic: listening to baseball games on the radio. Did you know that every commercial break on a baseball broadcast is 2 minutes long? If your local broadcasts are like ours and you listen to as much baseball as we do during the season, a nine-inning game can have 17-plus inning breaks (depending on who's winning in the ninth). That means hearing the same commercials over and over again.
In our house, we set a timer to 2 minutes and turn off the radio when the half-inning ends. It helps that our main kitchen timer can time four different things at once. So we can leave one of those four on 2 minutes and use it when the Pirates broadcast goes into yet another Bradenton tourism commercial. When on a roadtrip, I note the odometer at the beginning of the commercial break. When I've gone 2 miles (give or take), i turn the radio back on. Let's go Bucs!
Stuff like this disgusts me. Lots of people shared it from Huffington Post. It seems to come from something called the Hi! Cardstore.
Regardless, moms are the only kind of parents, right?Are we supposed to say "Aw, I miss and appreciate my mom."? Rather than saying "Wow, I just watched a video whose bedrock position was completely sexist."? My reaction fell on the latter side.
The name of this blog is a political statement about fatherhood. Regardless of the progress toward gender equality that has occurred over the last several decades, one stereotype persists and may be getting worse: moms are good parents and dads are incompetent boobs who sometimes babysit. Poppycock, I say. Or an excuse for dads who would like to be viewed as numskulls so that they don't have to parent their kids. Dads are parents too, and I know some who are very good at it.
I'm neither a stay-at-home dad nor do I work full time. I work part time, and I'm the primary parent for the foreseeable future. The primary competent parent, I hope it is not presumptuous to say.