Same. Mine has ADHD… Really the most clear-cut case of hyperactivity you’ve ever seen. Even with my wife at home and my mom in town most of July-August, it was more stressful than term time.

It does get easier after a few months. My first 6 months still haunt me. I can’t describe the calm I feel when my kid eats, toilets, and dresses independently. Sometimes without even fighting about it.

He was three at the time, it was a vocab issue. Still funny years later.

I do benefit from reading these accounts. Helps ground me. My kid sometimes makes me feel like he’s completely unglued, an assiduous non-participant in consensus reality. “Mayonnaise is spicy,” or he will calmly inform me that “my favourite green thing is nobody because nobody is green”. Doesn’t remember anything about anything, totally time blind, filled with chaotic impulses that leave him perennially scraped and bruised.

And yet on the sliding scale of kids in general, he’s basically lucid.

There was a shop like this at the last town I lived in. I’d always leave with an absurd volume of things for the amount of money I spent.

Part of being a kid is having preternatural access to buttons your parents didn’t even know they had. It took me several years to come to terms with that.

I wasn’t ready honestly. I just wish I was twice as patient and four times as smart. Or at least vice versa.

This was so unfunny that I’m going to actively be less sarcastic to my kid from now on

My nephew was born huge and he’s healthy. Kind of a monster, but I blame the excessive telly for that