A couple things that suck about parenting

1. When you try to be a good parent, and you save some of your kid's art that you especially like, and after leaving it sit on the kitchen counter for weeks you finally put it on your desk so you can hang it on the wall in your office later that day, and then your kid chooses that night to spit water all over your desk, so not only do you have to spend 10 minutes sucking water out of your keyboard, but the painting titled "a kid and her mommy holding hands and walking in the river" is completely ruined. Damn you, watercolors!

2. Listening to your kid talking to herself and realizing that her imaginary friends don't want to play with her because she's wearing the wrong kind of dress. And that's before she even finds the Cinderella book, mind you.

3. When your kid discovers the "big kid" Disney books on the high shelf and wants to hear them over and over and over again, and you have to spend an hour explaining "Why are there mean sisters who rip up Cinderella's dress? Why is Cinderella crying? Why can't she go to the ball in that dress?" Bonus parenting points if you manage to read parts of Bambi SO FAST and with so little inflection that the separation-anxiety-plagued kid doesn't understand that Bambi's mom ends up D-E-A-D as a doornail, shot by someone who looks suspiciously like her grandfather.

4. "Why did they put the chain on Dumbo's mom's leg?" "Because she got angry, and they didn't want her to hurt anyone." "She got angry? Like you do sometimes?" "(sigh) Yes, like I do sometimes, only usually I don't pick people up and shake them and incite stampedes." (pause) "Why did they put the chain on Dumbo's mom's leg?"

5. "Why is the mother being not nice, mommy?" Twenty-minute-long discussion with a 3-year-old about how people aren't always nice = why Jason owes me a mom's night out sometime very soon. And alcohol. And chocolate. And very, very nice yarn.