This week’s new Dustinland comic is about something that actually does happen to me on occasion. I’ll wake up to a beam of light shining through the one-inch gap that the window shade doesn’t cover, only to see that somehow there is light blasting right into my eye from an ultra bright street light a block away. Seems intentional if you ask me.
Am I alone here?
Posted in home owernship
Tagged home, home ownership, insomnia, sleep, trouble sleeping
This week’s new Dustinland comic is all about going on vacation with your kids and having to sleep in the same room with them the entire time. The strip pretty much says all I have to say on the matter, but the extra background is that I just got back from vacationing in Maine. So that’s why there hasn’t been a new strip in two weeks.
Maine is super awesome, by the way. Portland is a great foodie town, and the rest of Maine is an outdoorsy paradise. Definitely the closest an east-coaster can get to the kind of mega nature grandeur you mostly only see out west. Also: Beer and lobster.
Posted in parenthood
Tagged childhood, children, kids, maine, marriage, parenthood, parenting, parents, portland, raising children, raising kids, sleep, vacation
This week’s new Dustinland comic is about those times when your kid wakes you up screaming in the middle of the night. You always run to the rescue, but rescue isn’t always what’s needed…
I’ll give it to my kiddo in this case. He was getting over the flu.
Posted in parenthood
Tagged children, kids, nightmare, parenthood, parenting, parents, raising children, raising kids, six year old, sleep
Yeah… I mean, as this week’s Dustinland comic shows, it’s hard to sleep sometimes. Damn brain. Shut up! Shut up, brain! Perhaps some of this is due to my health habits of not working out ever, not meditating, etc… I should do some of that stuff. Also beer, coffee… all the things that make life fun… I dunno. I actually do everything in moderation but sometimes it feels like even that is too much.
Blech. I blame Trump.
Tagged anxiety, coffee, depressed, depressing, depression, sleep, stress, tired, trump
I could probably make every single comic about my kid, but I try to switch it up. But yes, here is my third Dustinland comic of the year, and it’s inspired by my son’s real “nightmare.” I mean, I guess it could be scary if it was “directed” right, if you will. Maybe scary like the part of the Shining where the guy is in the bear costume and you’re just like “what?” But man, when you wake up at 3:00 AM and run into the kid’s room, you expect something way worse that that.
Also, it’s a new year. Perfect time to buy my book, Thanks For The Meh-mories: 20 Years of Dustinland Comics! Now on Amazon, featuring such comics as The Theory of Hipster Relativity, Dorm of The Deaf, and More Choo-Choo! Buy it today, because you love me!
Posted in parenthood
Tagged bedtime, children, dad, dad life, dadhood, dads, dream, dreams, father, fatherhood, fathers, five year old, kids, kindergartener, nightmare, nightmares, parenthood, parenting, parents, raising kids, sleep, toddlers
This week’s Dustinland comic is basically my version of Go the F**k to Sleep. Not that he actually came up with the idea of being frustrated about bedtime. I’m sure there’s a caveman drawing of an angry caveman storming out of a cave while his cavebaby whines about how he needs more wooly mammoth milk. But yeah, it’s frustrating to a silly degree, although you start to roll with it after a while.
Good times.
By the way I apparently have some sort of close 6 degrees of separation family connection to the Go the F**k to Sleep guy. So in case he’s reading this, great job.
At first I had titled this week’s Dustinland comic “Bedtime Routine,” but then I swapped the order. Why? Because any parent knows that this isn’t just the bedtime routine of one particular child. It’s routine bedtime for parents around the world. Well, I mean, I don’t know if it goes down this way in the slums of India, but lets just say I can only assume it happens in households as “privileged” as mine. Hey, kids don’t like sleeping. They like playing. So any way they can extend awake time, they’ll do it. It’s pretty amazing the tactics they’ll come up with. Ad you really do notice it most when you have a babysitter over and you start explaining the whole routine and you realize how ridiculous it all is.
By the way, I just finished doing this with mine. We start the bedtime process around 8:00 and I swear, by the time it’s over, it’s 8:45. Amazing.
After this week’s comic, I think I’ve sort of accepted it: I like drawing dad comics. I can’t help it. I draw from my life—literally. And these days my life is being a dad. That and work, pretty much, and I can’t draw comics about that. Trust me, I would LOVE to in many ways, but anything worth saying can’t be said until I retire. I used to write all about sex and dating and bars and partying and all that fun stuff, but at this point, when I go down that route I just sound like some old fuddy duddy lecturing people. So yes, expect a lot more dad comics in the future. Not ONLY dad comics, but a greater percentage, as I come to realize that it makes me happy to draw them.
As for this week’s comic, I think it excellently illustrates the frustration brought on by a two-year-old’s non-logic. That’s really when I start to lose it. The yes-nos. And this comic, it’s pretty much exactly what happened, just with less crying (him, not me). But you know, when they’re not making you want to smush your own face in, they are really cute and wonderful. Hell, even when they’re being dicks they’re still pretty great. That’s how they win. Every. Time.
This week’s Dustinland comic is about snoring. Couples snoring. Now, my wife is not a big snorer, and neither am I. Basically, we only snore when one of us is sick—or pregnant. Fortunately, neither of those things happen very often. Now, snoring sucks. It makes one person sleep on the couch and the other person feel guilty. Right now, it’s not a big deal in my life, since it’s such a rare occurrence. But man, look at older folks… seems like the older you get, the more you snore, and the more you come to sleep in different rooms. Seems like at that point, people just accept it. I think that’s a big part of getting older. Just accepting things. I notice it with fatherhood. “Meh. Kid is sick. Gotta cancel our three-day weekend vacation we already paid for. What can you do.” That sort of thing. Fun times.
Zzzzzzzz….
This week’s strip is what you get when you mix pain killers with and comics. Really, I did have this huge list of ideas of comic ideas, but in my drug-induced malaise, I could not bring myself to tackle any of them. All these things that once seemed so promising, in my dulled state, it was all just so… blah.
I hear that some of the more powerful prescription meds are really addicting. I guess I can see that. Whatever I took was definitely not. It was really like taking Ambien Lite. Or Benadryl. Basically I was just extra tired. WOOOOO PARTY. I guess it did make my back hurt less, so mission accomplished.
Stay tuned next week for more comics on drugs!
I kid.
Dustinland - The Blog 