A dad’s Instagram callout is showing just how much kids wear out their parents.
Mike Julianelle of Dad and Buried, from New York, US, has an Instagram account called ‘Got Toddlered’, where he posts memes and photos of “things children have ruined.”
It seems kids have - not surprisingly - affected his appearance. On 12 October, Julianelle posted a side-by-side photo collage of his face before and after having children.
Admittedly, there’s a certain pale, sleep-deprived quality that may look familiar to parents.
Julianelle, who has a seven-year-old and an almost two-year-old, told HuffPost that after he posted the photo, one of his followers messaged him to say she loved it and suggested he ask for submissions from other parents.
“I’ve gotten a lot more of these than I did of the typical ‘my toddler destroyed something’ memes I was previously receiving! Probably because taking a photo of something your kids destroyed is less of a priority than cleaning it up,” the dad explained.
“And it’s much easier to clean a mess than it is to fix your own face!”
Indeed, Julianelle has posted at least a dozen “before and after children” photos. “I think they show the toll kids take on parents,” he said.
“Obviously, it’s meant to be lighthearted, and no one is seriously blaming their children for the state of their faces or lives, except for me when I seriously blame my kids for the state of my face and my life, which is basically all I do on my blog and Facebook page and Twitter,” he joked.
Julianelle told HuffPost he hopes these photos make other parents laugh and realize they aren’t alone in sometimes feeling “overwhelmed by this parenting thing.”
“My blog and everything else have always been about the fact that it’s okay to be honest about the pitfalls of parenthood,” said the dad.
“There’s no shame in admitting that for all the peaks, there are plenty of pits. Kids are the worst best thing that’s ever happened to us and if we don’t laugh about the havoc they wreak we’d have to cry instead and I’m not a crier.”
[H/T The Stir.]
This story was originally published on the US version of HuffPost.