By Jon Show — When Future Man was a baby, we visited some friends with a child a year or two older.

Our newborn spent much of the night crying but was pretty calm in the morning, while her toddler was losing his mind over something trivial, like a missing sippy cup.

“It doesn’t get better,” she shrugged. “It only gets different.”

I don’t know if there’s a better way to describe parenting. You trade making bottles for spilled milk. Scattered crumbs for empty cabinets. Nightly dinners for an empty house on Friday nights.

It may only get different, but that doesn’t mean some of the change wasn’t welcome. I was happy to shed some things along the way.

The early days

It’s irrational how happy I was to ditch the two things you probably use the most in the first year or two of parenting.

A mere 17 years ago, there was no such thing as automatic bottle washers (or at least none that I was aware of) or single-serve formula packets.

What began as an exciting morning ritual devolved into a deep breath and slog into the kitchen at unpredictable hours of the morning.

Diapers followed the same trend. The second kid spent way more time in a dirty diaper than the first one, who was changed every hour on the hour for his first six months.

I have a disturbingly vivid memory of standing next to the dumpster at the Legacy Apartments in the fall of 2015 after we potty-trained the Blonde Bomber.

I lifted the changing table pad above my head and spiked it into the trash like a medieval warrior tossing bodies into a mass grave. The Diaper Genie (or whatever generic version we owned) went next.

Parent-teacher conferences

My goodness, I despised parent-teacher conferences.

The first one we went to was when Future Man was 4 years old. He wasn’t always the easiest toddler, so when his teacher sat us down and told us she wished she had six other kids just like him, we paused and asked her to make sure she was addressing the correct parents.

I said the same thing in every ensuing one of them. I told each teacher that my parenting style could best be described as “1985,” so if our kids did anything wrong, to please let me know so I could rain fury down upon them at home.

Was I going to? Probably not. But it stopped the teachers from contacting us every time one of our kids did something that would have caused zero concern in 1985. I wonder if they rarely contacted us out of concern over what they thought I’d do to our kids?

Stomach bugs

Our family went through a period in the winter of 2016 when I googled “Can a home be infected with salmonella?” because we passed the vomit bug around three times in five weeks.

There is nothing — and I mean no torture that I have experienced in my life — worse than being the last family member left unheaved.

“I don’t think I’m going to get it” is the last thought that runs through a parent’s mind 30 minutes before blowing chunks for the next 24 hours.

Lice

The only thing more anxiety-inducing than a vomiting toddler is one who starts scratching his or her head.

I don’t think the Mother of Dragons would agree, but I love telling people that our family got lice four times. People look at me as if we live in the jungle and never bathe, which might be true, but that’s not why we kept getting hit by lice. The reality is that lice love clean, fine hair, and there were no finer candidates than our towheaded children.

I, of course, skated free with my bald head, but it afflicted my poor wife a couple of times because our kids loved using her hairbrush.

What’s parenting like? It’s like getting lice multiple times from your kids when they constantly use your hairbrush despite asking them not to use it at least 100 times.

Feeding toddlers

One of the things you realize when your kids get older is that they don’t really need you for survival. You’re like an expert consultant whose advice is summarily ignored.

As teenagers, I love making them food. It’s like my last thing left, and it makes me happy to have them ask what’s for dinner and get excited when I tell them what it is.

As toddlers, however, I detested it. I wanted to love it for the same reason I love it now, but the reality is that I would make a breakfast presented on a plate to look like the face of a teddy bear, only to be told teddy bears are stupid and they wanted a bowl of oatmeal.

Yes, oatmeal. Spend 10 minutes constructing a plate of food artwork only to have your kids tell you they want to eat something that looks like a pile of dog vomit and see what it does to your self-esteem.

Bedtime

My wife was the queen of bedtime. It was an experience. There were books, songs, memories and more.

I tried. I really did. I think I did a pretty good job for each of their first five years, but after that I treated it like they were in boot camp.

GET IN THE RACK! LIGHTS OUT!

I forgot to brush my teeth.

I SAID LIGHTS OUT!

There is something so satisfying about hugging your tweens and teenagers good night from the prone position on the couch and then sending them upstairs.

I don’t even care if they sleep anymore. They could be up there wiring money from their Greenlight accounts to a prince in Nigeria, as long as I can watch “Shark Tank” in silence.

Not all bad

There are so many things I do miss.

I miss taking them to the park, going on bike rides and taking them to the pool every summer night.

I miss taking them to the movies, building stuff in the garage, taking them to festivals and so much more.

They’re teenagers now, and the only time they spend with us is either when they’re so bored they have nothing else to do, when they want us to buy them something, or when they’re grounded.

So every once in a while, when I’m missing the days gone by, I’ll send them to their rooms and ground them for no reason so they have so little to do that they’ll go to lunch with me.

Don’t worry, there’s no chance they’ll find out about the trumped-up charges. I don’t believe either of them has ever read this column.

Can they read? I’m assuming they can.

Lucky for me, they’re too old for parent-teacher conferences.

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Jon Show lives in Robbins Park with his wife, who he calls “The Mother of Dragons.” Their 17-year-old son is “Future Man” and their 13-year-old daughter is “The Blonde Bomber.” Their dog is actually named Lightning.