The last Best of Tom for October is a March 2024 episode that's explicit, even for us. This is the full patron cut, so it ends with the after-show stories patrons got. It's a repeat for patrons, and every download helps keep Tom's share of the show coming while he's out.

A Maurice Sendak quote about the scary things kids keep from grown-ups starts a talk about what we hid from our parents and what our kids might be hiding from us. Tom never told his dad he snuck out, or about the babysitters: one who read him and his brother Penthouse Letters, one who broke into Dad's safe and found something she shouldn't have, and one who taught them to shoplift. Plus how much truth to tell kids, and why some kids just open up more than others. In the patron-only ending, Thomas has a Zelda problem and Tom takes Finn to MagicCon.

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Best of Tom continues with Tom, the squarest man in podcasting, on kids and drugs. This is the full patron cut, so it ends with the Breckenridge edibles story we still bring up, never before on the public feed.

Original description -

A listener asks how to talk to kids about drugs and alcohol, and the dads have to admit how little they know. Eli eats leftover shroom chocolate before bedtime, Tom clears his whole calendar for a shroom trip that never kicks in and finds out his friends have been getting high around him for years without telling him, and a boss gets twenty-something Tom drunk on Rumple Minze. Then, for the first time outside Patreon, the Breckenridge edibles disaster: three gummies, a hot tub at twenty below, a phone lost in a fifteen-foot snowbank, and a pizza order that ends in tears.

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Best of Tom continues with the episode the snapping turtle comes from. We've called that story back nearly thirty times since, and public listeners have never heard it: it was told after the show, for patrons only. This is the full patron cut, so here it is. It's a repeat for patrons, and every download helps keep Tom's share of the show coming while he's out.

Family vacations, then and now. Tom's dad takes the boys canoeing in the Boundary Waters, Thomas's family only ever drives to a Dodgers game, and Eli's family spends Disney stock money on Ripley's Believe It or Not. Tom on the blended-family "Thunderdome" trip to St. Louis (he came home and bought a ring), and why none of us can switch off on vacation. Then 19 minutes the public feed never got: Tom's trip to Florida to visit his mom, with house rules about wild dogs and alligators, the snapping turtle, and the neighbor with the spear gun.

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For comments, email thedads@dearolddads.com

For extended episodes, bonus content, and most importantly, for an AD FREE SHOW, make sure to pledge on Patreon!