Category Archives: Parenting Issues (i.e. Mistakes)

I can tell you are a Superstar from your healthy snacks

This is a big week in our son’s life. He is Superstar of the Week at his preschool. This is a major honor that can only be achieved through hard work, diligence, and having your name drawn out of a hat. All of the children have a turn, but this does not diminish the honor. When it’s your week, you are the only one who is Superstar of the Week.

The boy’s parents are not Superstars when it comes to thoroughly reading the information sheets he brings home from school. Instead, we rely upon him to keep us informed. This is ironic, as he seems to believe that his parents do more than skim the paperwork for the gist of it. He doesn’t like to waste our time supplying redundant details.

This resulted in a Sunday night trip to the store for materials, when we finally figured out that Superstars usually make a poster of family pictures to display during their week. The evening was a frantic blur of scissors and glue. Daddy ran security to keep the baby away from the project, on the construction of which, he so badly wanted to help.

I was the at-home parent on Monday of Superstar Week. When my son got up in the morning he asked if he needed a bath. Since his mother hadn’t left orders to give him a bath, I told him he didn’t need to take one.

“Yes, I do,”  he replied. I froze in place. Before I could demand of this alien imposter what he had done with my real son, he explained. “I can’t be dirty if I’m gonna be the Superstar.” So, Superstars take baths voluntarily? This is the most important thing to know about the Superstar of the Week. I went back and checked; it wasn’t mentioned in the handout.

The Superstar is privileged to bring to school a healthy snack to share on Friday. We will have to ask for some advice on this matter. When I was a kid, healthy and snack never appeared in the same sentence. If anybody had ever dreamt of such a combination, it would only have been to remind the provider to steer clear of the lead chips this time.

During my childhood, we ate wholesome snacks. These were foods that gave us the energy and the blood pressure to stand up for the American Way. Ho-Hos and whole milk defeated communism. Could carrot strips and V-8 juice have accomplished that?

Sugar and salt, the cornerstones of my youthful nutrition pyramid, seem to be out of favor today. Maybe my wife knows of a magical food item that fits into that narrow intersection of healthy and delicious to preschool children. If not, we’ll do what we usually do: bring it up in casual conversation with some up-to-date preschool parents and steal their ideas without letting them know how clueless we are.

Being Superstar of the Week brings glory, but also grave responsibility. You have to be clean, and you have to nudge your parents into the modern age. It’s not all fun and games, you know.

walking to school

Heading off to the first day of school in the fall. Who would have guessed that the experience would turn him into a Superstar?

 

 

If I can’t find your kindergarten, you’ll have to be homeschooled

We intend to send our son to kindergarten in the fall. Many parents are delaying kindergarten an extra year for their kids. That’s their choice and I respect it, but the way I figure it, the sooner he goes to school, the sooner he graduates, and the sooner he can begin working and saving money for that posh retirement home his parents will so richly deserve in their golden years. Even one year of lost wages could tarnish the first-class accommodations I’m owed.

I feel like, out of all the people holding clipboards who knock on our door at dinner time, one of them should be the person who signs up your kid for kindergarten and tells you where to leave him on that fateful morning in September. So far, none of them have been that person, and I begin to fear that such a helpful solicitor does not exist. We may have to leave the house to get the boy enrolled in school, and to find out where that school is.

In my youth, there was only one elementary school in town, if you happened to live in one of the towns that was on the whole education bandwagon. As long as your parents got you to the door of that school during daylight hours, with some kind of identification tag pinned to you, you were officially enrolled. There weren’t so many forms with nosey questions about residency and immunizations. The teachers were experienced at picking out the potentially rabid, and these were set outside the classroom door to become the school nurse’s problem. Life went on without a fuss, except for the minor difficultly of having to often find a new school nurse.

show and tell

Checking the pack of new pupils for signs of hydrophobia and ticks. (Image: Frances Benjamin Johnston)

There are several elementary schools in our district. I’m pretty sure our boy will go to the nearest one, rather than the one whose data entry person picks our packet out of the stack. I found a map and our house is in the area outlined in blue marker, so I think that means our son will attend the blue area school.

I went to our district’s web site and opened up the enrollment form. I scrolled all the way down through the many pages of forms until I hit the Acceptable Use Policy. Somehow, I doubt that my son will be running an online dating site from the PC in his kindergarten classroom. He’ll bring his own laptop for that.

I finally had to navigate over to espn.com and take some deep breaths to stop the hyperventilating. Why do they need to know more about my kid than I do? Now I’ve got research to do. Maybe I’ll Google him. I wonder if he’s got a Wikipedia page.

It all seems kind of daunting and confusing right now, but I expect we (my wife) will figure it out by autumn. If not, the boy will be another kid whose advent into kindergarten will be pushed back a year. That wouldn’t be so bad except for the dent it will put into my retirement plans.

I don’t like having to fire you, Daddy, but you leave me no choice

We scarcely recognize the number of threats we use to coerce our children into doing what we want them to do. If they talk back, we threaten them with Time Out. If they don’t eat all their dinner, we threaten to withhold dessert. When things get really serious, we threaten to leave them with the babysitter who wears too much I’m-an-icky-old-lady perfume. Tough love, right?

In our house, we would use fewer threats if our preschooler were more reasonable. Sometimes he is reasonable, and we come to a mutually agreeable resolution to a conflict. Other times, he wants to play like North Korea, and we have to start rolling out the ultimatums.

It made us realize the number of threats we employ with our child when he started loading threats into his own ammunition box of manipulative strategies. Then we got to hear what we sound like to him.

I hope our threats don’t sound quite as twisted as his do, but I guess we can never really know that. Maybe our threats fall into the same eyebrow-raising categories as his do:

The Logical, yet ineffectual threat:

“If you don’t take me to the toy store, you can’t get a toy.”

The Completely unrelated cause and effect threat:

“If you don’t give me some potato chips, Santa’s not gonna bring you anything for Christmas.”

The If I can’t touch you, I’ll get to you through your loved ones threat:

“If you don’t put on cartoons, I’m gonna throw this Thomas train at the cat.”

His biggest problem with issuing threats is that all of his are idle ones (except for me not getting a toy). He doesn’t want to hurt the cat; he loves the cat, and Santa always brings me something nice. A lot of grown-ups don’t understand the elements of a threat, so it’s no insult to him to say that he’s still working it out. Coercion is a difficult subject to master.

Vader in toy department

“If you don’t buy me a toy, I will command the Death Star to obliterate your puny planet.”

He hasn’t learned all his threats from his parents, though. One of his favorite threats comes from a cartoon. It’s the you’re fired threat. It goes like this: “Daddy, if you put any carrots on my plate, you’re fired!” This threat is a running joke between us. He uses it to tell me how he feels about different things, like carrots. I fire him sometimes too.

One day, his mother was calling from the next room for him to go clean up a mess he had left there. He went, but before he did, he rolled his eyes and casually told me, “She’s fired.”

boy with first fish caught

“I don’t care if it’s the first fish I ever caught; if you don’t get that slimy thing away from my face, you’re fired!”

I like the you’re fired threat. It gives him a light-hearted way to express his feelings about various situations. It lets him sound me out to see how far he can press an issue with me. Besides, I know he could never follow through on it. You have to be the boss to fire somebody, and he’s not the boss of Daddy. I happen to know that Mommy is the boss.

You sold your right to rest, old man

My eldest son recently turned four. He hasn’t taken a daytime nap in two years. A lot of parents of two-year-olds seem to be terrified at the notion of their children ceasing to nap in the afternoons. I’ve always been fine with my son not taking naps. What’s bothered me is all the naps I’ve missed.

I don’t get to take many naps these days, which is troubling, because I’m getting old and I need my rest. I am my son’s First Runner Up Playmate. This means that I am on call whenever the Grand Champion Playmate is not available. The Grand Champion Playmate is any child, aged 3-10 years, who happens to be at our house for any reason. Since children, aged 3-10 years, don’t cycle through our house as often as they might, I am regularly called up to active duty.

Playing with trains on floor

He always gets a supercool, long train while I’m stuck with the little nothing engine. Plus, he can fit in between the tracks, so he doesn’t have to crawl all around the room. No fair!

When I come home from work, the first order of business is to help the boy build a train track. There is already a train track in the middle of the living room floor, but the boy has at least four different sets of tracks, and those present are yesterday’s tracks – outdated and out of favor in these modern times. They must be replaced by a different set of tracks to meet the needs of present-day society.

Roughhousing while play trains

He can sense when I am especially weak and vulnerable. This inspires him to introduce an element of horseplay (guess who gets to be the horse) into playing trains, making it extra fun.

I should point out that I adore my boys, and I love spending time with them. It is only when I am very tired that I become a stick-in-the-mud at playtime. When you are all tuckered out, the only one you want to spend any time with is Mr. Sandman. Mr. Sandman doesn’t like playing trains.

Playing in a tent

Notice that the big set of feet seem dead to the world while the little set of feet are still active. This is the ideal way to play in tents; everybody gets what they want out of it.

Mr. Sandman does play some games, though. One that he can be persuaded to play for a few moments at a time involves tents. Kids love to play in tents, and if you can get a small enough tent, you can steal 40 winks in the middle of the game. If the only way you can get into the tent is by lying down, you’ve got a good tent. The trick is to make sure the game involves staying in the tent, as opposed to getting into and out of it. Inventing games that include occasional snoring helps too.

Parenthood means lost sleep. It’s a fact of life. My advice to those who are soon to become parents is to take a big, long nap right now. Right now!