Tag Archives: Sons

If you have any housework that requires throwing stuff, I’m your man

A while ago, I wrote about how our older son likes to “help” me with my chores around the house. More recently, I posted about our younger son’s love of throwing things. Today, I can happily report that the little boy has adopted his brother’s penchant for helping. He has melded it beautifully with his hunger to throw stuff.

Whenever we take a load of laundry out of the dryer, we take the basket upstairs and dump it out on our bed for sorting. This is perfect for the little boy, because not only does he love to throw things and be helpful, he also loves to be on our bed. Once established on our bed, he swings into action in his desire to serve his parents.

Goals are important to this little helper, regardless of how far afield his goals stray from ours in completing the task at hand. His goal in helping us with the laundry is to throw it all on the floor as quickly as possible, and thus help us make our bed look neat and tidy again.

Winding up

A strong wind-up is important to a good throw.

Follow-through

The fundamentals of the follow-through are important too.

running start

Sometimes, a running start can help improve velocity.

checking his handiwork

There are still a couple of open spots on the floor.

Heart and soul throw

You’ve got to dig deep and pour all your heart and soul into it.

The level of industry he displays in helping us cast our clean laundry to the floor is admirable. The bed looks fresh and new in no time. That would be enough for most children, but our boy goes above and beyond. Everybody knows that pillows are an unnecessary eyesore that all parents wish removed from their beds, if only they could find someone who could complete the job cheaply and efficiently.

pillow time

Okay, laundry’s done. Now let’s dig these pillows out of here.

flood of pillows

You could drown in all these pillows – definitely unsafe.

the core of the pillow mess

Found the root of the pillow problem.

Well, while you struggle with the unsightly mound of pillows blemishing the aesthetics of your bed, my boy takes all these daunting worries out of his parents’ way. It is quite a heavy weight off of our shoulders to know that we will not need to call in a professional to do this work for us. Who says kids won’t make your life any easier?

so long, nasty pillows

Sometimes a hearty shove is as good as a toss.

Let me throw a little compassion at you

Our one-year-old is developing a couple of traits that seem like an odd pair of characteristics for a little boy to form simultaneously. He loves to throw things, which seems quite normal. What is less usual is the level of compassion he shows when someone in his family is hurt or sad.

The boy loves playing catch, minus the part where he catches anything. He has quite a limber arm and throws a ball, or any other convenient object, with a healthy velocity. He is not picky about the projectile or the target.

Meanwhile, he is always ready with a hug whenever his big brother is upset, no matter how ridiculous the cause. But big boys never cry over silly things anyway, right? Toddler Boy kisses boo-boos to make them all better and is never stingy with a pat on the back when he has run through his repertoire of hugs and kisses.

mini catcher

Only one of these children came dressed to play with the likes of my little boy. For the rest, he would have only sympathy.

At first blush, these two traits seem as though they would have little overlap in daily life. That is, unless the boy grows to become a baseball pitcher who rushes to the plate to console batters he’s struck out, or a football quarterback who passes out hand-written thank-you notes to receivers who catch his passes.

In reality, these traits are just two sides of the same coin for an indiscriminate living room hurler. Like the other day, when he beaned me, point-blank, with plastic balloon pump. I still have the red mark on my temple to attest to his marksmanship. The moment he realized he’d hurt me, he was all over me with hugs and kisses. It really made for a sweet scene, or I’m assuming it did; my vision was still a little blurry.

He appears to be right-handed, although when he gets on the playground, he throws mulch equally well with both arms. I hope he quits throwing mulch soon, because mulch scatters like birdshot and he might wing kids other than the one he’s aiming for. As an upstanding parent, I’m all for minimizing collateral damage.

everything's a missle

When we run out of balloons to blow up, we use this handy device as a projectile to keep Daddy looking sharp.

The responsible adult in me wants to discourage him from throwing things so much, but the sports-fan father in me wants him to keep his arm loose. You can’t warm up by throwing air. We’ll try to steer him toward tossing various types of balls and away from chucking random bits of nature. We’ll also encourage him to throw toward folks who are ready and willing to catch what he’s pitching. This may take some time.

As he learns to blindside fewer people with heaved objects, he will have less cause to call upon his vast compassion for the injured. I hope this won’t make that trait fade from his character. I admire his compassion and hope he keeps it always, so long as it doesn’t prevent him striking out batters with heartless precision.

Kindergarten’s first hard lesson: It’s a morning people’s world

I’m waiting for the Kindergarten grind to catch up to my son.

His preschool was only three hours in the afternoon. Kindergarten runs all day. Like his old man, he’s more inclined toward being a night owl than a morning person. We’ll see where that gets him after a few months of having to get up early every day.

We worked on adjusting his sleep schedule in the buildup to school, but there’s nothing like the real thing to make it hit home. So far, after a week of school, he still must be forced to go to bed at a reasonable hour. He gets up in the morning without too much fuss, though it’s clear he’s not happy about it. Welcome to my world, kid.

There have been no reports of him nodding off in school, which makes him a better man than I was at that age. When I was in Kindergarten, I came home at noon. That, and the modern curriculum, makes his current situation more comparable to my first grade experience.

In first grade, my day went like this: get up at 4 a.m. for a quick bowl of Cream of Wheat before going to milk cows; get to school 15-30 minutes late, smelling as little like the barn as possible; chocolate milk and a cookie at 10; fit some learning in before noon; peanut butter sandwich and random Hostess product for lunch; sleep at desk until awakened for bus ride home.

Sleeping school

Where was this school when I needed it? I could have been first in my class.

I’m not sure what my class did in the afternoons as I was rarely with them in consciousness. I don’t remember falling behind, so maybe it was just a recap of the morning’s work. For all I know, it was free play all afternoon, or maybe the teacher led them in games of Let’s Shoot Spit Wads at the Sleepy Farm Kid. I was blissfully ignorant of the goings on around me, which makes me pine for the days when I could put my head down and fall asleep at my desk. The work day would go so much smoother if I could still sleep in that position.

Desk sleeping

“Arrgh! How do they expect me to sleep at such an uncomfortable desk?” (Image: Bayard Taylor)

By the second grade, I was staying awake all day. I’m not sure how that happened. It seems impossible that I could go to bed even earlier than I did in first grade. Maybe I matured, or maybe the second grade teacher made a habit of kicking my chair in the afternoons. It could be that the specter of cursive writing made it too hard to relax.

With all the stuff they throw at little kids in school these days, I doubt it’s a good idea to take the afternoons off anymore. If Kindergarten does start to wear my son down, we still have room to adjust his bed time. That should help him get through the day, but I don’t think he’ll like the idea at night. Hopefully, he’ll be too tired to raise a stink.

If you can’t stand the heat, don’t install a molten lava floor in your kitchen

I cook most of the dinners at our house. There is something about the sight of me cooking dinner that makes our one-year-old especially needy. We make faces and giggle and play at all times of the day, but the only hour at which he consistently needs to be held by me is the one in which I am trying to cook dinner.

Given the choice of being held by me or by his mother, it is probably 70/30 in favor of Mommy, except when I am cooking. When I am cooking, he sees no other arms but mine. Only these arms can keep him from a crying fit when there is something sizzling on the stove.

Parents learn to do much with one hand. Our days are a routine of picking things up one at a time, in the order necessary to complete what would be thoughtless tasks to freewheeling, two-handed, childless types. Still, there are some things that are nearly impossible to do with a child in one arm, like hoisting a roast out of the crock pot or forming dough into a pizza shape.

My son doesn’t care what I can’t do one-handed. Cooking is daddy-toddler together time. He lets me know this by wrapping his arms around my legs as I’m trying to walk to get the butter. If I want to move freely between the fridge and the stove, I’d better pick him up.

Butterworth's demise

“Pick me up or Mrs. Butterworth gets it!”

By picking him up I’ve jumped from the frying pan onto the electric coil, because putting him down again is bound to be an ordeal. When a toddler is okay with being put down, he lets his feet down to meet the floor. When I try to put my son down so I can strain the pasta, he lifts up the landing gear like the floor is hot lava.

Touching hot lava dismays children, even when it is cool and made of linoleum. I am reminded of this every time I attempt to set a child down in it. Having to sit in hot lava while a heartless parent cuts up chicken breast is the worst fate imaginable. It makes a child cry. A lot. Much more than necessary. Especially since no crying is necessary. But it might distract Daddy enough to make him cut his finger, and that would teach him some respect for bonding time.

Cooling lava

A panoramic view of our kitchen floor after it has cooled down a bit from dinner time. (Image: Robert Bonine)

It’s not only that holding a child while cooking is inconvenient. There are things involved with cooking that are hotter than metaphorical lava. This means the boy has to be upset with me from across the room as I pull a dish out of the oven. But when safety is not an issue, I have learned to do all sorts of food prep with one hand.

If you wonder what this looks like, just imagine the Heisman trophy statue. Only, imagine a one-year-old tucked under the left arm, instead of a football. Then imagine that the outstretched right arm is holding a whisk.