I keep on waiting for CJ’s daycare teacher to tell us how CJ will never make it past middle school, that she’s beating up the other kids for lunch money, and that she spends naptime huddled in the corner, muttering to herself about the injustices of preschool and nursing a double Scotch neat.
For Halloween this year, CJ decided she wanted to be a cat. “Great!” I said to her, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, which, for Halloween, isn’t all that much. Since she’s been into singing and dancing of late, I added, “Did you know that there’s a musical show about cats?”
Her eyes widened and we went to the computer, where we spent an hour going through YouTube videos with as much syrupy Andrew Lloyd Webber as I could take. Then I went to the library and got the video.
Since then, virtually every evening ends with her choice of three songs from the musical. In the picture below she mimics some of the singers in The Old Gumbie Cat song.
Perhaps more oddly, however, is what has become her favorite song. Initially, it had been Rum Tum Tugger, which in the T.S. Eliot poem was simply a cat with contrarian tendencies, but in the musical morphed into a hyper-sexualized tom cat. Now, however, it’s swung entirely the other way, to the maudlin hit “Memory”, which, oddly, is the only song in the musical that isn’t from Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
Hearing an almost-five-year-old singing wistfully of glory days gone by seems odd, but then a glance at our medicine cabinet and perhaps it’s not surprising at all. For folks not intimately familiar with 1970s standards, Memory contains lyrics like this:
Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again
Yes, we’re deep into her education on middlebrow culture.
Last week, CJ and I watched Star Wars, one of my favorite movies from my childhood, even though at the time I was somewhat older than CJ is now.
She loved it. When Princess Leia came on screen and I told CJ that she was a “princess”, CJ’s eyes lit up. And when Princess Leia stared down Darth Vader, and then smirked, CJ was smitten, and I knew I had made the right movie choice that night.
A few days later, on Thanksgiving Day, CJ got dressed in one of her prettier dresses in preparation for having a bunch of guests over for dinner. She was really excited, and she asked Becky to put her hair up….in buns on the side, just like Princess Leia. Becky did the best she could with the resources available to her (see the picture above).
I was extremely pleased that CJ seized on Princess Leia as a role model. In Star Wars, Leia exhibits courage, leadership and tenacity, not necessarily the traits most frequently portrayed by a princess in fiction.
However, while I’m anxious to show her The Empire Strikes Back (which I believe to be the best of the Star Wars saga), I may be slower to introduce her to Return of the Jedi, for obvious reasons.
Almost from their child’s birth, parents study their children to see which parts come from the mom, which come from the dad, and which characteristics come from seemingly no where to offer surprises both pleasant and unwelcomed. At least early on, it’s one of the joys of parenthood.
Much less enjoyable, at least in my case, however, is turning that lens the other direction. How does the parenting I’m practicing reflect what I received? What traits have I inherited, and how can I reinforce the strengths and compensate for the weaknesses?
Like a military re-fighting the last war, my parents cast a shadow over me as I think, “What would my dad do and how should I do it?”
I haven’t done a lot of analysis of my parents, and while I think most of my personality comes from my father rather than my mother, I can’t be sure. And while I love my parents, of course, I would like to avoid one particular minefield that has plagued my relationship with my father. And his relationship with his father before.
It’s in the back of my mind whenever I have to confront CJ about something, whenever she disobeys us or behaves insolently (which is virtually every hour of every day). It haunts me. Will I be able to avoid the fate that my father could not, even as he suffered the same from his father?
And she’s only 4.
I want CJ to benefit from my experience, to avoid my failures and to improve on my successes and achieve successes of her own.
But my control over that is both limited and, in some cases, unwanted. I have more control over and responsibility for the lessons I carry forward from my experience as my parents’ child. And that frightens me more.
In the last two weeks, CJ twice biked to daycare, with me jogging next to her. For a four-and-a-half-year-old, the 3.5-mile journey is not a trivial task, and each time I’ve praised her for the effort, and pointed out to her how other joggers and cyclists have also been impressed with her efforts.
We had planned to make the trip a third time the other morning, but when I woke her, she was reticent.
“I don’t want to bike to Roadrunners,” she said.
“Why not?” I said, in my most soothing and understanding tone, which, admittedly, isn’t that soothing.
“It’s too much hard work,” she said.
That just stunned me, and I left.
In the car on the way to daycare, I asked her again why she didn’t want to ride her bike to daycare. “It’s too much hard work,” she repeated.
I imagine that a lot of parenting is modeling behaviour that you would like to see emulated. Frankly, I’m just not that good of a person. I can and have tried, but I give up.
It’s kind of like when you’re dating. For a while, you’re on your best behaviour, because you like them and you want them to like you. But, eventually, you can’t keep up the act, and they see the “real” you.
The research says that in raising kids, you really can’t change much. You are the parent that you’re going to be, and you’ll raise the child that you’re going to raise. Don’t sweat it, because it’s not worth it. The kids are who they are, and, in the long run, you’re not going to change much, so sit back and enjoy the ride.
It’s so fatalistic. I feel like I’ve been bothering too much and for too long, and I need to just stop. I’m like the spouse who, after so many years of marriage, is ready to just let himself go and spend the rest of his years in sweat pants.
I’m just so tired of trying to be better.
And the weird thing is, even trying as much as I have, I don’t think I’ve been half the parent Becky is.
And, of course, I realize that I’ll still try. I may take a rest today, but I’ll be back at it tomorrow. Because that’s the parent that I am, and what I’m modeling is not being a great parent, but being a parent who tries. And that’s going to have to be enough.
I am not a birthday person, at least not when it comes to my birthday. It seems little more than marking time, a celebration that I haven’t died yet. While there might be something to that, it doesn’t seem like there’s enough there to actually throw a celebration.
I concede that others hold opposing and equally valid opinions on the subject matter.
The other night, Becky and I were lying in bed when I turned to her and said, “In just a few days, we’ll be 25% of the way home.”
Pause.
“What are you talking about?” she said.
“August 12th. We’ll be a quarter of the way done!”
“You mean she’ll be four and a half?”
“Yes! Isn’t that great?”
“You realize that when she turns 18, she’ll still be a senior in high school, right? Our circle of friends would likely really frown on us kicking her out of the house at that point.”
Well, of course, I didn’t mean that we would kick her out of the house on her emancipation day. I was just noting the passage of time. Obviously, child-rearing is a marathon with no finish line. For better or worse, there are also no grades and no scores. It’s not a game where you ever really know if you’re winning or not, and even if you were winning, well, just wait a while.
Perhaps I was noting this date because it’s one of the few tangible markers out there and I’m willing to grasp at most anything.
In an example of making explicit the implicit, during our first full day of our vacation to Norway, we bought a plastic tiara for CJ from the museum gift shop at the Akershus Castle in Oslo. She’s worn it every day since.
Now, of course, when I say “we” bought her the tiara, I mean “we” being the parent that isn’t “me.” I wasn’t pleased with the purchase. Can there be a more expensive place to buy a chunk of China-made plastic than a museum gift shop in Norway? Does she really need our encouragement to be more princess-like?
I know, I know. It’s a losing cause, and it’s not one worth fighting. Move along, move along.
The 1,000-foot climb to the top of the mountain on the island of Runde in Norway features a steep, muddy and poorly-marked trail, with cold winds and a steady drizzle being the norm.
And CJ killed it.
Sure, there were some early, minor protestations as she began, but for the most part, she did a fair imitation of a good soldier. Had I understood at the outset the difficulty of the climb ahead of us, I probably would have tried to come up with an alternate activity for CJ. But my ignorance served us well. She was spurred on by finding creatures great (sheep and skua) and small (caterpillars, slugs) and by the encouragement of her mother.
The past year and a half has been full of CJ surprising us with what she is capable of. She could ice skate before turning 3, write her letters and numbers shortly afterwards. Now, at age 4, she can swim the length of a pool and ride a bike without training wheels, and her Chinese improves day-by-day. It tells me that she is generally capable of much more than what we expect of and ask from her, and I feel culpable for not providing the context for her to reach her potential. Then again, where is the line between demanding too much and not enough? Becky and I, of course, generally disagree on the location of that line and how to find it.
My job is to introduce her to the tools of an independent adult as early as possible, since the longer she has to experiment with those tools under the security of our roof, the better off she’ll be when she actually does strike it out on her own. Part of that toolset is to constantly challenge herself and to not be afraid of failure. And you can’t overcome fear of failure without having failed a few times, and better to fail early and learn how to deal with it, than to fail later without that understanding.
Don’t pick her up when she falls, teach her how to get up on her own. She’s not a baby any more.
At least, I don’t *think* she is. She’s growing, and it’s difficult for a parent to calibrate from one day to the next their reaction to their children’s falls to accommodate the growth of the child. Yesterday, when she fell off her bike, she needed to be picked up. But does she need it today?
I don’t do celebrations well. I handle rituals with equal clumsiness. Last month, I had to witness, for the second time, a celebratory ritual that I find devoid of meaning, and it’s almost certain that I will have to go again, for the third time, next year.
The pre-school graduation ceremony. A contrivance meant to celebrate some accomplishment? A ritual meant to mark a passage of some sort? Does anyone actually fail to leave pre-school? The past two years, CJ has participated in her daycare’s pre-school graduation ceremony, as the younger daycare children fete the “graduating” class.
CJ is an only child in a two-parent, upper-middle income, high SES family. She will, almost by definition, be doted over, her every passage marked. Already, more pictures have been taken of her than of Becky and I combined over our entire lifetimes. Pre-school graduation is an exercise akin to those sports leagues where every child, even the lowliest bench-warmer, gets an award.
As with a lot of things, Becky and I disagree on this.
I feel that our circumstances mean that CJ will be over-indulged and coddled. We don’t need to go out of our way to participate in fabricated events to celebrate her “achievement.” She already gets showered with praise and attention every day. She’s not the seventh child of nine that gets lost in a crowd of siblings. It’s the same reason I don’t buy her pink things and nurture an interest in princesses and ballerinas…she’s already predisposed to do that, I don’t need to encourage it.
As attentive, engaged parents of an only child, our challenge is not making sure that she’s sufficiently praised and honored…quite the opposite.
First, Lucia, the kid down the block who is a few months older than CJ, had learned how to ride her bike without training wheels back in March, while it was still cold out and ice and snow still piled up three feet from the curb.
Then, Zora, the daughter of a friend of hours born five days after CJ, learned how to ride a couple of weeks ago, and then a classmate from daycare.
And that gave us the courage to have her try it out this weekend. A few minutes with Becky, and, voila, CJ was off and pedaling. She still has a hard time starting up, but it’s only been two days.
This is much earlier than I thought CJ would be able to pedal a bike on her own, sans training wheels. And it made me wonder about all the other things that she might be capable of, if we only gave her some gentle encouragement and training. Yes, Tiger Woods was golfing by age two and Mozart was composing from age 5, but I’m not talking about exceptionalism. I’m just talking about basic achievements that she might reasonably be able to reach had we simply exposed her to those activities. Skiing is one example that a friend of mine brings up fairly regularly.
Of course, if she didn’t learn how to ride a bike at 4, she would have at 5 or 6 or 7, just like reading and math. When is later too late? Are there disadvantages to learning too early? We generally believe that “it’s never too early to try”, but if I don’t expose it to her early, am I failing to be the best parent I can be?
Yes, I’m going down the helicopter parent spiral. Oy. Gotta pull out of that.
I know I can only be the best parent I can be, but I can’t fully express how disappointing that sentiment is.
Two other elements of this are digging at me. First, why did we decide to try to teach CJ to ride without training wheels? Because her friends are doing it. When it comes to using her peers as points of comparison, where’s the line between constructive and destructive? Lord knows, I don’t want her comparing my performance as a parent to that of my peers.
Second, if she can surpass my expectations as a four-year-old on something like this, why can’t she meet my expectations on other things?
While I was on a recent trip away from home, CJ decided she wanted to get a gift for me for when I returned.
“I want to buy daddy a gift,” is what she told Becky.
“Buy”? Becky tried to tell her that I would much more appreciate a gift that she made for me. But CJ insisted. “I want to *buy* him a gift.”
Now, I appreciate a new grilling spatula from Target as much as the next guy, depending on who the next guy is, but clearly we’ve sent her a message, and I’m not sure I like it.
We’ve said to her, when you give a gift, a real gift is something that you buy, not make. Birthday gifts, holiday gifts…they’re purchased.
Obviously, we haven’t done much to express the value of the personal touch of hand-made gifts. And, frankly, who does? But, of course, I want her to understand the true value of a gift, and, in time, I’m sure she will.
Some things, you’ve just got to let go, and this is one of them.
And maybe I need to stop taking everything so personally.
In my case, the only case on which I can speak with some authority, successful parenthood is about long and intense periods of frustration interspersed with unexpected moments of success. In that respect, I have difficulty seeing the forest from the trees, and I get bogged down by the frustrations and fail to appreciate her overall growth. I find it hard to envision the person she’ll become based on what I see in the moment, which is pretty silly considering my own history of embarrassing words and actions.
Last week, she came up with a surprise. One morning, as we’re getting ready for the day, unprompted, she decided she wanted to give away much of her trove of Mardi Gras beads, one to each member of her daycare class. “Are you sure?” I said. Nod. The above picture was taken shortly after her announcement.
“Now, you can’t ask for them back, you have to let them keep them forever, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And you have to let them choose which one they want, you can’t pick them for them, okay?”
“Okay.”
I asked her if there were any special necklaces that she didn’t want to give away and had her leave them at home.
This had disaster written all over it. I envisioned disappointment, arguing over trinkets, and regrets.
But lo and behold, it all went well. She gave away most of them, anyone who wanted one got to pick one, and CJ was happy about how it all went down.
Lately, she’s been working on generosity. At dessert time, she invites others to pick out a cookie before she picks hers. Unprompted, she offers her playdates the pick of her dolls. She knows that a host has certain responsibilities, even if she doesn’t quite know what they all are.
A year ago, I doubt I could have imagined this. Which tells me I need to have more faith. Be more generous.
It’s kind of neat to watch how, like most children, CJ absorbs things, if uncritically.
“I went home with a waitress, the way I always do!”
“What does ‘insider trading’ mean?”
“I smell something yummy!”
But one thing that she hasn’t picked up, yet, is swearing, despite my undisciplined mouth. (OK, wait for it, 4…3…2…1…huh. Nope, she didn’t swear. Weird.)
Somewhere on the Internet, there’s advice on what a parent should do when their child swears. I’m sure Becky knows what to do, she always does. As it is, I have difficulty dealing with the little things.
Yesterday, we drove by a synagogue that’s near my house, but not along our normal path of travels. CJ asked what it was, which of course, led to explaining what a synagogue is. “It’s like a church, only for Jews.” Which, of course, led to having to explain Jews and Christians, and then Muslims and Buddhists and Hindis.
“So they sing in the synagogue?” she asks, because she highly associates churches with singing.
“Yes,” I said.
Having explained the religions, I then felt compelled to explain atheism and agnosticism, with CJ nodding dutifully all along.
“Where do they sing?”
This weekend is going to be a bit harder. We’re attending Becky’s grandfather’s funeral. Not a close relative, but someone she sees about once a year and who she saw just a few weeks ago. We’ve tried to explain death, but it’s hard to know if we’ve really gotten through.
There’s a lot of “why?” going on, which is good, I guess. At first I thought that explaining a cremation was hard, but then I realized that burial probably doesn’t make much more sense to a 4-year-old. We long ago passed the “Are you and mommy going to die” stage, a prospect which she seemed to accept with great ease, which probably means we didn’t explain it correctly.
To have children is to have stories. Most of them only mildly interesting.
There’s the trip to Disneyland with her cousins and Uncle John over Christmas, where she was a trooper over an 11-hour visit to the rat trap, having only one very mild breakdown. Leaving the park, I asked her, “Which did you like more, Disneyland or the state fair?” “The state fair”. “Why?” “They don’t have scary rides at the state fair.”
As I said, she was extremely well behaved at Disneyland, and at the end of hours of waiting in endless lines and elbowing through the crowds of the busiest day at Disneyland in years, we decided to reward her with a trip to the Disney Store (she hadn’t even asked to buy anything all day). She came out of it with a princess doll with fantasyland-quality hair and a Minnie Mouse plush doll. The princess and its horse were pretty quickly marginalized, but she clutched to Minnie for dear life.
For just over four weeks.
At that point, she received an early birthday gift that she had requested: a baby doll whose eyes open and shut (pictured above). A simple enough, classic toy (and we are grateful for the brown-eyed doll, which is apparently extremely difficult to find). But it relegated Minnie to the hinterlands. She’s been sitting on a shelf in my bedroom for nearly a month and until 10 minutes ago CJ had yet to ask for or about her.
It’s a pretty trite observation that kids today could do with about a tenth of the toys they have. It’s probably also true that I could do with about a tenth of what I’ve got. If I’m going to cut back on her stuff, I should probably cut back on my own as well.
Which reminds me, I’ve got to pay the bill for my motorcycle insurance.
We don’t watch a lot of television at home, but when we do, it’s frequently football. CJ pretty much views our TV as a conduit for football and not much else. And, of course, she consequently loves watching football.
But she doesn’t get to watch TV for free. Every commercial, every product placement is an exercise in understanding why the things being shown are being shown.
Me: “What are they trying to sell you here?”
CJ: “A car.”
Me: “How are they trying to sell it to you?”
CJ: “By showing you that it goes really fast.”
Trips through stores are the same.
Me: “Who are they trying to sell that to?”
CJ: “Little girls.”
Me: “How do you know?”
CJ: “Because it’s pink and when they want to sell it to little girls, they make it pink.”
It hasn’t made her less susceptible to marketing gimmicks, and she still wants the stuff (yesterday, she spent 10 minutes whimpering in Target because I wouldn’t buy her a Minnie Mouse shirt), but it’s an effort to get her to be an active consumer instead of a passive one. Given the amount of media the average person consumes, it seems like you can’t start that education early enough.
Becky says I have unreasonably high expectations of our daughter. She’s right, of course, but I’m not wrong.
The way I see it, if CJ is simply as “good” as Becky and I are, she won’t reach the same socio-economic level that we’ve reached. Say, for instance, that Becky and I are in the 70th percentile in terms of the broad category of “stuff you need to get along in life in this world.” If CJ hits that 70th percentile as well, she’ll fall behind where we are now.
That is, things are getting harder, less equal, not easier, more equal in this world. And that’s why I push her to be better than me, because just being as good as me won’t cut it.
And that doesn’t even factor in the fact that CJ’s a girl. Sixty percent of college kids graduating now are women, which means that 40% are men…which means that if you’re a college-educated woman who wants to marry a college-educated man, your odds are low and the competition is stiff.
And, yeah, marriage isn’t everything, but we also know that married people live longer, are richer and are happier.
Sigh.
Just so this isn’t an entirely bleak post, the picture above captures one of the best parts of my day. Becky picks up CJ from daycare, while I’m at work at home. CJ comes running through the door, yelling “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”, runs up to me, gives me a big hug and jumps into my lap. Best ten seconds of the day.
The above picture shows CJ enjoying a well-deserved, post-dinner lollipop.
What the above picture does not show is the six pieces of pork chop and seven pieces of broccoli that she ate in order to get that lollipop.
“Please stop being silly, Tabeedee.”
She continues to be silly.
“Tabeedee, after dinner, I promise, I will play with you and be really, really silly with you. But first, you have to stop playing with your food and eat your dinner, then you can have your lollipop and we can go play and be silly.”
“How much do I have to eat?” she asks.
“All of the vegetables,” I say, knowing she’ll eat the mac and cheese and the pork chop anyway.
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
And she does.
“We’re very fortunate, aren’t we,” I ask my wife, after CJ eats all of the broccoli on her plate. My wife nods. “We’re teaching her how to negotiate. It’s a lifelong skill. You don’t want to be pulling an Obama.”
Perhaps the most difficult for me as a parent is understanding that I am a 24/7/365 role model. CJ doesn’t miss anything. She sees when I am sleeping. She knows when I’m awake. She may not know if I’m bad or good, but that’s only because she lacks a fully-formed understanding of right and wrong.
How many times have I sworn at an errant driver, only to catch her focused eye in my rear-view mirror?
I would like CJ to learn how to speak Chinese, or at least have the sound of the language in her head, so we’ve been taking Chinese classes together since the beginning of the year. I have no illusions that she will magically derive fluency from these once-a-week classes, but I just want her to have the sound of it in her head so that if she were to take it up later in life, she has that background.
But I also know that the only reason that she is engaged in the classes is because I work on it with her. It’s something that interests me, so it interests her.
For the same reason, I’m in the market for a used keyboard and plan on beginning piano lessons.
But I really don’t know how long I can keep this up. How long can I be the person that I want to be, rather than the schlub that I actually am?
A couple months ago, I was reading a newspaper story on a study that showed, once again, that despite ever more women entering the workforce and taking on more of the income-earning burden, women still do most of the housework and, when there are children, spend more time caring for the offspring.
Now, some things should be thought, and some thoughts should be spoken, but the overlap between those two sets is far from perfect. Particularly at the dinner table.
My stream of consciousness went something like this:
“Well, of course women do more of that stuff. They get a higher emotional payoff from that stuff than men do. Children frequently prefer mom over dad, and women get judged by their homes more than men do. I’m not saying that’s right, but that’s the way it is, so it makes sense that they would pay more attention to housework. Men get judged by other stuff.”
Silence.
It was a short, one-sided conversation.
For the few guys who read this blog, note that I said it here so you wouldn’t have to. You’re welcome.
Summer has ended, and, obviously, this picture was from a month back, when we actually went to the local wading pool, and our cherry tomatoes still ripened on the vine.
We don’t download our pictures as we take them. Instead, we let them pile up in our digital camera’s memory card until there are so many that we couldn’t possibly be bothered with going through them all.
But every now and then, when I finally have some quiet time and can get in front of our speedy home computer (as opposed to my glacial work laptop), I browse through what we have.
I should do that more often. Between the daily adventures of her obstinance and my parental malpractice, I overlook and misplace the moments I should be cherishing.
Or blocking out.
Like this picture. Here, she’s so exhausted, she fell asleep in the bathtub:
How exactly did she do that? And what kinds of parents let their three-year-old do that?
Note that she still crosses her ankles when she goes to sleep, a habit that we first documented quite some time ago.
Our bedtime ritual is, like a lot of things, dictated by CJ’s predilections. She insists on snuggling with Becky before going to sleep and, as long as Becky is in the house, CJ refuses to let me put her to bed.
Which is fine. But to reasonably share the task, it means that I am in charge of baths. However, I prize efficiency, and a bath takes, easily, twice as long as a shower, which means that for most of the 3 1/2 years of her life, CJ and I have taken showers together.
So, the question is, at what age (of the daughter) is it just creepy for a father to be taking a shower with her daughter?
The double standards we have about men/women and boys/girls are pretty annoying to me. For example, sitting in a coffee shop on a Monday afternoon, as a middle-aged man, when I smile at young girls who remind me of CJ, I get the sense that I am under suspicion. Is there a different age of appropriateness for a man showering with his daughter than a woman showering with her son?
Is there a different cut-off age for posting naked pictures of your daughter versus your son?
Scene: Rocky, me and CJ are seated at a restaurant, I’m next to CJ, Rocky is across from me, an empty chair across from CJ.
We’re waiting for mom.
A few minutes in, I see mom through the restaurant window and I tell CJ I see her.
“Mommy, mommy!” CJ shrieks.
Then, turning to me, CJ says,
“Daddy, go sit over there,” pointing to the seat across from her, so mommy can sit next to her.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t know much about child care, and three years in, that remains true.
And while I’m sure our daycare’s child-rearing skills are great, their parent care skills are beyond reproach. The above video was from our parent-teacher conference last week.
“We haven’t seen Grandpa Gaw in a long time,” she said this afternoon, as we drove home from the dog park.
“No, we haven’t, ” I said. “That’s very astute of you. Some day, mommy and daddy will try to explain that to you, to the best of our ability.”
Her observation had come out of the blue. It didn’t come in the middle of a discussion of anything related to grandparents or while she was playing with anything from the grandparents. Instead, she was half asleep from riding in the stroller through the dog park. She might have been dwelling on it for quite some time before verbalizing it. Who knows.
I thought that we had done a pretty deft job of eliding the issue of my father. We simply did not mention him. There was Grandma Wright and Grandpa Wright and Grandma NaiNai…and that was it. We haven’t seen Grandpa Gaw in more than a year, and I had thought that maybe she would have just forgotten about him by now. Apparently not.
I think of my life and, by extension, my family as pretty normal, which includes the normal number of issues that we ignore, hoping that they’ll go away or, at least, allow us to forget to feel the pain. I imagine that this may not be the first time that CJ raises this question, and I don’t know how to address it.
How do other people broach the unspoken hot-button issues that children invariably raise? All I’m trying to do is bury deep down inside my psyche a painful issue that I don’t want to confront. Is that too much to ask?
p.s. For those of you who haven’t seen the skating video yet, here it is:
“Motherhood is wonderful in discrete, short bursts,” a friend of mine e-mailed me. I hear that. The cost/benefit calculation is tough. 23 hours and 59 minutes of mind-numbing responsibility, and 1 minute of immeasurable bliss.
At this stage in CJ’s life, the hardest part for me is having to pre-edit my every utterance. For example, you don’t say, “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” because the answer is always “No.” It’s “Let’s go to the bathroom” or “It’s time to go to the bathroom.”
And because transitioning from one activity to the next is such a chore, you have to plan ahead. “After we finish reading this book, we’re going to go to the bathroom.”
And I fell into the trap of counting, and I’m still digging my way out of that trap. “I’m going to count to three and then I’m going to take you to the bathroom.” I end up sounding like and feeling like an idiot. More than usual, that is.
She mocks me and says, “Count to three, daddy, count to three!”
On the other hand, she learned how to count to three really early.
The hard things about fatherhood are the same as the hard things about everything else in life. The high points and the low points may define it in retrospect, but the day-to-day, on-going difficulties are what you have to live with now. The whining, the tantrums, the late-night and early-morning wake-ups, the unending petty annoyances, the insolence…that’s what wears you down. In retrospect, the screaming-on-the-floor-in-the-middle-of-Target incidences may not mean much, but it dominates my here-and-now.
The new year apparently has brought a new aggressiveness in CJ, with more frequent, more intense, and more unpredictable tantrums. I’ve heard that age three can actually be a more difficult period than the “terrible twos”, so I guess I can look forward to that.
Some say that the high moments of parenting, those gosh-awful cute moments, make up for the numbing pain, and maybe that’s true. When I got home from a 12-day trip, CJ welcomed me with a heart-melting, high-pitched squeal, “Daddy! Daddy!”
Of course, when our dog, Heidi, got back from an 11-day stay at dog camp, where she stayed while we were down in Louisiana over the holidays, CJ emitted the same high-pitched squeal, “Heidi! Heidi!”
I’m not sure when humor is supposed to kick in for children, but for CJ, it happened a few months ago. And, of course, I only am just now getting around to blogging about it.
In her first two years, laughter was not the predominant sound that came out of her mouth. Come to think of it, it still isn’t. Rather, it’s predominantly whining and crying. If I drew a pie chart of the types of sounds that come out of her mouth, it wouldn’t be pretty. But I must admit, the progress is good. When I made a recording of her crying the ringtone on my cell phone, Becky objected because she felt it gave an unfair representation of our child. She may have a stronger case now than before, but it still doesn’t quite hold up.
The question is, does the hours of crying and whining that a parent has to endure get outweighed by the brief moments of joyous laughter that punctuate the day. It’s like enduring an hours-long surgery without anesthesia, and then being given a shot of morphine.
Anyway, this is one of her first jokes, and while I’m no Richard Pryor, I thought it wasn’t bad for a 2 1/2-year old.
The set-up:
There’s a children’s song called “I Had a Little Turtle” (see another child here singing it) that CJ likes to sing. And then she wants me to sing it.
After singing it a couple of times, she liked the new song, and she would always chime in on the last line, when I would sing “Sometimes she likes to…” and pause to wait for her to shout “Poooooo!”
Then, one day, instead of saying “Poooo!” she shrieked:
“Peeee!”
And laughed herself silly.
She hasn’t learned, yet, that comedians don’t laugh at their own jokes.
Like a lot of children, CJ goes by a lot of names. Folks who keep up with her through this blog tend to call her CJ. At daycare, they call her Clara Jade, in large part because the class has another Clara in it.
Me? I call her Tabeedee. Or, as she says, “Daddy calls me Tabeedee, and mommy calls me Sweetie.”
I’ve been meaning to get down in bits the story of Tabeedee, just so it doesn’t get lost. So here it is.
When Clara was born, Becky and I were prepared with a boy’s name. Martin Solomon. We had been on vacation in Georgia and while visiting the King Center, I thought, “Hmm. ‘Martin.’ That works.” Not quite sure where Solomon came from, though. Probably for the best that we didn’t go that route. Martin Solomon seems like an awful heavy burden.
Anyway, while we had a boy’s name, we did not have a girl’s name. So when I sent out the e-mail to folks announcing our bundle of joy, the subject line ended with “Name TBD.”
Thus, Tabeedee was born. I wanted to have it as a middle name. But somebody objected.
Of course, I also like the ulterior definition. When you’re a child, so much of life is TBD.
Come to think of it, so much of life is TBD, even when you’re an adult.
So, a couple of people have mentioned to me that they think this blog is book material. I dunno. So, I’m asking you. The blog looks at fatherhood from my perspective, one of ambivalence. I don’t offer wisdom, encouragement or promises, and I don’t think my view is either dominant or rare. But I do think it is less acknowledged.
This is totally anonymous, feel free to be as open as you’d like, but please take the poll.
Today, I discovered that, given enough cranberry sauce, CJ will eat just about anything.
In this case, liver. Liver from a bison raised by a small local farmer, mind you, but liver nonetheless.
Fortunately, neighboring Wisconsin is the largest producer of cranberries, and cranberries can freeze for up to a year.
Unfortunately, Becky can’t stand liver.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. When she was four months old, she gobbled up a plate of pate and foie gras at Spoonriver.
Of course, this leads to the question: What are the limits of cranberry sauce? CJ already likes broccoli and Brussel sprouts. Does cranberry sauce go well with durian?
I can’t say when it started, but she’s begun to lie. I’m neither disappointed nor upset. Actually, I’m a little happy that it’s come so soon, still three months shy of her third birthday.
A few days ago, shortly before dinner, she asks me if she can play with her fingerpaints. I was in the kitchen making dinner, so I punted and asked her to ask her mom. A few minutes later, she comes back, holding back tears and sniffling, asking if she can play fingerpaints. Although I knew the answer, I asked her what her mom said. Without hesitation, “She said, ‘Yes,’” she said.
I’ve been bracing myself for this, and the day has come. A little early, but it’s come. An article from New York magazine has been my guide, a layperson’s compilation of the research on children and lying.
It starts very young. Indeed, bright kids—those who do better on other academic indicators—are able to start lying at 2 or 3.
“Lying is related to intelligence,” explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University and a leading expert on children’s lying behavior.
Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.
Before you decide to click over to the full article, note that the above three paragraphs are the most sanguine ones. The rest of it is filled with summaries of studies that reinforce your worst fears about children and lying. It doesn’t matter if they know lying is bad, or how much they know lying is bad. It doesn’t matter if they’re well-adjusted or otherwise well-behaved, get good grades at school, or if you think they never lie.
They do. A lot. And if they don’t, the alternatives aren’t that attractive.
But that’s okay. Neither the steepest nor the most significant challenge ahead. Just add it to the pile.
I just came back from a 12-day trip with a buddy of mine, sans family, to Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh. It’s a different trip when it’s just you and the guys. You don’t see the same things, you don’t go to the same places. You stay out a lot later. And in places like Vietnam and Cambodia, both stops on the current sex tourism circuit, you get approached by different people offering different, um, services.
I didn’t do anything that I couldn’t come home and tell Becky about, but I did do things that I wouldn’t do with her and CJ. And, of course, what would be the point of a guys’ trip if that weren’t the case?
The family was, however, always on my mind. What would Becky think of this? Would this be a place that we would want to revisit together? How would Becky and CJ handle the current of scooters that flows like a river through the streets of HCMC, oblivious to any laws of traffic or common sense?
I saved for them Hanoi and the beaches of central Vietnam, as well as Angkor Wat. I spared them harrowing rides on the backs of scooters that serve as cheap taxis, street food that could threaten their stomach linings, bus and boat rides that could threaten their safety, and dingy bars that some might say have “character” and others might say lack “cleanliness”.
And, in the end, I returned home, health intact, and only a little worse for the wear. Within four days, I had Becky saying, “Maybe you could go back to Vietnam?”
She’s been out with a fever and, we presume, a flu. Other than being forced to take time off from work to take care of her, it hasn’t been that bad. She’s been a pita, to be sure, but not nearly as bad as I would have imagined…and, frankly, it’s hard to tell the difference between her flu-induced bad temper and her normal bad temper. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. Whatev.
Oddly, her fever began just after we returned from a late lunch at a local restaurant that, almost a year to the day, was also the site of her breaking her arm. Last year, shortly after CJ got treated for the broken arm, I received a letter from my health insurance provider asking for details of the incident…specifically, where did it occur and how. It was pretty clear that they were hoping to hit up the restaurant to pay the medical bill.
I somehow misplaced that letter. And the next one. And the next one. I really do need to clean up my desk some day. Or not.
A couple of weekends ago, Becky and I were flat on our backs sick. It hurt to roll over in bed. So, for the first time, we used the television as a baby sitter. Not the kind of use where you put the child down in front of the tube to salvage 10 minutes to make dinner. No, we’re talking about half an hour, an hour at a time, just to get some relief.
And CJ loved it. She sat slack-jawed in front of that box, basking in whatever idiotic images flowed from it. She quickly learned how to answer questions with a thoughtless “Yeah” while never tearing her eyes from the screen.
And, so, it begins.
Television is like a lot of things in life — a force so strong and unrelenting that, no matter how hard you fight, you eventually succumb. Public financing of sports stadiums comes to mind. It’s how parents end up taking their kids to Disneyland.
So, if, in the middle of the night, your child is lying in the hallway, bleating “Mommy, where are you?” for half an hour at a time, is it child neglect to roll over in bed as if you didn’t hear her?
CJ hasn’t been sleeping well the last couple of months. You’d think that after 30 months of practice, she’d have it down by now. She’s been getting up two, three times in the middle of the night, coming to our room and, essentially, keeping mom up. And, as collateral damage, keeping me up.
Our solution? Hide mommy, by having her sleep in a little-used room, with the door blocked closed. Which led to the situation last night. Which we will repeat tonight.
The moments when CJ will have a meltdown because of her need for daddy time are rare, predictable and easily remedied. Her need for mommy time is unrelenting, unquenchable and erratic. So when, at 1:30 a.m. last night, I told her that mommy was unavailable and we would see her in the morning, she let me have it. And then she said she wanted to sleep in the carpeted hallway, without a pillow, without a blanket. I let her.
At 3:30 a.m., she woke up again, again bleating like a lost sheep for her mommy. This time, though, she was willing to be put in her bed.
And Becky slept, gloriously, until 7:15 a.m.
For us, that’s what passes for success these days.
Today at lunch, unprompted and unsolicited, CJ said, “Thank you, daddy, for making lunch.”
I’m sending my macaroni and cheese recipe to a lab now for analysis. Whatever the secret sauce, maybe we can bottle it and solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, forge effective healthcare reform, and develop cheap, practical and sustainable energy technologies. Or get blueberry stains out of girls’ dresses.
Whatever. In any case, it’s a small yet fulfilling step and I will over-value it as much as I unreasonably can.
So, lately, in an effort to achieve a modicum of household tranquility, I’ve been trying to enforce several rules, and I’m happy to report that some of the effort has been paying off. Of course, for the most part, the rules relate to my behaviour, not CJ’s.
My almost hourly mutterings of the serenity prayer over the past 2 1/2 years has led me to the understanding that I have no control over her whining and crying, her intermittent outbursts and histrionics. I only have (modest) control over how I react to them.
Among the rules I’ve been trying to adhere to:
Don’t talk to whining or crying children. They don’t hear me, they don’t listen to me, and it only frustrates me. Just wait it out. This falls under the rubric of “don’t reward bad behaviour.” Unfortunately, it’s difficult to adhere to that rule with any rigor since, let’s face it, with some children, if it weren’t for bad behaviour, there would be no behaviour at all.
Don’t say “no”. Children don’t hear it, they don’t listen to it, and it only frustrates them. Unless it’s a finger in the power socket, come up with something else. Brevity may be the soul of wit, and you can’t get much more brief than “no”, but it’s the death of diplomacy, and child-rearing is all about diplomacy: getting what you want while they get what they want.
Don’t negotiate with yourself (more bluntly put, don’t beg). Children don’t care, it sets a bad precedent, and, of course, it’s humiliating.
It is sadly true that I break all three of those rules on a daily basis, including this morning as I was taking her to daycare. Still, just having some semblance of rules and trying to adhere to them has given me a sense that I have some control…even if that sense is completely illusory.
We bought a new car recently, replacing our near-emancipation-age Toyota Corolla wagon. One of the features in the new car is a fuel economy gauge that updates in real time. It’s standard in many new cars these days, telling you what your mileage is and how it’s fluctuating as you drive.
I need one of those as a parent.
One of the difficulties of parenthood is that you have no idea how well you’re doing. She hasn’t lost a limb, but she has broken one. So, what, does that put me in the 50th percentile of all parents?
A few weeks ago, our teacher at daycare called us to chat about some behavioral issues with Clara at daycare. Apparently, she’d been pushing around other kids. And taking their toys. And, when the teachers would ask her to do something she didn’t like, she would stare them down. This, apparently, was an issue.
Of course, for me, this was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, my daughter was disrupting school and was displaying anti-social behavior. Fortunately, she wasn’t pushing around the smaller kids or taking away their toys. Apparently, she’s rather protective of the smaller kids. Instead, she was pushing around the classmates who were the same size and age. So, I guess, at least in one sense of the term, she’s not a bully.
The blessing part is actually two-fold. Yeah, maybe I’ll have a child who stands up for itself and doesn’t take guff from no one. Whatever. But the other blessing comes from the validation of my frustrations as CJ’s parent that the daycare teacher’s concern gave me. I’m not frustrated because I have a normal child. I’m frustrated because I have a disorderly child, and I have a daycare teacher with training in child development to prove it.
Becky and I really like our day care center. The teachers are really well-trained and attentive, they have a great teacher-student ratio, and, perhaps most importantly, CJ loves going there. As usual, I don’t know nearly as much about it as Becky does, and I really don’t know anything about child care…but they have fabulous parent care. They know how to make us parents happy.
And we have regular parent-teacher conferences, just like in a regular school. Actually, just like in my performance evaluation at work, come to think of it. In the most recent one, under “Goals” there was this:
/Develop more appropriate coping tools to use during times of disappointment.
Well, heck, Becky and I thought, most of us work on that for most of our lives. I still am, anyway. Isn’t half of psychoanalysis devoted to that?
Then this one:
/Continue building turn taking and conflict resolution skills.
I’m thinking of writing a book: “Everything I need to know, I’ve needed to know since daycare.”
Finally, this one:
/Use spoon more consistently at mealtimes.
Yes. Something I can get my hands around. So to speak. Spoons. Got it. Will do.
P.S. The above picture has nothing to do with this blog posting, except that CJ is extremely happy with our small strawberry patch which has been bearing its annual fruit these last couple of weeks.
Did I ask too much
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it’s all I got
We’re one
But we’re not the same
Well we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again
“One” – U2
Okay, so Wikipedia says this song was inspired by a letter that Bono wrote to the Dalai Lama. Whatever. He was really writing about parenthood and asking the most simple things from your child.
Okay, so I’m asking the seemingly impossible. “Please”. I’ve been trying to get her to say “Please.” I’m having second thoughts, though. Not because it’s a hopeless endeavour, but because the return-on-investment isn’t there, or, at least, is less immediately apparent.
The key for me is to reduce the incessant whining. When I prompt her to say “Please,” she stops, smiles and then softly whispers it. I’m not making any progress in getting her to say it unprompted, but for that moment, the whining subsides.
But it seems like I should be working towards many other more substantial and worthwhile developmental goals. Patience. Perseverance. Diligence. Kindness. Generosity. Humility. Integrity. Irony. The list is so long, I don’t know where to start. So I start with the simple stuff.
Sometimes, CJ is incredibly gleeful, as in the above picture, running to meet her grandmother, grandaunt, and granduncle. She rarely gets to see them, but there she is, running up to them, full-speed, as if they were the source of her every happiness.
Other times, the loss of a few goldfish crackers has Vesuvian consequences. It’s in those times that you earn your stripes as a parent. I find myself constantly trying to crack her code, to get what I want out of her in a way that stops short of physically forcing her to accede. Dragging her upstairs to get her into bed is a loss. Letting her stay downstairs is a loss. Having her scream and writhe on the ground inconsolably for ten minutes is a loss. Convincing her to walk up the stairs herself is a win.
A conversation she and I had earlier today while she was strapped in her car seat and the car is sitting in front of the house:
“I don’t want to go out of the car.”
“But it’s time to go in the house.”
“I don’t want to go in the house.”
Followed by five more minutes of back-and-forth, and escalating whining on her part.
“How about this,” I say. “How about you use the other door to get out of the car.”
“Okay.”
Did I win that round? Did she? Who knows? I got what I wanted, but did she get what she wanted, too?
And that’s parenthood, at least for now: a never-ending, relentless series of negotiations, where the counter-party has a seemingly bottomless well of patience and an unknown calculus for an appropriate outcome, and every single instance of bargaining holds implications for the next instance, which lies only moments away.
Clara likes feta cheese. But not the fake stuff you get from France or, heaven forbid, Wisconsin. It’s gotta be the real deal from Greece, the sheep’s milk/goat’s milk blend that’s been aged at least six months.
And she likes olives. But not the green olives you get in a jar, or even the pitted black ones cured in olive oil. No, she needs the black ones that still have the pits in them so her parents can painstakingly carve out the pits and then feed the meat to her.
And I’m not raising a gourmand here. The ketchup on her pulled pork works just fine. Note that in the picture above she’s eating her feta accompanied by a banana.
She just wants it her way. The definition of high maintenance. I gotta stop that.
This weekend is the official start of potty training. We started Friday night and she had one accident this morning. Not a complete success, but a positive step forward.
CJ had been pretty excited about the prospect of potty training for a couple of weeks now, particularly since her best friends at daycare, who are slightly older than her, have already been doing it. The picture above depicts her trying on her new underwear. Obviously, there were some first-timer difficulties. When she and Becky came home from Target with the 6-pack of girl’s underwear, CJ couldn’t have been more excited. Everything fascinated her, from the plastic bag packaging to the pieces of tape that kept each pair in a roll. I wonder at what age new things lose their ability to inject wonder into our lives. Tonight, we’ll be having pork chops for dinner, and even though we have pork chops at least once a week, she’ll still be ga-ga over them.
I better enjoy this while it lasts.
Why can’t I enjoy things without anticipating the end of the joy?
She’s at a stage where she can respond to questions, but you don’t really know if she understands what you’ve asked, so you can’t quite trust her response. She’ll give conflicting answers to questions that ask the same thing, only in different ways. I feel like I’m re-enacting scenes from “Rain Man.” Next thing you know, she’ll insist on only flying Qantas.
And, of course, she’s been as troublesome as you’d imagine a two-year-old. When she throws a fit, contravenes directions that you know she understood, and, in general, makes me question how our species ever decided to reproduce, I often end up hugging her tight, gritting my teeth, and whispering to her, “Oh, my little pita.”
I don’t think of myself as a particularly severe person, but I guess relative to Becky, I am. And, in CJ’s case, that’s the only point of reference she has.
How does that translate into behaviour? It means that she tries to push Becky in ways that she doesn’t with me. If Becky isn’t home, the process of getting CJ to sit on the potty, go upstairs, strip down and take a bath, get into pajamas, read a couple of books, in bed, lights out and I’m back downstairs is 35 minutes, easily half the time that it takes for Becky. With Becky, it’s an unending set of negotiations and boundaries-testing.
If Becky is trying to put CJ down to sleep and I hear unrelenting screaming, the sound of my footsteps coming up the stairs is enough to alter CJ’s demeanour.
The flip side is that I don’t get the same kind of affection that Becky does. I get affection mixed with a hint of fear. Or fear mixed with a hint of affection. Kind of like the godfather.
I’m not sure where this comes from, though. Both Becky and I are judiciously firm with her, and Becky is certainly no pushover. Is it my (relatively) deep voice? My steely glare? The firm handshake that I use to greet her? (Okay, just kidding on that last one). Maybe every parental pairing has a good guy and a bad guy, and I’m just the less good guy.
Today, CJ is at the stage where she attributes new roles to old condiments. In this case, ketchup. Or catsup, we have yet to determine CJ’s preferred spelling. Here, CJ eats it up with the morning’s oatmeal. Followed, no less, by a second serving of the same.
Certainly, we encourage this sort of harmless experimentation, but I’m under no illusion that she’s much different than any other child her age. And I credit natural curiosity more than anything that we have done. Other than, of course, to make quality condiments available.
Still, it’s cute, so we have a picture of it.
She has yet to acquire a taste for Tabasco sauce, but I’m confident that that will come in time. She’s already learned the distinction between things that are “hot hot” (temperature wise) and things that are “spicy hot.” I’m anxious for her to develop the taste for spicy foods in large part because I’m tiring of frequently having to either bland down my cooking or cook two sets of dishes, one for her and one for me. I’m taking a strategy of gradualism, making dishes progressively more spicy. Earlier this week she balked at what I thought was a rather bland curried rice. Alas, this is going to take longer than I had hoped.
When I picked up the paper the other morning, I showed CJ the headline and mentioned to her that her 529 was in the tank and that she should prepare for community college…not that there’s anything wrong with community colleges. A few minutes later, she dutifully read the paper to her doll, no doubt assuring her/him (I haven’t checked) that his/her tuition was secure.
The economy has me thinking a lot about our household finances. I think about how we’re lucky that we have diversified income streams. I think about our budget and how we could cut back. I think about how we would cope if one of us lost our jobs. I think about my friends who have alreadylosttheirjobs.
And then I think about whether CJ will really notice. Kids don’t really need nearly as much as we think they do. Despite what they might say.
Among the gifts CJ received for her birthday was a tea set, which she adores and uses almost daily. Being a Chinese-American and having been raised with a cup of tea in my hand since as young as I can remember, I’m quite fond of tea. But I didn’t realize until recently the apostasy committed by my wife with regards to this beverage, and she seems to be passing it down to our offspring.
As the above picture shows, CJ has learned to pollute her tea with milk and sugar. Perhaps I’ll be able to pass it off as the remnants of her having been raised by woodland creatures and we rescued her at a still-young age. Maybe I’ll be able to shield her from the cruel comments of her betters as they deride her poor up-bringing. In any case, it will take an Herculean effort to spare her the fate of the Elephant Man, hiding in dark alleys and pleading “I am not an animal! I am a human being!”
This shot was taken a couple weeks ago. Note the hat. She’s already appropriating her dad’s clothing. I thought that wasn’t supposed to occur for another decade? I better start hiding my sweatshirts and flannel shirts now.
We (and when I say “we”, I mean “Becky”) have been doing a pretty good job of encouraging CJ to use the toilet, regularly putting her on the potty. On the weekends, when she’s with us the whole day, we have her on the potty before and after every meal and several times in between. I swear, she must have a pea-sized bladder.
While CJ is generally fairly amenable to the task, on occasion she resists. One of my more effective ways of getting her to sit on the potty is to take one of her books, sit next to the potty, and start reading silently to myself. Eventually, she comes over and asks me to read to her, and I’ll have her sit on the potty while I read. All in all, not bad.
So, of course, now that CJ is into baby dolls, she reads to her dolls as they sit on the potty.
Lesson: Don’t underestimate the power of modeling.
As a parent, it seems like I have only a limited amount of influence over the development of my daughter. For example, I’d like her to be left-handed (makes for a more effective curve ball and slider, going into the batter instead of away from the batter), but right now, that doesn’t seem to be in the mix. The above picture was taken last month while we were doing some holiday shopping at a toy store. CJ saw the toy stroller and baby dolls and took to them immediately, pushing the babies around for more than 15 minutes as we milled around.
CJ has since been caring for her dolls somewhat more attentively than before, pushing them around the house in her wagon and the Tonka truck that she got as a gift.
I’m not a real fan of conforming to stereotypes, so I don’t view this as a particularly positive development. But, clearly, she enjoys the dolls, so who am I to stand in the way?
In the past few weeks, CJ has learned to assert herself and express her, um, needs. That is, she “needs” just about everything. That sippy cup she’s holding in the above picture was something she absolutely needed on our trip to Southern California for the holidays. As her parents, we knew that she “needed” her sippy cup and brought one on the trip. Unfortunately, we misplaced it. On Christmas Day. You can bet that we were at Target bright and early on the day after Christmas.
“I need that!” is one of those phrases that pushes Becky’s button. I call it “Driving mommy to crazy town.” On numerous occasions over the last few weeks, she’s been halfway there.
If expressing your desires is a step in development, CJ has taken a big leap. With a running start. Into a long jump pit.
In one of those random bits of parenting reading that I came across some time ago, it said that children are more likely to eat the things you’ve made for them if they have had a part in the preparation of the meal. Being that I tend to take it personally when she turns her nose up at my cooking, it’s been in my interest to let her participate when I can.
Yes, she actually eats her vegetables, including the Brussels sprouts seen in the picture. Occasionally, I take her grocery shopping, and she insists on biting into the cucumbers that she grabs as we swing through the produce aisles. I know, however, that it’s only a matter of time before she’s pestering us for junk food. How do people deal with the checkout lane? I swear, every time I go through one of those things, surrounded by candy bars and tabloid magazines, I gain five pounds and lose five IQ points.
Eating hasn’t been a problem, yet, but I hear that’s coming. She already exhibits a lot of frustration that you would see from a two-year-old, gritting her teeth and gripping her fists, body trembling when she doesn’t get her way. Every now and then we get the lie-on-the-floor-and-wail treatment, but, so far, not in public.
Right now, the best moments of fatherhood come at the beginning of the day (albeit a little too early for my tastes) and when she comes home from daycare. It’s a brief but satisfying moment (and only a moment) where she cries for “Daddy!!!!” But once I get that hug, she’s gone. It’s as if she just wants assurance that I’m there and haven’t abandoned her, and once she knows she can take me for granted, she does.
CJ does not jump into new situations aggressively. With new people, in new situations, she will hind behind her parents’ legs, clutching her sippy cup, and no amount of prodding, coaxing and wheedling will get her out. Once she’s comfortable, however, she can be as aggressive and enthusiastic as anything.
I know that that is typical for a child her age. Evolutionarily speaking, you probably want a child to be timid in new situations, otherwise she probably wouldn’t last too long in the wilds.
I just don’t want her to be a wimp. It doesn’t look like she will be.
It doesn’t look like a break, but it is, and it’s hers.
They called it a “transverse buckle fracture along the dorsal aspect of the distant left radial metadiaphysis. Subtle cortical irregularity can be seen along the medial aspect of the distal left ulnar metaphysis indicating the site of an additional buckle fracture.”
That is, she suffered a small break in her left wrist.
So how did it happen? On Sunday, we met some friends at a bar for lunch and we had to sit at one of those high tables that requires bar chairs. The infant high chairs and the booster seats weren’t good for those chairs, and so CJ sat on a bar chair. And, of course, fell off of it, breaking her fall with her left hand.
What can I say, the girl can’t hold her drink.
Oddly, she didn’t let out one of those ear-piercing screams that tells you that she’s really hurt. Rather, it was a run-of-the-mill cry that subsided with some nursing. When we got home, she would continuously clutch her left wrist. I asked if it hurt, and she said yes. So I pressed on it a bit, turned it, raised her arm. She didn’t so much as flinch. I asked if it hurt and she nodded and clutched her wrist. So, after a few hours, we were off to the emergency room.
The doctor examined her in much the same way that I had, and, again, she didn’t evince any sign of pain, other than clutching her wrist. I got the sense that he ordered the x-rays not so much because he felt we needed them, but more to both cover his ass and to assuage a couple of concerned parents.
Lo and behold, there was a small break.
As you can see in the picture below, taken the evening after getting her cast (her choice of color), the broken arm hasn’t slowed her down. At first, she worked at how to deal with just one operable arm. By the next day, however, she had learned that an arm in a solid, hard cast can be used to push people out of the way and to leverage her way into tight areas.
…is not necessarily fiction. It could merely be opinion.
A friend of mine recently married a divorcé, who had had children in a previous marriage. One weekend morning while they were lounging in bed, my friend’s husband turns to her and says, “You know, when we have kids, we won’t be able to do this again for years.” Pause. “And it’ll be totally worth it.”
When my friend recounted this story to me, I said to her, “The first part of that statement is a statement of fact.”
I never thought of myself as a particularly prudish sort when it came to song lyrics, but there came a time the other evening that did give me pause. In choosing music for CJ, I’m generally just looking for a dance-ability, although I’m not keen on girl bands, a la The Go-Gos or Bananarama. But, have you listened to the lyrics from “Greased Lightning”? The Joan Jett stuff seems a bit more, um, aggressive than I’d like for my daughter. On the other hand, I’m encouraging aggressiveness, so I guess I shouldn’t complain when I get it.
I don’t know how much of what we encourage actually gets through to her. You can only do what you can do.
She recently has taken to saying “Thank you” and “Please,” and Becky and I are reacting reflexively. First, we immediately and positively respond whenever she says “Thank you” or “Please.” Second, I find that I’m unfailingly polite when I’m around CJ. Gotta be a good role model.
I’m not sure if we’re training her or if she’s trained us.
This car was parked next to ours at the state fair a couple of weeks ago. Going to the Minnesota state fair isn’t just about eating chocolate-covered bacon fried on a stick. It’s not about watching mom lose her hat on the Giant Slide. It’s not about seeing the champion boar or petting a horse.
The state fair is where the great masses of Minnesota converge and you are confronted with the notion that not everyone thinks like you do. And it’s not just some remote whacko screaming on MSNBC/Fox News, it’s a very real person with very real concerns who lives quite close to you, thinking thoughts and holding beliefs that are quite different than mine.
As an Asian-American living in a state with, um, not so many Asian-Americans, I’m regularly reminded that I’m different than most folks here. And, I suspect, CJ will be, too. Those who think that Barack Obama’s candidacy indicates that we have entered some kind of post-racial society have probably not looked too carefully at our society.
Recently, I was chatting with a friend, who also has a young child, about the pain and pleasure of raising a child. Okay, I was talking about the pain. It probably comes as no surprise to readers of this blog that, between Becky and me, I’m the one that does the bulk of the complaining when it comes to CJ. My friend shared that sentiment about raising their child, and my friend felt guilty for being the one to do all the complaining.
Then it came to me. It’s not that Becky doesn’t have things to complain about or that she doesn’t want to complain. Rather, since I’m complaining so much, she doesn’t feel like she has room to complain. Somebody’s gotta be sane.
So this weekend, I promised Becky that I would refrain complaining for the entirety of the weekend, starting from Friday evening and extending to Monday morning. And that she was free to complain all she wanted to.
Becky seemed to like the idea, but she has yet to take advantage of the opportunity. Maybe she is out of practice. And, of course, it’s only 8:30 p.m. on Friday.
All kinds of clues indicate your place in the world. CJ’s verbal patterns indicate where I lie in her world. Somewhere below our dog, Heidi, and somewhere above that stroller. Not much above the stroller, mind you.
Mom, of course, sits on top of the hierarchy. She is the alpha and the omega. I’m somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, one of those squiggly lines that look like a clam fork. And it makes sense. Mom provides comfort, and at the tender age of 18 and a half months, comfort cannot be over-valued.
Mom is irreplaceable.
Dad? Dad provides the fun. He swings you around, teaches you how to make farting sounds, and teaches you the difference between bears and road-runners. Any idiot can be fun. Dad’s eminently replaceable.
I used to think that I had patience, that I was a fairly even-keeled guy, not prone to outbursts.
I was wrong. And it took CJ to teach me that.
Last December, I talked to Becky’s grandfather to wish him a Merry Christmas and ask him for any sliver of advice he might have on raising children. His words of wisdom were as succinct as they were prescient: “Try not to get too annoyed.” Alas, that advice is easier dispensed than followed.
Certainly, CJ tries my patience with her deafness to my pleas not to throw her food, with her insistence on showering herself in root beer, and with her carelessness (in the sense that she really takes no care towards anything). But, I also find myself impatient with her development. It would be so much easier if she could just tell me what she wants. And her wants never cease. I can’t wait until she learns the concept of gratitude. Good Lord, even our dog, Heidi, is thankful every now and then. I have a hankering to sleep in until 7:30 on a regular basis, so I can’t wait until she can entertain herself after her regular wake-up time of 5:30 a.m. before wailing for our attentions.
Did I mention that I lack patience?
And I fully realize that once CJ reaches those thresholds, I’ll simply find new ones to be impatient for her to reach.
The other day, I was chatting with a neighbor who has a daughter about three months older than CJ. As we watched over the two kids, CJ came to a small set of two stairs and walked down them with little effort. My neighbor let out a little gasp of amazement, saying, “She goes down stairs?” The less evil side of me (I only have “more” or “less” evil sides) was tempted to say, “Yes, but she can only count to five.” I refrained from doing so. That’s how I knew it was the “less” evil side of me.
I have a hard time resisting the urge to compare CJ’s development progress to that of other children we meet. It’s particularly annoying to me because I know how much I disliked it as a child when my parents would compare me against children they deemed my peers. And, let me tell you, when you go to a Chinese-American church, your peers tend to set the bar pretty darn high. If they don’t win prizes at international violin competitions, they earn Westinghouse scholarships or translate Chinese literature. Straight A’s and entrance to an Ivy League school? Please, that’s table stakes.
But here we are, less than a year and a half in, and I’m holding up CJ against her peers…do they enunciate better than she does? Do they have a larger vocabulary? Why does she seem to take so long to adjust to new situations?
Of course, my fretting over her relative development probably mirrors my own insecurities and motivations as a parent, and contemplating that for any length of time makes me shudder.
Okay, so she didn’t get into a fight. Rather, she took a fall at daycare and bludgeoned her eye. This picture was taken several days after the fact, and it’s amazing how quickly she’s healed.
Actually, this was one of the few pictures we took of a camping trip that we recently took with Becky’s dad. Our picture-taking has really fallen by the wayside. We take her on her first camping trip and took all of a handful of pictures.
The first night of camping was a nightmare. Rain, thunder, lightning. We neglected to put away all the food in the bear box, and so we had raccoons in the camp. And CJ shrieked most of the night. Woo-hoo.
The second and third nights were much, much better, and three nights of camping is really my limit.
The nice thing about camping with a toddler is that there is a much smaller set of things that can really endanger her. Once you’ve checked around for the poison ivy/oak and other poisonous vegetation, you only really have to worry about one thing: the campfire. Just don’t let her into the fire. Find a stick that has a nice taste? Great. Got some rocks you want to stick in your shoe? Go nuts, kiddo. Want to wander off to find a bear? Knock yourself out. Just bring a bear song or something. We have black bears in Minnesota. Are you supposed to play dead with them, or make a loud noise? Run downhill?
In the city, there are all kinds of rules. Don’t run in the street without your bright orange vest. Don’t put that in your mouth, you don’t know which chemical truck that fell off of. Don’t eat the dog poop, it’s not worth the calories.
But camping? Stay out of the campfire. Life is so simple.
It took 484 days, but yesterday CJ finally nailed it. A clear, loud and undeniable “No.”
She quickly went on to satisfy her daily quota of usage of the word.
She recognizes a lot more words than she speaks, an attribute that I hope carries with her at least through the time she spends under our roof. She knows what we mean when we ask if she wants to go to the park or go for a walk. She has strong opinions about hats and the wearing of them. Best of all, she knows what a “book” is and is often anxious for us to read one or several to her.
I say “best of all” because I think Becky and I would have a rough time if it turned out that CJ did not enjoy reading. It’s probably an elitist thing, and I have frequently and not-unjustly been accused of being an elitist (which, however, does not mean that I will be voting for Barack Obama), but reading is an activity too important to be left to chance. I can’t remember exactly when we first started reading to her, but within her first week I was reading the Wall Street Journal to her. Sure, she has a weak understanding of the relationship between the value of the dollar and exports, but it’s a start.
But, back to “no.” CJ has already done plenty of boundary testing, and I am inclined to think that with the advent of this new capability, more is on the way. Happy, happy, joy, joy.
CJ has three phones. What she is holding in this picture is not one of them. Rather, she has inherited three of our now-dead cell phones, none of which she appreciates nearly as much as the other, working ones.
She also has a remote control (to a now-dead television) and a bevy of other discarded technological junk. But what she really wants is a laptop. Anyone?
Of course, her attachment to these things better reflects our attachment to these things. Sigh.
This picture will probably be one of those that will really make her cringe, in about 10 years. Woo-hoo.
To the casual observer, this picture may appear to depict CJ enjoying a slice of banana bread that her father baked for her, with a special ingredient…love.
In fact, however, this photo shows CJ developing a new consumable product category: the boysenberry jam delivery vehicle. This category is an off-shoot of similar items where the primary item (in this case, banana bread) is a loss leader to sell other, often higher-margin items (boysenberry jam). The most commonly-cited example of this is razors and razor blades.
My previous blog entry posited the theory that because I reckoned my child as being cuter than the other kids in her daycare class, I have evolved into being a true parent. Because only true parents are deluded enough to believe that their child is so exceptionally cute as to be above all others.
A couple of weeks ago, we went on a vacation to Taiwan. The first leg of the journey was to fly to Detroit, where we would take a plane to Japan. During the layover in Detroit, I let CJ loose in the area around the gate. Now, I understand that the Japanese tend to obsess over all things cute. But complete strangers were stopping to take pictures of CJ as she crawled around. Old ladies, young girls, middle-aged men, they would whip out their digicams and cell phones and take snap shots. Some would pose with CJ (and even CJ’s grandmother) and have their friends take their picture.
Now, these are Japanese tourists. They know cute.
So maybe I’m not the delusional parent that I thought I was. Maybe I’m back to just being some guy.
I do not believe in my personal exceptionalism. That is, generally speaking, I believe that things related to me, events surrounding me, and the things that happen to me are fairly normal. Even the most off-the-wall things that occur, I tend to believe, are within the bounds of reasonable expectation. That is, abnormal things may happen to me or around me, but it is normal for abnormal things to occur during the course of a person’s life.
So last week, I was dropping off CJ at daycare, and it seemed to be a particularly busy morning in the Early Wonders room, with infants of different shapes and sizes crawling and toddling around. After taking off her snow suit and putting her milk in the refrigerator, I surveyed the room and thought to myself, “Huh. Yeah. She is cuter than the rest of them.”
That’s when I realized that I am, indeed, a parent.
CJ takes her eating seriously, as the concentrated demeanor in the picture above will attest.
But, sometimes, I think that she doesn’t quite get it, as the picture below will attest.
In devouring her banana, she would alternate between the peel and the fruit, as if they were equally delicious. Who knows, maybe she’s right. Ah, if only I could regain the eyesight of a child.
She can’t walk, yet. She can’t stand on her own for more than a couple of seconds. She can’t figure out how to turn around to go backwards down the stairs.
But she can worry her mother by going up our rather steep staircase.
As with many houses of a certain age, our home has a staircase that would not pass inspection in this age. It frightens me a little to watch my mom and Becky’s parents try to navigate it. I’ve already planned out the trip to the emergency room when CJ barrels down it head first.
The staircase is also a significant reason why it is unlikely that this will be our last home. I’d like to move, but mostly just for the sake of moving. I get bored quickly, and I think CJ would benefit from living in different places. But inertia is tough and I’m afraid I’m getting comfortably numb.
Sigh.
CJ hasn’t quite figured out how to turn herself around and go backwards down the stairs, despite our efforts at modeling the behavior. When she tries and can’t figure it out, she gets frustrated and panics. So, do you help her out or do you have her work at it until she gets it? Do you teach her that mom and dad will always bail her out of a tough spot, or do you teach her that mom and dad won’t be there for her when she needs them?
In an earlier blog posting, I mentioned how CJ got an ear infection and we struggled to get her to take the antibiotic. It was a two-person job, with one person holding her and both her arms while simultaneously pinching her nose to force her mouth open, and the other administering the medicine while simultaneously squeezing her cheeks, to prevent her from spitting the medicine out.
Invariably, about half of the medicine would end up splattered on our clothes and faces, and her hair would be matted down, on both the front and back, from amoxicillin that had escaped her mouth.
Now, however, we’re on our second ear infection (and I’m getting the sense that we should get a Costco membership just so we can buy amoxicillin by the two-gallon jug) and we’ve found that CJ actually likes the stuff. She just doesn’t like it when we give it to her.
So, the key is to let her hold the syringe and she’ll put it in her mouth, and one of us gently pushes down on the plunger until she’s had all the medicine. Becky thinks it’s a sign of her innate willfulness. I think there have been plenty of signs of that already.
As Christmases go, this went pretty well. I’m not sure how a first Christmas is supposed to go, though.
I’m simple, though. My only wish for Christmas gifts for CJ was that they required no batteries. A full set of symbolscymbals and gongs would be fine. Just no batteries. And, for the most part, I got my wish.
CJ and her cousin, Quentin, got theirs, too. Lots of gift wrap to eat.
So far, the clear favorite of her gifts has been three wooden shape puzzles from her uncle Tim and aunt Robin. Simple, satisfying, and easy to taste.
It’s shocking to learn, I know, but I have been known to focus on the darker side of things. Such was the case on our flight down to Baton Rouge in an early winter storm. They had de-iced the wings and the weather wasn’t too bad, but there were ugly premonitions.
Of course, when an airplane goes down, there isn’t really much you can do. Again, why do they have life jackets on an airplane, but no parachutes? I know, I know, you’d just cause havoc. But, still.
So as the flight attendant was going through the motions of explaining what to do in the event of a water landing, I was thinking about what to do with CJ. In her first year, we’ve taken full advantage of the free passage that airlines allow for the first two years of the infant’s life, this being her fourth trip, and we’ve been fortunate enough not to have had an unscheduled landing.
But what if we did? How would we hold her secure? In a crash landing, there’s no way that we could just hold her really tight and expect to be able to hang on. The force of a crash landing, if we were fortunate enough to survive it, would rip her from our arms. So I start looking at the things that we have with us…something that would help strap down CJ…my belt, maybe. Maybe I could hold her tight against me and then close up my jacket around her. I look at Becky’s sweater and consider which would be more reliable, the buttons on my jacket or the zipper on her sweater. Maybe I look for the largest passenger on the plane and borrow their jacket. I recite in my head the plea that I would make to them to help me save my daughter’s young life.
If you’re going to miss a connecting flight and be forced to wait five hours in an airport with a sick child, there are worse places than Memphis International Airport. Not horrible food, clean enough, and lots of empty gates for a child to crawl around through. No free Wi-Fi, though.
When CJ gets sick, it really underscores the different roles Becky and I play. During CJ’s good periods, we played hide-and-seek around empty gates, crawled through tight spaces, and smiled at passers-by. During CJ’s bad periods, it was all mommy, all the time. Mommy is infinitely more indispensable than daddy.
CJ has more or less been eating table food for a few months now, and what you see in the above picture are her four major food groups: cheese, frozen fruits and veggies (in this case, blueberries), Cheerios, and milk. Much of it actually goes in her mouth and down her gullet.
My only wish is that our dog, Heidi, appreciated fruits and vegetables more.
I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN’T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD.
– John Belushi as “Joliet” Jake Blues
I could have gone with Gloria Gaynor (“So you’re back, from outer space, I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face”), but I think I need to save that one for when it really counts.
Apologies all for my long absence from the blogosphere. It’s been a hectic month and I have numerous but insufficient excuses. Let’s just say I’m a bit over-loaded.
CJ currently has her first real sickness, a combination of a respiratory virus and infections in both ears. The above photo illustrates her rather successful attempts to prevent any medication from actually going down her throat. The early-morning trip to the emergency room last Wednesday had the effect of getting me an early start to the day. Note to self: the ER at Children’s Hospital is remarkably uncrowded during the early hours of a midweek day.
The hospital trip once again highlighted the difference between Becky and I in terms of how we view risk. CJ had been running a fever for several days and had not been eating well. She had a cough, a runny nose, and abnormal bowel movements, and, the night before, she had vomited. We were pretty sure it was something along the lines of RSV, which is a respiratory virus that requires, essentially, just waiting it out. On Wednesday early morning, Becky had gone to CJ, nursed her for a while and she vomited up everything that she had just taken in., and CJ started breathing rapidly. She called the clinic and the nurse decided that CJ’s quick breathing warranted a trip to the ER, so Becky woke me up.
I looked at CJ lying on our bed. I smiled at her. I tickled her belly, she laughs and squirms. I made a funny face at her, she laughs and squirms. I said, “This child does not need to go to the ER.” I look at my wife. We went to the ER.
But, as I said, it wasn’t a painful trip to the ER. No waiting, took some readings, snapped some X-rays, got a prescription for some pink liquid that we have to feed her twice a day for 10 days (joy), and I got an early start on the day.
Tomorrow, we fly down to Baton Rouge for holidays with Becky’s family. I think I’m going to hire a logistics expert.
A couple more pics of our struggles to get medicine into CJ.
Ed. note: Becky says: “I called the nurse line in the hopes that they’d make an appt for us in the clinic. not because of her breathing…I didn’t think we needed to go the ER either, I just wasn’t willing to actively disregard the recommendation of the nurse. It was probably a quicker visit than it would have been several hours later in clinic.”
For six weeks I’ve been doing part-time Daddy Daycare (two days a week), and so far it hasn’t been horrible. We have good days together and we have less good ones, but overall, she doesn’t hate me.
Still, on the days when I drop her off at daycare, she is rarely sad to see me leave her. She sees other parents drop off children, and watch those kids break into relentless tears as those parents flee to their jobs with broken hearts.
CJ? She looks at those crying children, looks at me, looks back at them, and almost shrugs. She has never shed a tear when I have dropped her off at daycare. Rather, she looks at me as if to say, “Oh, hey, you’re leaving? You can find your own way out, right?”
This morning, she waved at me gleefully as I left.
And no wonder. Look at the picture above, taken by her daycare teacher. She loves it there.
Daddy Daycare, on the other hand, is a bore. We shop for groceries, take the dog for a walk, have breakfast with friends, visit the park, and go to coffee shops to play with other kids. She’s 9 months old and already over-scheduled.
It almost goes without saying that children make you feel your age. Lately, though, I’ve been hypersensitive to the passing time.
Guys tend to buy clothing as needed, as opposed to “shopping” for clothes. The other day, I needed to buy some jeans, so I went to Target. Since when did I go to Target to buy clothing? Scanning the wall of denim in various shades of black or blue, in various cuts of slim or baggy, my eyes tracked the price tags. I didn’t buy the cheapest pair, but I had a flashback to a time in my mid-teens when I was desperate for a pair of Levi’s 501 button-fly jeans. And you would only buy them at Miller’s Outpost, nowhere else would do. My parents didn’t get it.
Now, I’m at Target, ignoring the branding and just looking for a cut that wouldn’t embarrass me. The jeans that I chose were actually less expensive than the 501′s of 20+ years ago, even after those years of inflation.
In a decade or so, I’ll be taking CJ shopping and she’s going to be pushing for her 501′s, and I’ll have to search for an analogous desire to achieve some degree of empathy. Becky excels at empathy. Perhaps I can outsource that to her.
I telecommute to my job on a full-time basis, which, generally speaking, means that I work from home or coffee shops or anywhere there’s an Internet connection.
It also means that I dress, well, not like a slob per se. But I dress like most people do on the weekends. Sometimes I shave, usually I don’t. I may wear a shirt that I wore the day before. I embrace disheveledness.
But dropping off CJ at daycare, I see other parents wearing suits and ties and very uncomfortable shoes, looking at me, thinking, “There goes the neighborhood.” The other day, I shaved before dropping off CJ.
And, of course, this is just the beginning. A friend of mine with a four-year-old felt compelled to not only make cupcakes from scratch for her daughter’s birthday, but to have the cupcakes baked in small ice cream cones and artistically iced. Becky assures me that, for health reasons, schools in Minnesota wouldn’t allow home-baked goods. But that just means that Lund’s becomes the baseline. No doubt we’ll have to custom-order something from an artisan bakery in Linden Hills.
For a baby, CJ is not a huge smiler. But we’ve found that the most reliable way to get her to smile is to have her see mom and dad kissing. From a survival standpoint, it’s easy to see why that would be true for babies in general. Their odds of survival are enhanced greatly when mom and dad stay together, and them kissing is a good indicator that they’re happy with each other.
Odd how in a few years having her see mom and dad kissing will become one of the most reliable ways to get her to cringe.
Sorry for the poor job of maintaining this blog recently. I’ve been ill, I’ve been working, yadda yadda.
Last weekend, I went hunting for the first time, with my father-in-law taking me to hunt pheasant. It was both my first time hunting and my first time shooting a shotgun. I managed to fire at something, but did not manage to hit it, and I managed to not shoot my father-in-law. For me, that was success.
Today, we decided to head out for a brief hunt at a (relatively) nearby state park, and this time, I took CJ along. Actually, CJ and I just came along for the walk, carrying our dog’s leash. But the shotgun didn’t spook CJ, and she seemed to enjoy the day in the prairie, even if we didn’t find any pheasant.
Note, her blaze orange cap (borrowed from her grandpa). Safety first!
I’d like to think that I’m open to new things, and I’d like to think that I’d be able to inculcate that in CJ.
But then again, I’d like to think that a major Cleveland sports organization will win a championship in my lifetime.
Today was CJ’s first day in what promises to be decades of institutionalized care and instruction. Daycare.
This is supposed to be a traumatic time for both child and parent. But look at that picture. Does that child look traumatized to you? The daycare teacher took that photo during breakfast. She seems to have had a successful first day of mouthing on a rubber duck and scoping out the kids around her. From what I remember, college isn’t too different.
And it’s not like the actual drop-off was anything more than a perfunctory, “Oh, you’re leaving? Okay.” She happily went to the daycare teacher’s arms and turned away as we left.
As for Becky and I, that wasn’t nearly as bad as advertised. Of course, I have a heart of stone. I don’t know what Becky’s excuse is.
The picture above of my beloved daughter is gratuitous and has nothing to do with this post.
I telecommute full-time, which means that my office is wherever there happens to be an Internet connections. Lately, because grandma has been taking care of CJ and CJ doesn’t like it when I’m at home and not available to play with her, I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time at coffee shops that have free Internet connections. In the Twin Cities, there are a bajillion of them. (Check out my map of free public Wi-Fi spots in the Twin Cities)
One of my favorite places to work is the Riverview Cafe. It has a reliable Internet connection, decent coffee, a decent number of electrical outlets to plug in the laptop, and an outdoor seating area (with a nearby outlet) that is pleasant on a warm day. (Its one drawback is that I occasionally find it to be over-airconditioned).
The Riverview Cafe also has a nice play area for small children and the cafe is a gathering spot for stay-at-home parents (almost all moms) and their kids. And here’s the rub. As a new father, I enjoy watching children play and thinking about how CJ will fit into that milieu as she grows up. But middle-aged men behind computers staring at children is a definite social no-no.
I get cautious looks from mothers, and wary glances from children. Smiling at them only makes it worse. They make me feel like the creepy old man that I’m not. Or, at least, I don’t think I am.
A friend invited me to dinner with her family at her house earlier this week, and I got a chance to see how other families deal with meal time for the young ‘uns. Their child is a year older than CJ, so it was kind of like a “coming attractions” opportunity.
The dad cut up an avocado and some veggies, put it on the high-chair tray, and the kid just gobbled them up. The grandfather said, “You have to eat your vegetables so you can grow up big and strong!”
The next day, it was my turn to feed CJ.
“You have to eat your peas so you can grow up sharp-witted and sarcastic!”
Oh, and if you look real closely at the above picture, you can see peas on her eye-lashes. The food gets everywhere.
If I were Bart Simpson, the opening montage of The Simpsons would feature me at the chalkboard, repeatedly writing out the line “CJ is not a toy, CJ is not a toy…”
My role and Becky’s role has been pretty well defined by now. Becky is the nurturer. I’m the guy who will put her in mortal danger for the heck of it.
The above picture is from this morning, when CJ and I engaged in our frequent dance ritual. Elvis Costello, “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” in celebration of the new red shoes that CJ was wearing. Mom calls it “dancing,” but it’s more like a combination of slam-dancing and weight lifting. My arms are sore afterwards.
Which is just as well. I gave up my hope of running a marathon this year, so this is about all the exercise I get any more. Last time I stopped running, I gained 15 pounds and took to wearing roomy sweatpants. Pathetic.
“Dancing” with CJ entails flinging her as high as possible without banging her head against the ceiling and simultaneously spinning and tossing her a la a pair of figure skaters. It’s disappointing how I’ve fallen so easily into the stereotypical father role.
Recently, CJ has been making valiant attempts at crawling, hoisting herself up on all-fours and vigorously rocking. Occasionally, I would put a favored toy just a little out of her grasp to entice her, but that invariably results in an awkward lunge, followed by a collapse on her nose.
In analyzing her technique, the problem is clear, and pictured above. Many of her tics have come and gone. She no longer sticks her tongue out, a la Michael Jordan. Her toes no longer hold the fascination they once did. But the hooked ankles and the steady, studied gaze seem to have staying power.
I try to help her out with her crawling, repeatedly untangling her ankles or holding her ankles apart, to no avail. Any facility I have for teaching is totally inadequate to this job.
And, of course, I project my failure to convince CJ to unhook her ankles out into the future and realize that it’s a good thing she doesn’t understand a word I say, because I have a lot to learn about teaching.
I need to stop taking every setback and extrapolating them to broader, horrific scenarios. It’s neither healthy nor realistic.
I’ve always been a city boy, and when the annual state fair comes upon us, I relish the opportunity to visit what is essentially a foreign land to me.
For CJ, of course, it’s all brand new. One of the attributes that has become apparent is that she approaches new things with a focus and intensity usually reserved for art-house films. In the photo above, she inspects a newborn piglet at the fair’s “Miracle of Birth Center,” where they feature fresh-squeezed farm animals. Note the concentration in her eyes. It’s the same look she gives to everything and everyone new. A slight knitting of the brow, a fixed gaze and a timid pat.
Her circumspective nature will come in handy. I told her that “Pigs say ‘Moooo’.”
Becky says that she’ll grow up not believing a word Daddy tells her. I say that will make her a good journalist. And doom her to a life of poverty and ridicule. Oh, well.
Today, CJ learned how to sit up by herself. Not actually get into a seated position, mind you, but maintain a seated position. A milestone, to be certain. But when Becky excitedly pointed it out to me, I had a hard time generating the requisite amount of enthusiasm. I dutifully grabbed the camera and snapped a few shots. (Click here to see more of them)
It’s much too soon to have become inured to the new tricks perpetrated by my offspring. At this rate, I’ll be totally ignoring her before she gets a chance to burp out her first words.
While I failed to be impressed by her sitting up, another development did interest me.
When CJ was first born, we were not prepared with a name for her. In sending out an e-mail notifying folks about her birth, I had said that her name was “TBD” or “to be determined.” For the two days that she was without a name, I lobbied for “Tabeedee” as a middle name. To no avail.
Since then, even after she had been properly named, I’ve generally been calling her “Tabeedee”, although on this blog, I tend to refer to her as CJ, in large part because it’s simply easier to type. Most people, however, generally call her “CJ” or “Clara.”
Today, as I was trying to get her attention for the above picture, when I called out “Tabeedee,” she turned to me and smiled. “Clara,” on the other hand, elicited no reaction. Score.
This is *not* a contest, but I did want to share Gregg and Sarah’s similarly gymnastic adventures with their Henry. Understand that next month Henry turns 2-years-old next month (as opposed to CJ’s 6 months) and that the video is a re-enactment of a time when Henry was of a more manageable weight and size (and when Gregg was not as far removed from his days wreaking havoc on an ultimate Frisbee field).
Also, in my original posting, I neglected to mention the rise this trick got out of a passer-by who witnessed it. When I performed it in a park in Muscatine, Iowa a couple weekends ago, a local woman warned, “If you’re not careful, you’re going to turn that girl into a tomboy!” She did not mean it in a nice way. Yes, she used the word “tomboy,” but she really meant (gasp!) something the name of which she dare not speak (heaven forbid!).
Like a lot of people, I find that I use the same tone of voice in speaking to the dog and speaking to the baby. I also find that my words have the same lack of impact on both of them.
When we got the dog, Heidi, last year, we were without child and Becky seemed convinced that we weren’t going to conceive. A month after we got Heidi, voila. Personally, I would have rather we had waited on the dog, but here we are.
I’m not really good at the high-pitched coo-cooing, but I try. Having the dog to practice on for a few months was helpful, though. “Sit.” “Wait.” “Come!” “Good girl.” At one point or another in the last 6 months, those have all come in handy with CJ. Particularly “Stay.” I doubt that will last, though.
Still, I’m looking forward to seeing whether some things you do with a dog work with CJ. For example, in addressing a dog, you’re supposed to say things only once. Repeating the same command over and over is a waste, because it loses its impact, and the dog thinks you don’t mean it. If they don’t obey after the first instruction, you correct them.
Yeah, that’ll work with CJ. I’m shopping for choke chains now. Do they come in toddler sizes?
As I’ve mentioned in the past, Becky and I have different standards for what constitutes acceptable risk. Last year, before CJ came along, we were visiting friends in Southern California who have two children, one almost 3 years old and the other a 1-month-old. While standing outside a restaurant along a modestly busy street of a Los Angeles suburb, the toddler began walking down the sidewalk. She would peek back to see if anyone was watching/following her, and she was clearly enticing someone to come get her.
Me? I’m just not that great at playing that kind of game. Becky ran after her, appalled that I would let a toddler go alone down a street where cars were going by at 40 miles per hour.
“That’s why they have another one,” I said, pointing to the 1-month-old.
Anyway, the above video is from last weekend’s wedding. I apologize for its tiltedness…I couldn’t figure out how to rotate the video. UPDATE: I figured out how to rotate the video…but now I look fat. Wait. Maybe I am fat.
Becky describes this as “the trick where daddy tries to wrench CJ’s arms off and then drop her on her head.”
Clara Jade Gaw
