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.

I’m doomed. Still.

“Daddy, GO AWAY!” she said.

“Honey, that’s  not very polite,” mom said.

“Daddy, PLEASE, GO AWAY!”

There are so many fine lines in parenting.

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.

Please.

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.

For recent pics, click here.