One Thousand Words

When I was still taking art classes, I had a session on how to construct a portfolio. One of the tips was, of course, make sure EVERY PIECE is good. And if you’re doing sequential art, show that you actually can DO sequential art, can tell a story through art, not just have a bunch of splash pages and pin ups. But specifically, we were told to have your strongest piece as the very first one, and your second strongest one as the last one. That way, you set the tone with the first piece and then you end on a high note, so people viewing your portfolio are impressed right away and also leave with a good impression.

Then Nesko and I watched a pop sci show about how the brain works, and they just said lead with positive stuff and people gloss over the negative. First impressions super matter, apparently.

But I’m going to stick with what I was originally taught, and I’m going to sandwich some grossness between cute stories.

THE FIRST CUTE STORY

Niko no longer says “yes.”

When I say that, I don’t mean that he’s become suddenly and overwhelmingly negative. I mean that while he agrees to things, the word “yes” no longer passes his lips. Nor does yeah, or as he says it, “yay-uh.” No, it’s suddenly all “Sure” and “Of course.” As in, “Niko, would you like some milk?” “Oh, of course I would!” “Niko, would you please pick up your blocks?” “Oh, sure!” “Niko, would you like a hug?” “Oh, of course I do!”

WHAT EVEN IS THIS.

It’s like he has a secret handbook on being cute.

The other day, I asked him if he would like some applesauce and he said “Of course.” And then he said “Actually, I would really appreciate it if I would have some pudding instead, please.”

Actually.

I would really appreciate.

OH MY GOD.

Can I have another kid who’s just, like, a copy of him? Because he’s basically perfect. Except not as the next story will reveal.

THE GROSS STORY

At the age of four years and 5 months, Niko has decided that it is HIGH TIME he learns to wipe his own butt. He’s been using up flushable wipes at an alarming rate and we’ve been dealing with random poo fingers here and there. But then yesterday he apparently decided it was TIME TO STOP FUCKING AROUND. He approached wiping his own butt with a grim seriousness. LET’S DO THIS THING, he resolved.

And he started going in the bathroom every half hour to squeeze out some pathetic tiny turd nugget.

He’s kind of obsessed.

And suddenly, we’re back to having pants accidents.

“Mama,” he says sternly. “I had a little bit of a poop accident.”

He is not proud of these.

So I’ve been picking up flecks of feces from the bathroom floor, doing a lot of hand washing, reminding him that he can’t use an entire package of flushable wipes in one go, etc.

And then, just after Nesko got home, I was in the dining room when I saw what looked to my weak eyes to be a a brand new knot hole in the wooden floor. Wait. There was no knothole there before… was there? I prodded it with my toe. It went squish.

Look.

I don’t have a lot of expectations out of life.

But one that I cling to is the expectation that I can walk through my house without stepping in shit.

Nesko launched into a long story about how HE was working at a house with DOGS and they had to RUN A LINE and the yard was FULL OF POOP and I’m like, ok. That’s horrible and gross. But that, at least, is outside. In nature. Nature, you know, that thing that is a toilet for wild animals. THE GREAT OUT DOORS IS ONE HUGE TOILET. My house? Not so much. My dining room floor? NOPE.

I just… no.

So then I patrolled the rest of the house, squinting at every smudge and speck, armed with a bottle of disinfectant and paper towels.

And then Nesko gathered Niko into his lap for cuddles and finger nail trimmings, and we discovered a motherlode of poo on Niko’s heel.

THE SECOND CUTE STORY

Niko has a baby.

His baby is named Baby.

Baby is a girl (a DWIR-OLE) except for when she’s a boy.

Baby currently lives in the bouncy seat that he used when he was an infant, that we’re holding on to until Nesko’s sister who just had a baby returns from Europe. At this point, we will have to evict Baby from her perch, her soft and cradling throne.

Niko sometimes carries Baby around, and feeds her cookies (wooden blocks, string, etc) or shares things he’s eating with her. “One little nut for me, and one for Baby. And one little nut for me, and one for Baby.” He invariably eats Baby’s portion, of course. He also brings her small toys, books, and shoes (?) for her to snuggle with so she doesn’t get lonely. And from time to time he decides that baby is taking a nap so he walks around and shushes us all because Baby is sleeping. Then he decides that Baby is fully asleep so we can be loud again. “Baby sure is sleeping hard! She’s a hard sleeper.”

Sometimes Baby needs a diaper change, or Niko decides it’s time to potty train her. He’s very encouraging. He cleans her up and cuddles her and says kind things.

It is the most adorable thing.

It almost makes me forget that I stepped in poop in the dining room.

Technorati Tags: 4 year old, parenting, poop, potty training

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Niko has seriously levelled up in some aspects of his problem solving/helpfulness skills and it’s both adorable and ARGH NO STOP PLEASE NO at the same time. For instance, pouring his own drinks leads to massive spills, wiping his own pooey bum leads to poo everywhere, and jumping up and using a tool to turn on a light switch is an awesome idea but when that tool is a crayon it leads to crayon on the lightswitch/walls. There’s also the frustrating fact that he is ABLE to fully dress himself but still insists on us “helping” him where “helping” is “doing almost everything.” However, I think that’s primarily him being a bit clingy because a lot of stuff is changing and changing fast (Nesko has a new job and isn’t home as much, school is starting soon, we’re talking about moving albeit not for at least a year, etc). But I look at my little baby who came into this world as a helpless squalling grub, and every day I get closer to seeing the adult who’s going to leave my house.

He spent most of Saturday with his Tetka (aunt), and didn’t get home until pretty late. He had a super great time with her (he always does, she’s great) and before he left she told him that LATER ON as in IN THE FUTURE he could come over again and “swim” in the pool (a little wading pool, nothing big/fancy… if it was a real pool you know I’d rudely move in and never leave). He interpreted this, as little kids do, as TOMORROW.

So instead of sleeping in on Sunday he bounded into our bedroom, bright and alert, at 5:00 a. m.

I’M AWAKE NOW! IT’S TIME TO BE AWAKE! HEY WHY ARE YOU GUYS STILL SLEEPING?!? IT’S TIME TO BE AWAKE NOW! I NEED YOU TO HELP ME PUT ON MY SWIMMING CLOTHES! I’M GOING SWIMMING WITH TETKA NAMEREDACTED! I NEED TO PUT ON MY SWIMMING PANTS! WHERE IS MY WATER SHIRT? I’M GOING TO GO PACK MY BAG!

Then he scampered off.

He came back a few minutes later wearing swim trunks (over underpants).

I’M ALL PACKED NOW! WHERE IS MY WATER SHIRT? WHEW IT’S GOING TO BE A HOT AND SUNNY DAY, I NEED MY SUNSCREEM. WHERE IS MY SUNSCREEM? WE CAN ALL PUT ON SUNSCREEM AND GO SWIMMING IN MY LITTLE POOL. IT’S SOOOOOO HUGE IT’S ENORMOUS! I PACKED MY BAG! HEY, WHY AREN’T YOU UP? I NEED TO EAT SOME CEREAL YOU GUYS! I HAVE TO EAT A GOOD BREAKFAST BEFORE I GO SWIMMING!

I dragged myself out of bed and helped him get a bowl of cereal (WITH MILK OK MAMA) and told him he had to not wear underpants with his swim suit, so he stripped down and redressed in just the trunks. He scarfed down two bowls of cereal and I checked his bag. He’d packed:

• a full change of clothing including underpants and socks
• a hat
• sunglasses
• his water bottle
• appropriate snacks in little containers

This child does not need me anymore, except to get things off of high shelves. OBVIOUSLY.

Nesko called his sister who was all yeah no, I’m busy all day, I meant LATER and we broke the news gently to Niko. But not until he’d told me just how BIG and HUGE and ENORMOUS his swimming pool is. Internets, his swimming pool is SO BIG it is the size of my butt.

Apparently my bottom is now a unit of measure.

I told him that my butt is pretty small for a swimming pool and he said OH HM WAIT NO. MY SWIMMING POOL, he said, IS THE SIZE OF THAT THING YOU GOT UP THERE and he pointed at my shoulder which, I mean, that’s even smaller than my butt. Whaaat?

He’s decided that today is a good day to have a picnic so he’s spread a little blanket on the floor and consuming all food (breakfast, snack, lunch) right there. I can dig it.

Technorati Tags: 4 year old, parenting

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We had ISSUES yesterday involving TEARS and RECRIMINATIONS because Niko wanted to paint but didn’t want to clean up his toys first, which I set as a requirement… in part because I couldn’t even get TO his painting stuff to get it out, so thick were the wooden train tracks and stuffed animals upon the ground. He eventually came around and we Cleaned All The Things but he’d lost the urge to paint.

It came back this morning.

He helped me get his supplies, including spreading out the blue plastic table cloth we put on the table to protect it. He took off his shirt and painted several dinosaur scenes and practiced writing his name with big chunky paint brush and tempera paint.

I really need to video Niko painting because he narrates what’s going on while he creates. This is the sky and this is sand down here and here’s a Mamenchisaurus with its RIDICULOUSLY LONG NECK and its really big feet and here is a Diplodocus with its long neck and long tail and its spikes on its back and now here are its really big feet. And these are its footprints! And here are some clouds, because it’s going to rain and it’s going to rain on them and here are some rain drops falling on them and they’re falling on the ground and over here on the sea. This is the sea. And here’s a baby! It hatched out of this egg and here’s some other eggs in a nest.

It’s wonderful and adorable and he got very covered in paint. I had to scrub it out of his ear and one arm pit. TOTALLY WORTH IT.

After about an hour of painting we cleaned up and he got into his play dough and made an apple that is lumpy but recognizable as an apple, complete with stem and leaves, and then he made a potato (what?!?) and some cookies and a pancake.

He also lamented that it was SO SAD that he didn’t have A SPECIAL TABLE FOR HIS TRAINS like he’s seen at some stores. I reminded him that he has a really big table in the living room that he could PUT trains on, so he constructed a city on the table with wooden block sky scrapers, wooden train tracks, plastic trees, and rocks. There’s a train station with a parking lot.

After his nap we’re going to work on writing some more.

It’s a good life.

Technorati Tags: 4 year old, crafting, parenting

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Niko’s gotten really into coloring and painting lately. He pretty much exclusively is interested in dinosaurs ONLY and gets super pissed if a dinosaur that’s supposed to have spikes/plates/a frill/horns/etc isn’t portrayed as such so he will DRAW THEM ON while scolding the original artist. “How could they even DO THAT? They should KNOW that a Kentrosaurus has a big spike on its side! They should KNOW THAT!”

He likes to paint, mostly with tempera paint (finger paints make his fingers feel icky, so mostly he uses a Popsicle stick to scoop paint onto the paper then push it around). He paints stegosaurs and allosaurs and baby sauropods eating ferns, and he adds some trackways (footprints), and then he draws a giant comet coming straight at them. It’s a whole story process.

We used to set him up with an art easel in the kitchen, which has tile floor. Now that he’s marginally less prone to sloping paint EVERYWHERE I set him up on the dining room table, over the hard wood floors.

I pour some paint into these little paper cups I picked up for free somewhere. They’re about the size of a dixie or bathroom cup. A 1/2 cup sized reusable plastic storage container, small glass, or ice cube tray would also work. And then the pain, paper, etc gets set down on the plastic table cloth we saved from his birthday.

When we were ordering birthday decorating supplies, I splurged a tiny bit on a blue plastic table cloth. It’s meant to be disposable. I did not dispose of it. Instead, I wiped off all birthday crumbs, folded it up, and stuck it in our big white cabinet that holds printer paper, art supplies, and computer cords. And when he wants to paint I pull that sucker out and lay it down on the table. It’s water resistant, so if he spills a bit of water on it the water doesn’t soak into the table cloth or (antique) (and ugly, but emotionally priceless for Nesko) dining room table. It protects the table and table cloth from paint spills. And when he’s done, I just fold it up and put it away.

We’ve gotten a lot of use out of it. It’s way cheaper than “oil cloth” (which is not actually oil cloth, may I pedantically point out), and less likely to be impregnated with cancer-causing chemicals. It reduces my anxiety about paint RUINING EVERYTHING. And it lets Niko MAKE A LOT OF ART!!! Which he loves doing.

Speaking of child!art, what do you do with it? I have kept a total of maybe 3 pieces (two of which are drawings of us as a family, and the first drawings he made of humans) and I display the rest for a while before tossing it. Or I send it to family or friends. But really, I toss a lot of his art. I might scan or photograph some of his current stuff before tossing it, but really I consider it ephemera.

What’s your take on this?

Technorati Tags: 4 year old, art, parenting

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Niko’s gotten interested in “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic” or as he calls it, “I Love You Pony.” He’s very taken with the show and talks about how the ponies are his friends. He’s renamed various stuffed animals as Pinky Pie (his favorite), Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Inky Dinky (his own made up pony character, who is a lizard) and sometimes we play Ponies. The show is ostensibly about friendship, and each show wraps up with an explicit discussion of the lesson learned in that show, usually one about friendship or respect or generally not being an asshole.

Sounds good, right?

But actually it’s not.

The show models a lot of negative behavior that’s only resolved at the very end. So there’s 5 minutes of positive verbal addressing of the negative behavior, and 16 minutes of demonstrating negative behavior before then. The main focus is on the negative behavior, that’s what’s given the most attention, that’s what’s modeled for the kids. Kids who watch shows that model negative behavior with a positive ending focus overwhelmingly on the negative behavior. They act on what’s modeled. As most parents and caregivers know, “do as I say and not as I do” doesn’t really work.

I’m not really loving “My Little Pony.” Too much negative behavior is displayed, and the ending lesson generally feels overly prescriptive and too sugary sweet. It’s a lesson, and we know it’s a lesson.

So what show does my judgmental ass approve of?

I really like “Dinosaur Train.” When we first started watching it, I made fun of the show’s premise. It feels like such a marketing thing, you know? Just shoving together two things kids like: dinosaurs, and trains. Woo, hop on that merchandizing bandwagon! But the show fundamentally works. It follows 4 siblings (one of whom is adopted) and their parents and friends as they travel around studying other dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures. The kids play together really well, address and solve interpersonal issues quickly and fairly, and demonstrate great interpersonal skills and problem solving… including shutting down bullying. The parents are involved in their lives, including the dad who is kind of goofy but not because he’s a guy, because he’s a goofy character. He’s really involved and competent as a parent. Social messages in the show are delivered subtly and consistently throughout an episode instead of broadcast at the end.

“Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” is another good one. The social skills messages are more overt, since that’s the purpose of the show and it’s aimed at younger kids. But the messages are integrated and positive behavior is modeled throughout the entire show instead of being spoken about briefly at the end. Again, there’s rich involvement from male parents and guardians.

“Sid the Science Kid” also integrates positive interpersonal skills. The kids might argue or disagree, but it’s done so in a positive and constructive manner and quickly resolved. Sid’s dad is active, involved, and competent at parenting and the show makes an effort at showing a wide range of ethnicities and cultures as a norm and also emphasizing women’s role in STEM fields. There’s a big focus on critical thinking and working together and that’s again woven through the entire show and not just tacked on at the end.

It’s not a coincidence that these shows are all 1) on PBS and 2) relatively recent shows. I think there’s going to be a bigger push, at least for little kids’ programming, to get child psychologists involved in designing and writing the shows. There’s growing awareness of how kids consume media, and what they do and do not pick up on. As parents and guardians we are gatekeepers for what our kids consume. I don’t think occasional episodes of MLP or Scooby Doo or whatever will ruin a kid forever. But I do think that part of my job as a parent is to discuss things Niko watches with him. So, for instance, the last time he watched a MLP episode, I had to discuss with him how most people are terrible at things when they try them the first time but that if you work hard you’ll get good at it… a direct contradiction to the episode’s focus on being naturally gifted at things and great the first time one turns one’s hand at something new.

Technorati Tags: parenting, toddler, tv

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Jason Good has a blog post about reasons his 3 year old is flipping out, and it’s pretty funny. It digs right into just how irrational little kids are, how confusing and overwhelming the world can be for them and how confusing and overwhelming they can be for their parents/caregivers. I like his blog. He’s obviously an involved and loving parent who knows his kids well and is able to put a humorous yet understanding spin on daily life. So when I first saw links to a tumblr about why a kid is crying I assumed it was a link to his site. It wasn’t. Instead, it’s a collection of photos of a crying 2 or 3 year old with a caption as to why he’s crying. The kid cries a lot, apparently. And the kid’s parent takes time to photograph the kid while crying and note down why he’s crying (milk’s in the wrong color cup, a piece of cheese is the wrong shape, etc). There’s a lot of people who think it’s really funny.

I don’t.

It’s really, really hard being a kid– especially a young kid. A really little kid flips out when his cheese is the wrong shape or her milk’s in the wrong cup because 1) that means it’s just plain WRONG and/or 2) that’s one thing in a huge world they have control over and now they’ve lost that control. Good’s blog post feels empathic. It reads as a guy who understands that it’s hard to be a little kid, and that it can be frustrating to be the parent of a little kid, but if you step back you can see the humor in the situation. The tumblr feels… I don’t know. My mind lights on words like “cruel” and “predatory” but I don’t think that’s quite it. Friends of mine suggest it’s something that was designed to go viral and sure enough, the creator and his family were on TV concerning it. But what’s the difference between Good’s blog post and the tumblr?

I think the biggest thing is that Good put in effort after the fact to list reasons his kid was flipping out and the sheer number, and ridiculousness of them, builds and is funny. And a lot of stuff he talks about were things he was doing with his kid, interacting with his kid. The tumblr is quick snapshots of a kid that already looks stressed out accompanied by one-sentence descriptions. It feels like the tumblr author prioritizes taking a photo of his kid in crises to helping his kid in crises solve the problem. Good talks about his kid, the tumblr author complains about his kid.

And, you know, sometimes parents and caregivers need to vent. Kids can be frustrating, challenging, hard work. And when parents and caregivers complain they’re frequently abused for doing so, especially if they’re women. (In fact, one friend of mine asked if the tumblr would be as popular if it were a mom writing it; dads get way more leeway to be less than saints. I think it’d fly as long as she was white, affluent, and joked about how much wine she drinks. Several “mommybloggers” fitting that description landed book deals based on their HILARZ discussions of alcoholic parenting, then checked into rehab. That really wouldn’t have worked for them if they weren’t a certain type.) So I’m all for finding and creating safe spaces to vent, to unload, to ask for help. But that really doesn’t feel like it’s what’s happening.

In my experience, which is fairly limited to my own relatively laid back 4 year old and some babysitting (age ranges from 1 1/2-7 years old) most freak outs can be nipped in the bud by remembering HALT. Is the kid Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired? If your kid (or adult) starts getting on edge and acting brittle, look at the circumstances. When did they last eat? Do they need to calm down and sleep? Do they need attention? Are they angry/frustrated and need to express that and then calm down before proceeding? For really little kids, also check to see if they need to use the bathroom or are generally over whelmed. Being mindful of your kid’s needs can go a long way toward creating a smoother life for everyone involved. This isn’t some magic bullet that will solve all your problems, obviously.

It’s also important to remember that little kids don’t have adult brains. If they ask for a piece of cheese and you give them the “wrong” shape of cheese? That is not what they asked for. Until they make certain synaptic connections, they cannot translate that. It’s not possible. Their brains are growing, and they aren’t just increasing in size they’re increasing connections and the ability to make deductions. They have very little control over their lives, so cling to what they CAN control: what color cup they use, what shirt they wear. They are just learning new skills and get frustrated easily because what they WANT to do is so much harder than it should be because they are still learning how to do it. When little kids flip out, it’s because they can’t cope with the world at the moment. Part of maturing is learning to cope with it, even when frustrating… and part of parenting is teaching kids how to cope with a frustrating world.

Or you could take photos of your sobbing child and post it to tumblr, I guess.

Edited to add:
I was talking about this with a couple other people and more than one person compared it (negatively) to The Honest Toddler. Good and THT both discuss parenting and specific child-centered situations, and tend to poke fun at adults, parents, and specific styles of parenting (generally affluent, privileged parenting) while the tumblr pokes fun at a kid… a kid who’s defenseless at the moment. Instead of holding the powerful up to scrutiny, it holds the defenseless up. It’s a bit exploitative. And it bothers me that there’s just this constant string of negative photos of a little kid having problems.

Technorati Tags: parenting, toddler, tumblr

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A few months ago, Nesko and I were worried and upset. Why was our child acting like an out of control jackass? Was it something we were/weren’t doing? Was this a major personality change? My MIL returned to beating the drum of “it’s his medication’s fault” (he takes an oral medication for his asthma every night) but she blames everything on that. I fretted to a friend of mine who doesn’t have kids but who nannied for several different families while in college.

I keep telling you, Brig. Little kids are psychos.

She is full of wisdom!

The best part of getting advice from someone like her, someone who’s raised kids but isn’t a parent, is that she isn’t as emotionally invested in her advice because 1) they aren’t HER kids and 2) she’s worked for a bunch of different families and seen just how different kids are. So she can be all “well, this worked this time and that worked another time, your situation reminds me of this other thing” and I get a range of advice instead of “THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE DID WITH OUR CHILD AND HE’S PERFECT SO IF IT DOESN’T WORK FOR YOU IDEK YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”

Anyway, apparently kids who are 3 1/2 go through this stage where they turn into horrific beasts and EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE and they challenge everything and “forget” all rules and sometimes start crapping their pants again even if they’ve been potty trained for a year because HA HA HA WHY NOT, SUCKER.

So we battened down the hatches and set boundaries and enforced rules gently but firmly and remembered to give him extra time for transitions, and… I realized the other day that I no longer want to find a nice family of wolves to take over raising my child. He’s back to being delightful and charming.

It’s not perfect, he’s back to sleeping in our bed which I HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE. But at least he’s sleeping now and not waking up constantly screaming about how lonely he is… or just plain screaming. His actual hand to god real nightmares and night terrors have been completely gone since he started sleeping with us again, poor duck. So in theory I should be more rested. But in actuality he pushes me to the edge of the bed and is a very active sleeper, hitting and kick and working his cold feet under my body to scrape his toenails along my torso/crotch. If I put my back to him he hooks his toes into my butt like he’s a tow truck trying to haul me out of a ditch. It’s weird, man! Toes don’t go there!

But this too shall pass. He won’t be in our bed forever.

He’ll either grow out of this, too, or I’ll look up that nice wolf family I had my eye on. There’s some coyotes in the area. You think they’d take him in?

Technorati Tags: 4 year old, parenting, sleep, toddler

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Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

William Makepeace Thackery said that but if you’re anything like me you might remember it better from “The Crow.”

Niko is still in that stage where he thinks I know everything and can do everything. If he asks me a question and I don’t have an answer, he thinks I am holding out on him and gets angry at me. I gave him some blueberries and didn’t pluck a dried bit of leaf off one of them, and he was offended. “Why would you even think I like this?” He asks me to draw an Ornitholestes and takes it personally if I draw it “wrong” (holding an egg/not holding an egg/too big/too small/too happy/not happy enough/dancing/not dancing/etc). He had a hilarious looking pratfall the other day out of NOWHERE (usually you know why a kid falls down. They slip on a piece of paper or step on a floppy sock or stumble over a toy or slide on that slippery patch of floor they’d rubbed butter into earlier or something. He just flew right down.) that ended up fairly serious, with a badly bitten lip. He clung to me, sobbing, upset that he was crying so much and unable to stop. Then he blamed me. “You should have SAVED ME. You should have CAUGHT me.” It was my fault he fell, you see. Because I should have intervened. Like lightning. Like god.

I can’t save him. I can’t read his mind and make him happy. I can’t make everything all better. He’s still grappling with the idea of mortality, of death; with the idea that some day he might not have a mama and a tata, that he’ll be alone. I can’t just make that better.

He has nightmares, and night terrors. Maybe this is the side effect of a medication he’s on, or maybe it’s just his age or his relation to me (I get nightmares frequently, as in several times a week… during times of high stress they can hit every single night multiple times a night. It’s… not restful.) He screams and cries and thrashes and he’s seriously upset, and it just kills me that I can’t make everything right. I hold him, I try to calm him down. One particularly bad one I tried to reassure him that he was in his own little bed and he was safe. “I’m not safe. I’m not! I’m not safe anywhere!” he wailed. It was like a knife through the heart. He didn’t remember it at all the next day.

“Why didn’t you save me? You should have saved me!”

I’m trying, kiddo. I’m trying.

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Niko, like me, grows hair and nails super fast. So we trim his nails frequently or else he claws us up, and we cut his hair and then like two days later he looks like wolves have been raising him. He was fretting over being “chupo chupovee” (a hairy man) recently and kept asking for a haircut. At one point I went into the bathroom and someone had removed the bathmat (draping it over the garbage can in the kitchen) and put Niko’s little pink chair in the middle of the floor. WHO COULD HAVE DONE THAT. Why, Niko, of course! Preparing for his haircut. So Nesko finally took him in there and trimmed his hair. I tried to slip in there to use the toilet and the floor was entirely covered in hair and Niko was shirtless and I pretty much had a glimpse of what he will look like when he is 40: a dude with a hair sweater. It’s your destiny, dude. Sorry. Or maybe you’ll like being super hairy and bask in the glory of never being fully naked even when unclothed, I don’t know.

Nesko’s gotten pretty good at cutting Niko’s hair, but the problem remains that Niko has my hairline. Namely, his hairline almost reaches his eyebrows near the temples. It’s the opposite of Nesko’s hairline, which is very high up, giving him a smooth high intelligent looking forehead, as opposed to my brutish almost Neanderthal look. It’s like I married a dolphin, y’all. And Niko very obviously takes after me. I expect his unibrow will start coming in when he’s 12 or so.

Anyway, he’s all groomed now and looks like a tiny human and not a feral beast child, so that’s a great change. Unfortunately, he’s still acting like a feral beast child roughly half the time. It’s less than ideal.

Technorati Tags: 3 year old, parenting

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I tried to put Niko down around his regular time and he was riled up and fussy and kept popping out of bed and wanting just one more thing etc. His negative behavior ramped up until I was standing outside his door returning him repeatedly to bed as he escalated his screams. He begged me to stay with him, said he needed me, begged me to let him sleep “in the big bed” (our bed) etc. He finally insisted that he needed to tell me something and I relented.

“Don’t get lost!” he begged me.

“What.” I said.

“Don’t go into the woods and get lost!”

We discussed how I wasn’t going to go into the woods, I wasn’t going to get lost, I wasn’t going to sneak out in the middle of the night while he was sleeping, I wasn’t going to run off with wolves or get eaten by wolves, I wasn’t going to get hugged by a hug wolf and turn into a hug wolf and go on a hug wolf rampage. I wasn’t going to leave him.

“Are you going to die like the seal’s mama did?”

Mother.

Fucking.

Caillou.

I don’t normally let Niko watch “Caillou” because the protagonist’s whiny voice is irritating and I don’t want to model that tone, or negative bullshit behavior, for Niko. But yesterday I was elbow deep in sprtiz cookie dough and using a new press I wasn’t as familiar with so I was having some few problems and hiking out to the living room to change the channel wasn’t at the top of my priorities. It apparently should have been, as an otherwise innocuous trip to the zoo involved meeting a baby seal who’s mama died so it was being hand reared. And apparently that concept soaked in Niko’s brain for awhile only to surface tonight in a fit of terror and screams and neediness.

So I hugged Niko and kissed him and promised him that I would never die. I would never leave him. What if I get sick? I’m not going to get sick. What if I get hurt? I’m not going to get hurt. What if I get old? I’m not going to get old. I’m never going to die, I’m never going to get old, and I’m never going to leave.

These are promises I can’t back up.

I have no way of keeping these promises.

And it was utterly useless to try and soft shoe around the issue, to make vague claims that I simply would never leave, that I would always love him. No. He wanted the full deal, the full promise.

I will never die.

I will never age.

Jesus, I can’t keep that promise and it’s tearing me up.

Technorati Tags: 3 year old, death, parenting

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