daddyville

I can only hope that my mother eventually forgave me for the million+ questions that I must have pummeled her with during my growing up. It seems that she has as there is no evidence of any harboring of ill will for this rather innocent, but nonetheless wide spread abuse of the aging by their bright eyed and ever curious--to the point of wishing that you could just grab a fly swater to fend them off--Tots and Tot-ettes. As we know, this would never fly (no pun intended) and we would also never do that anyway. But the thought has probably crossed more than one parent's mind out there; I'm sure of it.

The point here is just to say that having your own child changes your perspective on everything. Absolutely everything. As a teenager, I remember having a heavy dislike for this particular parental response because I thought that it meant that I was being disavowed as a reason/experience-enabled member of the household and in a small way that might've been partially true. Although it was not really that, it was more that my mother either didn't have the time and/or the desire (read: Both!) to explain herself to someone who thought that he knew more than was actually possible at 14 years of age.

I remember getting all hoped up on psycho-babble in my high school psychology class and then coming home and practicing my 'still wet' analytical skills on my mom first thing through the door after her long, hard day at the office. Yeah, that didn't particulary go over so well. It was kind of like the relationship that sparks have to gasoline. Most of the time we were fine though....as long as I remembered that I was a kid and not her equal. (She gave me a lot of latitude growing up.)

Age changes things though, as life takes you across the fence and shows you life from the other side as you now have a little one (or ones) who question(s) every little thing that you ask them to do. For us it's not really every little thing, but there are times when it sure seems that way. Our daughter is only 4 1/2 at this point and she already thinks that she understands things just fine. She's got a few, but otherwise it's all jungle. So there are times when she asks for an explanation of a directive that I've given her by saying "Why (are you asking me to do) this?" or "Why that?" and a lot of the time I try to be reasonable and give her a little info as to why 'we're doing this' or that so that she has that sense of involvement in the process. This doesn't always work and sometimes it backfires outright and then out of my mouth pops that classic phrase "Why, you're asking me? Because I said. That's Why. (silence) ....and I'm your Dad. End of Story."

P.S. Hey Mom, by the way, you rock. You're a Saint, and I love you.

We--or I should say Shayla and Helena--had a great play date at our house today. It's so much fun to see the little ones playing and having fun in harmony and happiness. It does a parent's heart good to see these things. For me, it makes all the challenging times worthwhile, because there are times during the other when I wonder if there will ever be a break, a lull, in the drama of it all. We have a little girl after all, and so although I have nothing to compare it to, I can say that little girls are fairly emotional about most things, and when they are small, this is about everything. This is at least my experience, and I own that, but it makes it all the more special when things flow in harmony. God Bless harmonious experiences. Amen and Amen.

I don't know if you have kids or not or that if you do, that you may actually remember what it was like in the mornings when you were feeding them and getting them ready for school when they were wee tots, but for me this is my first (and only, so far), and what a ride it's been and we've only barely begun. Bargaining for Breakfast is only one small charade on a larger board seemingly full of games.

My daughter is now four and a half years old and has just begun Pre-K at a local public school. This has been a boon for me as a stay-at-home-dad, as I can now start to look for some part time work to supplement our family's income, which with her mom going to school for her Master's and working part time, would be a very welcome economical addition to the family's substantive needs.

Like any household getting ready to start the day that has young people as a proponent to the family mix, there is a lot of hustling, corralling, and 'prodding' that goes on. Breakfast is that special meal of the day that starts everyone's 'engines' for whatever awaits them outside the walls of the house out in the 'real world'. Pre-Kers don't really understand what this means, of course, and therefore this leaves you, their lowly parent, to be the one who begs and pleads and bargains in every creative way imaginable--doing acrobatics around the living room and such--to get them to eat something more than some milk and a half a piece of bread before sending them out into the jungle.
"You're going to be hungry in a matter of 45 minutes from now, and I'm not going to have the people at school thinking that we don't choose to feed you before sending you out the door", you say as calmly as you possibly can. "I'm not going to have you begging the teacher for a school breakfast when we've already tried to feed you four courses early this morning."
"Yes, daddy", she says as she looks at me as if I've lost my mind and knows very well that nobody eats breakfast at home anymore in this day and age.
"Well, get to it then. It doesn't really look as if any of your food has migrated into your stomach yet. Make it disappear. Make me happy and eat so that I know that you will not be asking the closest adult near you at school for food in an hour. ....Please? Pretty please?", I plead. If you had told me 5 years ago that one of the possibly biggest challenges that I would experience as a parent to a young school-aged child would be to get them to eat a good breakfast before sending them off into the wild blue yonder of the public school system, I would have thought nothing of it. I would have considered it for 20 seconds or so, trying to imagine this vague, amorphous concept that you placed into my lap, not feeling at all the real life responsibility that biology places into the genes of real life parents. I would have breathed deeply, shrugged a little, pushed it off, got up and walked away. Well, my friends,...that is a pretty little picture of something I now term to be blissful ignorance. The truth is, that the ignorant never know that they're ignorant until they're not ignorant anymore and by then it's far too late to enjoy the benefits of the ignorance that once was. Ahh, to be ignorant... Oh well. Moving on.

"It's really hard daddy", she mumbles and moans as the words come slowly tumbling out of her mouth after I return back to check on her progress from 5 minutes earlier, her bowl still sitting there with her oatmeal still intact, barely touched and her baby banana still sitting in the same spot where I had laid it, stem still connected and whole.
"Okay. So you've decided that the oatmeal you agreed on is not really suiting you tastes today", I ask?
"Yes", she quickly interjects! "Exactly!" Okay, so I'll give her that one.
"Okay Shayla. You have one more chance to decide on something different that you'd like to eat this morning, but we're running out of time. So what'll it be", I ask? I beat her to the punch and suggest something both easy and quick for both of us considering our time constraints.
"How about almond butter on a toasted half of a sprouted grain English muffin?"
"Sure! That sounds fine daddy", she says with a big smile. Glorious! Maybe we've found something that we can agree on this morning! My fingers are crossed, literally.

Five minutes later I serve up the above to her and she does her best to eat about half of it plus the baby banana from before. Okay. I've done my duty I tell myself, and I tell her in no uncertain terms that "when your teacher asks me if you've eaten breakfast I will tell her with a crystal clear conscience, "Yes, she has", and that will be that. Okay?"
"Okay, daddy", she replies.

And with that, we went off to school, with another episode of 'breakfast bargaining' laid to rest. I really hope some of this is sinking into my little one's head. It's really hard for me to be such a stickler for routine, but I know that routine will save her later. If there's no hard and fast routine to begin with, what do you have to be flexible with later on? If there are no rules, if there's no sense of action and consequence, what's leniency mean when you choose to enact it? Nothing. That's the funny thing about rules: they help everyone, both the rule maker and the follower. (Pardon me. Being a parent can make you wildly philosophical. One does not lack for material.) *smile*

Shayla at 4 1/2 years old. She just keeps growing and growing and growing....