parenting

Bad Influence

/ Shane / 4 Comments

So, there is a flip side to the social butterfly coin.

We had a situation the other day. We were at the garden, and there was a little girl from the neighborhood who didn’t have a plot in the garden there. This little girl…hoo boy. Words escape me. She was the worst kid I have ever seen. She wouldn’t listen to anything. No matter how many times Sara said not to touch people’s gardens, or touch our things, or leave this or that alone, she just kept doing it. And the worst part was, she was convincing Evie to do it. She pulled out every trick in the book, telling Evie that her parents said it was okay to do things, telling us that Evie wanted her bike helmet, even though it was just a ploy to get the bike helmet we said she shouldn’t touch, etc. It was even worse than that, she had such sass on her. For example, she was trying to convince Evie to take off her shoes:

Sara: “Evie, don’t take off your shoes”
Girl, in her sassiest tone: “They’re not shoes, they’re boots.”

If we stopped watching them for even a second, the girl talked Evie into some compromising position; taking off her boots, practically strangling her trying to take off her helmet, getting her to take off her clothes so they could “shave” with sharp sticks. At one point I looked up and she had Evie by the hair and was getting ready to smash her face into the ground. She was, “washing [Evie’s] hair”. She never once called Evie by the right name, and even got into an argument with me about what Evie’s name was. Talk about oppositional defiant.

Did I mention this girl was 3 years old?

Poor, sweet Evie was completely unprepared for this. All of her interactions with other kids has been more or less adorable. Sometimes kids are bossy, but Evie’s okay with that. But we’ve never prepared her to resist being really taken advantage of or manipulated. It was actually quite startling.

It wasn’t all bad though. I was particularly proud to hear Evie say, “Remember what my mommy said…” a couple of times to the girl. It was like Evie was trying to do what was right, but she was totally overwhelmed by this other girl.

So here was the horrifying part. Evie wants to make friends so badly, that she was putting up with all of this. In fact, when the girl finally got called home (Thank god!) Evie said she was sad and she missed her. That really made my heart shrivel up inside.

Of course, when we did get back from the garden, Evie was not listening to us anymore, and being naughty. I was thunderstruck. We were around this girl for less than an hour, and, until her spell wore off, she had more influence with Evie than we had in years.

Thus the true horror of bad influences on your children was revealed to me. And to see Evie desperate for this girl’s attention, and to see how bad and corrupting this girl was, if only for a short time. It made me think of abused wives going back to their husbands. Now I am scared to send Evie to school, lest she fall in with a bad crowd! And furthermore, imagine being in that girl’s class in school. The teacher would not be able to give attention to anyone else, she would have to focus completely on dealing with her.

Really, the victim here is not Evie, it’s that poor little girl. If she acted like that with us, imagine what she is like at home. Imagine what her home is like in general. I feel really bad for her. However, at the end of the day, she’s not my responsibility, Evie is. And that’s why I am always going to be nervous whenever we go to the garden, that she might be waiting for us.

I kind of hoped I wouldn’t have to deal with things like this for a few years!

Social Butterfly

/ Shane / 4 Comments

When kids are little, even when they are “playing” with other kids, they’re not really playing with other kids. They’re mostly just playing at the same time as the other kids, who happen to be in close proximity. However, some switch recently flipped over in Evie’s head, where she suddenly noticed other kids. She really just loves to make friends.

Whenever we go to the park now, she’s so excited to talk to the other kids. She runs up to them and says, “My name is Evie, what’s your name?” She also tries to entice them to play whatever game she is playing, such as driving in the little plastic car and announcing casually, in her loudest voice, “The back is open, if anybody wants to sit in it!”

At soccer practice, we’ve been going with the same kids for like 8 weeks now. Suddenly, last weekend, it’s like they noticed each other. Soon Evie and another girl were holding hands and stopping periodically to hug each other. It was the most adorable thing ever. It was hilarious too, as each of them would kick a soccer ball in opposite directions, and then almost pull their arms out of their sockets as they both tried to run after. Eventually another boy joined in with the hand holding, and they almost threatened to destroy the entire practice with their peace, love, and happiness.

The other aspect of this is that she is now learning adult social skills, such as making conversation segues and small talk in order to keep conversation flowing. For example, seeing Nathan’s pop bottle: “I got a water bottle for Christmas from Santa. Have you seen the big girl bed that Santa got me?” which of course leads to her showing him around her room.

The other day she met a random girl at the library and Sara was watching her make small talk with the girl:

Evie: “So, where’s your mommy?”
Random Little Girl: “She’s at work.”
Evie: “My mommy never leaves me. Sometimes my daddy goes to Detroit.”

::General arguing about the moon for quite some time::
Random Little Girl: “The moon doesn’t look like this picture.”
Evie, finally getting fed up: “Sometimes the moon is a circle, and sometimes it is a crescent!”

I love watching her interact with other kids!

Why?

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Everybody knows this stage of development. “Why? Why? What? Why?” All day long we get these questions. Evie asks why so much, that it has become a sort of default response to every statement. She says it even when she doesn’t want to know why. We’ve even gotten in the habit of ignoring her first why, because if she really wants to know, she’ll ask again. This saves you from a lot of pointless question answering.

Now lots of times these are questions she really wants to understand, and, of course, lots of times these questions are questions that nobody could ever be able to answer.

Evie: “What time is it?”
Me: “5 o’clock.”
Evie: “Why?”
Me: “…”

She likes to ask things about total strangers like, “What’s that boy’s name?” or “Where is his mommy?” She also asks questions in other strange circumstances. Let me give you some examples.

Evie: “He doesn’t wear a hat.”
Me: “This one doesn’t wear a hat?”
Evie: “Why?”

So, she makes a statement, you repeat it back to her, and she asks you why. Or, another example, she asks you why to something that only she could know:

Me: “You don’t like to eat those ones.”
Evie: “Why?”
Me: “You’d have to ask yourself that.”
Evie: “Why? I was asking myself.”

(Yes, if you ever say ‘you’d have to ask yourself’ she almost always answers this way, out loud)

And lets not forget about “What?” As part of this sort of voracious information gathering, she really hates to miss out on anything, or not understand. If you try having a conversation around her but not include her, you will regret it. She will interrogate you on every aspect she doesn’t understand. Of course, once her questions are satisfied she doesn’t really *care* about the balancing of the check book, but she wants to understand what you are talking about, to be sure she doesn’t care. For example, she frequently asks me what time it is if she sees me looking at my watch, even though the time is essentially meaningless to her.

All in all though, the questions really aren’t as bad as you see on T.V. or whatever. I usually try to answer her as much as I can. And she doesn’t get too frustrated with it, so it’s not that big of a deal. But lets just say there are times where it is a bit trying.

And that’s sort of the point of having a toddler, isn’t it?

Facing Forward

/ Shane / 5 Comments

When you are a parent, it seems like you are constantly faced with tough decisions. You are called upon to make weighty decisions that have no clear right answer, and without any good, concrete evidence on which to make your decision. That’s why I like to talk about some of these things periodically on the blog. There really is no right answer, but at least someone out there might be able to read about how and why we did certain things, and maybe that will help them come to a decision of their own. Or maybe at least help them feel a little more secure in their decision, knowing someone else out there agrees with them. Or, barring all else, learn from our mistakes!

So, one such decision we made was to keep Evie sitting facing backwards in her car seat for as long as possible. Always when people see her sitting backwards, they’re always like, “Oh. She still sits backwards?” Even people without kids sometimes. So obviously it is something that people notice, and that stands out as odd.

Really, the root of this decision comes from this horrific video that Sara made me watch, about how much safer it is during a crash for kids to face backwards in their seats.

It is quite clear when watching the video, and watching the poor little crash dummy babies, that the seats really are designed to absorb shock better when facing backwards. And the seat itself has recommendations about how much a child should weigh before you turn the seat around.

So, if it is safer to face backwards, why is there such a push to have the kids face forwards?

I think the main reason that parents tend to assume kids want what they want. So they can imagine they would want to face forward, and that the kids would also want to face forward. Well, this is true to a point; kids do enjoy being able to see forward, or at least Evie does. But at the same time, until we turned her around, she had never experienced it any other way besides backwards. So she didn’t know what she was missing.

Also, it is easier to deal with her in the car when she is facing forwards. You can hand her things a lot easier. But at the same time, if backwards is safer, is it really worth a little added convenience? And we certainly managed to hand her things when she was backwards, and it wasn’t that inconvenient.

All that being said, it is so nice now that she is facing forwards! We saved it as long as we could, and then switched her around on the trip back from Pittsburgh, on the brilliant idea that it would help a long trip pass quicker. Evie really enjoys being able to see what’s in front of her. She always asks what street we are on (I think she knows the neighborhood better than I do!) and she still has not gotten over pointing things out that are on the road in front of us.

Probably the thing I notice the most is the ability to point things out to her. Previously we would say, “Hey, there’s a dog! Wait…coming up on your left…did you see it? No? Well, it went by really fast.” But now, she can see what we can see.

So, to us, the decision firmly came down on the side of leaving her facing backwards as long as possible. However, facing forwards really was worth the wait.

Potty Tickets

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Overnight and during naps, Evie got the brilliant idea to start taking her diaper off before falling asleep, which inevitably led to a wet bed. Washing her bed-clothes multiple times a day started to get pretty old. In an attempt to fix this problem, I told her if she needed to go potty, she could call me, and I would come help her. This was one of those instances where the cure was worse than the affliction. Pretty soon she was calling me down every few hours, all night long, even though she hardly ever really had to go. The frustration with this situation led me to utter a statement that I immediately recognized as a mistake:

“Evie, I’m not coming back down here again.”
“What if I have to go potty?”
“Well then, I guess you’ll just have to go on your own.”

Hoo boy.

After that, she was coming out of her room constantly, always taking off her clothes, always crying when she got her shirt stuck on her head or dropped her pajamas in the toilet. In other words, this was the worst, least manageable stage of all.

I should say that all of this was combined with (and/or responsible for) Evie starting to not take a nap anymore. She’s in sort of the awkward, in-between stage where she sometimes goes without a nap, but then has an extremely cranky, sleepy, rest of the day.

I have a theory on parenting. Lets call it the “sine wave of parenting difficulty”.

Basically, every 6 months your child goes from reasonably easy to parent, to reasonably difficult. Not necessarily naughty, though. It could be they change their sleeping habits, start teething, reach a stage where they are whining, or pushing boundaries, or potty training, whatever it is. The tricky part is to remember to appreciate the peaks, so you can get through the lows.

So anyway, a perfect storm of not sleeping, mischief, potty issues and a push for independence is sort of making this one of those parenting troughs. I wasn’t sure what to do. On the one hand, both Evie and I were losing sleep for no particular reason. On the other hand, I didn’t want to tell her NOT to go to the potty, because I would eventually like her to be able to go the night without a diaper. So how to break the habit while simultaneously not encouraging and not discouraging?

Finally, Sara came up with the answer – potty tickets! Evie gets two potty tickets per night (one for naps) which she can use to go to the potty. When she’s out of tickets, she has to go in her diaper.

Evie loves it. She is so excited to use the tickets. By the time I get down there, she’s dancing on the bed, waving her ticket around and saying, “Daddy, take my ticket!”

At first, the tickets were just little scraps of paper. Sara had a second stroke of inspiration when we were on the train the other day, and now the potty tickets are actually old Metra tickets

It’s still not ideal. She uses the first potty ticket within 5 seconds of being put to bed. After I put her into bed I close the door and wait, so I can go back in immediately. She rarely has to go that soon, so she’s still stalling there. Consequently, we have had to move her bedtime up to compensate for this.

Other than that, though, it works out pretty well. It’s a tolerable balance between what I would optimally like to have and where we were just a few days ago.

And that’s all you can really ask for, isn’t it?