parenting

It’s hard to be the oldest child

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Poor Evie.

I’ve just been noticing lately that we’re awfully hard on the poor girl. Basically, when it’s Evie’s fault, it’s Evie’s fault, but when it’s not Evie’s fault, it’s still Evie’s fault. We yell at her for hitting her brother, and then we yell at her for not getting out of Ollie’s way when he’s trying to hit her. We yell at her for taking toys from him, but then we yell at her for not finding a way to share when he takes something from her. She tries to help by comforting Ollie when he’s crying, and we yell at her to give him some space. We tell her to wait her turn, not interrupt, and to let Ollie answer his own questions, while simultaneously ignoring him when he does the same, justifying that he gets so few chances to speak. She tries to help, or just gets excited, and we yell at her for bringing things up, such as asking Ollie if he should get pee pee chocolate when we’re trying to end the practice.

I try so hard not to do it, but it’s like I just can’t help it. There are times when you have a strategy as a parent, and a 5 year old just messes that up. Being as she’s older, we do expect her to be the responsible party between the two of them. However, it’s hard on a 5 year old who is constantly being asked to take the high road. Her life sure would be easier without a younger sibling.

However, all this childhood angst we’re creating might not be the worst thing in the world.

I have long been fascinated by the whole “birth order” thing, wherein children have certain personality traits based on the order they were born. To give a few examples, first children tend to do better in school, because they tend to be permanently seeking the approval of adults, and also because they had a little “boost” as a young child being alone around adults, while youngest children tend to be less responsible and have a career in something more exotic but less secure, like being an artist. Youngest children have the security that comes from having a whole group of people taking care of everything before they get there.

Now I don’t believe birth order is the end all be all, but I do anecdotally see evidence of this all over the place. No predictor of personality (or behavior in general) seems to be very accurate, but birth order seems to be the most consistent predictor across cultures, geographic locations, socio-economic standards, etc.

And let’s face it, oldest children are the best! (Says an oldest child who is married to another oldest child)

I can’t help but think that all of this pressure the oldest sibling happens to take is one of the reasons they tend to be more responsible for things. Because we *make* them responsible for things. Overtly, we ask Evie to help her brother, but inadvertently we force her to take responsibility for both her actions and his actions. As parents, we lean on her more, and Ollie gets to skate under the radar a little bit. It’s no wonder then, that after a lifetime of that you just get used to the mantle of responsibility.

All that being said, I do continually feel bad when I realize we aren’t exactly being fair to her. Not only do I not want to be too hard on a 5 year old, I also want my 2 year old to turn into a responsible adult as well, not some free spirit, no-responsibility, must-have-my-way man-baby. I know that’s one extreme, and there’s no real danger of that happening to Ollie, but if it is true that older children consistently score better on tests or are more responsible, then isn’t it our duty to sort of spread that out a little bit?

“Look at my bottom!”

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Since we last spoke about Oliver’s potty training 3 months ago, things have been going very well.

He really never puts up a fuss about going to the potty, and he hasn’t had an accident in I don’t know how long. It doesn’t even occur to me to bring a change of clothes when we leave the house anymore. The only slight hitch is that he always makes us take him to the potty downstairs, but that is manageable I suppose. At least he always goes.

He can sometimes wear underpants for his nap, but it is very unpredictable.  He can go for hours without going, so he aught to be able to last through his nap, but even if you have him go right before he goes to bed, he sometimes still goes. If you think he will, he won’t, but if you don’t think he will, he will.

However, the one nut we haven’t been able to crack is poo poo. He *always* goes in his diaper at night (or at least first thing in the morning). It has been very difficult to convince him to go in the potty. He has gone several times in the potty, but it hasn’t quite translated into any sort of desire to go with regularity. Even M&M’s and a prize bucket hasn’t helped.

However, lately he has started to notice when he has to go, by suddenly announcing, “Look at my bottom!”. And I have to admit that, even though I know this is what he always says, it still makes me nervous. I always have to look at his bottom. When you get such a pronouncement (or sometimes just an emphatic “I do not have to go poo poo!” out of nowhere), you grab him and run. And then he goes, just like that.

Of course, he still goes in his diaper at night anyway, but hey, it’s going in the right direction, right?

Welcome to the World, Sweetheart

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Ah, that magical moment in every little girl’s life, when she first sees a naked homeless man.

We had only recently arrived at a park we don’t normally go to, when Evie insisted that she needed to go to the bathroom. “Why didn’t you go before we left?” I asked. “Because I didn’t have to go then!” replied every child since the dawn of time. Luckily(?), there was a small stone building of the kind that can only mean ‘Outdoor Public Bathroom that is Semi-Occasionally Cleaned’, so I started in that direction, daughter in tow.

As we got closer, I heard the distinctive noise of a shower. “Hmm, that’s kind of weird, they have showers in the park bathroom?” I thought. In retrospect, this was probably ridiculous, but the bathrooms reminded me of nothing so much as the bathrooms at a campground or state park, which do often have showers. So my brain failed to send up the proper warning flags. “Hmm, that’s kind of weird, there’s shoes and socks in the open doorway?” I wondered. But we find all kinds of clothes all over the place all the time in our neighborhood, so that didn’t jump out at me either. There was a bright pink girls shirt that sat in our parking lot for two weeks until I threw it in the dumpster. There used to be a power line down the street with an entire collection of shoes hanging on it. So again my brain failed to send up the proper warning flags.

“Hmm, that’s kind of weird, there’s a naked man standing in the bathroom even though there is clearly no shower in here, and the door which leads outside to the public park is standing wide open where anybody could walk by or even walk right in holding the hand of a 4 year old girl.”

To give him credit, he seemed more surprised and embarrassed than we did. I find that odd. I mean, if I were taking a shower in the sink completely naked in a public bathroom with the door open, I would probably be nervous and jumpy, expecting someone to walk in at any minute. On the other hand, maybe the people who frequent this park know better than to go into the bathrooms, so maybe he takes a nice relaxing sink-bath every day with no fear of anybody barging in on him. And anyway, I guess I shouldn’t really try to put myself in his mindset, because probably if I were taking a shower in the public bathroom sink, I would probably just remove my shirt or something, and not get completely naked. But that’s just me.

We beat a hasty retreat and found the women’s bathroom instead. Of course this meant I had to wait outside while Evie went in to take her sweet time. You would think this might be the end of the story, but unfortunately the man quickly put on his shorts and then came outside to chat with me, sans shirt.

“I’m really, really sorry about that.”
“Oh, that’s okay, no problem.”
“Well, did she see anything?”
::please tell me I’m not having this conversation::
“No, I think she’s okay.”
“Well, as long as she didn’t see anything.”
::please oh please oh please let this conversation end::
“I think she’s fine.”

I have no idea if she saw anything or not. And I mean really, what’s the worst case scenario? Her life will not be ruined by seeing a naked man. Her mind will not be shattered. Let’s not forget that for the past three quarters of a year there has been a naked boy running around the house every evening, and she’s been able to cope with that.

Suddenly, the man looked at me with deadly seriousness. “If this were football season, I’d have to have words with you.”

Realization dawned on me that I was wearing a Packer’s shirt and ball cap, and this man did not approve. “Evie, please hurry it up in there, I do not want to be knifed by a homeless man!!”, I thought. I mean, look, he probably wouldn’t have knifed me. He was barely wearing any clothes, so he probably didn’t have his homemade shiv on him at the moment. Besides, the Bears/Packers rivalry is just good natured fun, right? It’s not like we’re in Philly. On the other hand, this is a man who was standing naked in a public place. He probably isn’t the last word on proper behavior.

(Side note, I would think that if you had a place to watch the Bears’ games, you would have a place to take a shower, no?)

I found some excuse to dart into the women’s bathroom on the pretense of helping Evie (“What’s that honey, you need help reaching the soap?”), physically speeding her out of the bathroom. I gave him a nod as I dragged Evie by the arm back to the safety of the playground as fast as I could go and still maintain my “oh yeah, I’m totally cool with chatting with half-naked dudes I don’t know (who a very short while ago used to be completely-naked dudes I don’t know) outside of public bathrooms about our favorite sports teams” nonchalance.

This is one of those parenting moments they don’t teach you about in books.

The Terrible Twos

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Oh boy. It’s that time.

Oliver is in the midst of the most typical terrible twos there ever was. Although I know that the ability to throw down a tantrum and the desire to do exactly the opposite of what you’re told with a twinkle in his eye are normal for this age, it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I would say he is both better and worse than Evie (I was complaining about 15 minute crying fits? Ha!). On one hand, his personality is generally more easy going, and sometimes (very, very occasionally) you can derail him a little bit with distraction, because he’s not as single minded and determinedly furious as she was. (You would laugh at that last sentence if you could see how determinedly furious he has been at least once a day for the past few weeks.) He doesn’t seem to be *quite* as opinionated as Evie is about things. Okay, well, I will say this, at least he has never peed himself in anger just to spite me.

On the other hand, when Evie got really mad, she would always throw up. So it couldn’t go on that long; it had a built in time limit. Oliver can go on, and on, and on, and on no matter how many times you think, “He absolutely cannot keep up this level of anger for long.” Twice now he has kept me up for a solid hour in the middle of the night (believe me, I checked the time), shrieking, crying, sweating, kicking the ground, the whole nine, because I dared to change his dirty diaper. At one point I stopped trying to calm him down and just read a book. He never paused or even slowed down for a second. An hour is a long time to expend that much energy. I know I couldn’t manage it!

(Totally off topic here, by why is WordPress recommending that I tag this post Mitt Romney??? Draw your own conclusions on that one folks, I guess we know which way WordPress leans.)

Although most of the time his typical two year old behavior is frustrating (especially when it involves biting, hitting and kicking, and when it takes three times as long to get out the door), sometimes you can’t help but laugh. It’s just so funny to see someone totally Hulk out over something so trivial, like he would destroy the world with his anger over the fact that you put his dinner plate *there* instead of *right there* where it clearly belongs.

He’s normally such a sweetheart that this new thing is just so incongruous with his usual behavior. It’s really surprising, and then again it’s not. Having gone through this once already, it’s eerie how similar it is to when Evie was a two year old. As with a lot of things with raising Ollie, it’s easier to bear knowing that it’s totally normal, and it’s just a phase that will pass.

Although it’s never easy, parenting is a lot easier the second time around.

People without kids are going to have to deal with the fact that my kids might sometimes ruin their day

/ Shane / Leave a comment

On occasion, children have been known to get out of hand. And on occasion, nearby people have been known to remark, or give the stink eye, especially if those nearby people have chosen not to have kids, or have raised their kids so long ago that they’ve completely forgotten the fact that on occasion their kids weren’t the perfect angels they remember them as.

This hasn’t happened to me, mind you, because my children are perfect angels. And also because I have a terrible scowl that is so fierce, judgmental people instinctively know that they can keep their judgement to themselves. And also because judgmental people are usually (but not always) wise enough to save their disapproval for a time when they are safely away from any kind of real confrontation (by which I mean the Internet).

So I have heard some general grousing about children ruining things. Everything. Meals at restaurants, movies, walking in the park, etc. (True story, last weekend Oliver screamed so loud in the bathroom at Meijer that people were forced to flee without washing their hands. My children even ruined hand washing!) And even more than that, I can assure you that I’ve *imagined* more complaining about my kids than all of the actual complaining about kids that has ever taken place put together.

I suppose there might be actual parents out there who really are clueless about what their kids are doing, ignoring them as they run circles around the restaurant, screaming at the top of their lungs, knocking people’s food off their plates, etc. (or at least that’s the way the pearl-clutching old ladies will tell the story to their church group or whatever when they get home) But speaking for the rest of us, I can assure you that we are absolutely mortified by bad behavior, even if we are pretending nonchalance as we hastily wolf down our meal and try to collect our stuff as fast as possible so we can get the hell out of there, crawl into a hole, and die.

As a parent, I try so hard to make sure my kids behave. I feel awful when my kids are awful. I think we do about as well as is physically possible to do, and yet despite our best efforts, on occasion they still cause trouble. Sometimes the kids still shriek at 5 a.m. in a hotel room because they can’t agree on who should get to use the remote like a pretend phone first. Sometimes they still make trouble at a restaurant because they didn’t get the right crayon color, or we forgot to let them order for themselves, or they didn’t have “the right kind of french fries”.

But here’s the thing: all of that is part of learning how to behave.

It could be argued that it’s not fair that my kids are ruining your experience, that my choice to have kids is interfering with your choice to not have kids. I suppose there is some merit to that. However, if you make that argument, then you can’ t complain about how awful kids are these days, or how society is going to hell in a handbasket. Because we’re trying to be good parents, and trying to make our kids into good, respectful people. We’re trying to teach them how to behave. And when you’re learning something, you don’t always get it right the first time (believe it or not, our kids get it right more often then not, and when they don’t, it’s my fault for misjudging the level of tiredness/hungriness/orneriness in the first place).

If we hide in a bunker, never exposing our kids to the real world, then they’re going to end up as weirdo degenerate sub-humans who don’t know how to act in public, or interact with the real world. And ultimately, that’s going to end up disrupting your life a lot more than this one dinner.