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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.

It’s hard being a kid. is a post from: Now Showing! Please stop by and leave a comment! If you like my baby blog, please check out my other blog as well.

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“Niko, did you finish your apple? Go take your plate to tata if you want bacon.”
“NO! I do NOT want… oooh! Yeah! I DO want bacon!”

“Mama, is this dinosaur a plant eater, or a meat eater?”
“Well, it’s got forward facing eyes and big sharp teeth. It looks like a meat eater.”
“No, I think it’s a plant eater.”
“But look, it’s a therapod. It’s got two feet with three toes on it, and a long tail for balance, and–”
“WELL MAMA, next time Elliot comes over I will ask HIM if it’s a plant eater or a meat eater.”
“And will you believe what he says?”
“I will if he says it’s a plant eater.”

“Ahhhh! Ahhh! Ahh! The living room is fulllll of dinosaur zombies!”
“Oh, huh.”
“DO YOU KNOW HOWWWWW to stop dinosaur zombies?”
“Do you…. I don’t know. How do you stop dinosaur zombies?”
“WITH FLOWER GUNS! pew pew pew pew pew.”

“I wanna watch that train show with that fox and that hound.”
“Oh… do you mean “The Fox And The Hound”?”
“Yes, it’s got a train in it.”

“Niko, no puppet show in the kitchen. No toys in the kitchen. You need to take that puppet show out of here.”
“TOO BAD it’s stuck to the floor TOO BAD I can’t move it OH WELL TOO BAD.”

“Hey, do you want to watch ‘Word World’?”
“Yes! They make words on that show, that word world show. Do they make the word dinosaur?”
“I don’t think so, that’s kind of a big word and they mostly spell little words.”
“What about Stegosaurus? That’s my favorite word.”
“Why is that your favorite word?”
“Because of all the S’es.”

We are ONCE AGAIN trying to transition Niko to sleep in his own little bed and not in our bed, kicking and punching us all night. The night before last he was up literally every hour, yowling and crying, resulting in three very tired people the next day. I had a headache LITERALLY ALL DAY from lack of sleep. Nesko slept in until almost 11:00, scuttling our plans to run errands in the morning. Niko was lobbying hard to go to the park that day and I told him that we’d planned to take him to the park in the morning but we were too tired to go because he’d kept us up all night. TOO BAD. He asked several times and I told him the same thing each time. Why can’t we go to the park? Why can’t we go outside? Why can’t tata play with him? Because he’s sleeping, because he’s tired, because he was up all night because Niko was being mean and unkind and not being quiet and not letting us sleep.

Last night went much better. He did wake us up with his crying once, but I think it was a legit nightmare. Nesko settled him and came back to bed. We both went to bed around 10:30 (although I had a hard time falling asleep) and woke up around 8:00 and my mood and energy levels are both vastly improved. I’ve still got a sleep deficit but am feeling a lot better. Niko and I had a talk today about his future allowance.

Basically, he gets 10 cents for each night he sleeps through the night without being a dick and if he makes it for a full week he gets an additional 30 cents, which makes a dollar. Also, if he helps us pick up all his toys and books before going to bed he gets 10 cents with a 30 cent bonus if he does it every night for a full week. This is another dollar. So he’s got the potential to earn $2.00 a week just by being a decent person and not an asshole. He wants to buy some more trans, so he’s got a goal to work toward. I’m going to make a chart so he can see how well he’s doing, including showing how well he’s working toward his goal. The train he wants costs $10.95 and I figure Nesko and I can handle the tax since he’s so young. When he’s 6 or so he can start figuring that out and accounting for it himself.

I know some people will object to “bribing” him for basic good behavior, but honestly, I want him in the habit of doing these things and I want to give him an allowance any way. Some people push for giving kids a base allowance that’s not dependent on behavior or chores. I think most people just do what their parents did, but neither Nesko nor I got an allowance so we don’t have that to fall back on.

How do you handle allowance in your household? Was it an easy decision, or hard? Is it what your parents did, or different? Is it dependent on chores, or not? What’s your pay scale? I’d love to hear more.

BTW, I wrote a post about diets, body size, and taking photos of yourself at my main blog. Please feel free to check it out.

Some Recent Conversations Around Here is a post from: Now Showing! Please stop by and leave a comment! If you like my baby blog, please check out my other blog as well.

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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?

This too shall pass is a post from: Now Showing! Please stop by and leave a comment! If you like my baby blog, please check out my other blog as well.

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

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SO.

The child I had surgically removed from my body an eon ago is now FOUR.

We decided to celebrate. I invited way more people than our apartment could comfortably hold and decided on a space theme since Niko is super into the idea of aliens and space exploration right now. Or he was. He quickly vetoed that and wanted OMG TRAINS. He’s still into Thomas and decided that Gordon would be his special birthday friend because Gordon is number 4 and Niko is 4. So I bought some Thomas invitations and we were set.

I set the time of the party for 1:00-4:00 because then we wouldn’t have to provide lunch or dinner, but then I went and blew literally $100.00 on snack-type food (crackers, cheese, crudites, dip, hummus). My MIL brought over her Pita (not the puffed up flat bread, but layered phyllo dough and cheese, or cheese and spinach, or meat, etc. If you’ve had spanikopita (note that pita in there) it’s similar to that but in a log or coiled or round) which was A-MAZE-ING.

I had big plans to spend the week before the party deep cleaning and organizing and getting everything awesome so the week OF the party I’d just have to tidy and maintain. Then I got super sick and spent that week horking out brown slime and complaining about how I wished I was dead, so none of that got done. And the house didn’t get fully cleaned. But I kind of stopped caring.

This was one of our decoration inspirations:

I handed the job over to Nesko while I frosted the cake THE MORNING OF THE PARTY because REASONS that were outside of my control. I also made a zillion cookies… a bunch of tiny engines covered in different colored sugars, and also larger cookies in the shape of an engine, coal tender (I put non pareils on top to be “coal”), a coach, and a caboose. Niko loved them and ate them like this: “oh hey train I’M GONNA EAT YOUR COUPLING NOW! nom nom nom NOW I EAT ALL OF YOU!!”

When he was done, it looked like this:

Well, actually, we hung a bit more crepe paper in swags on the front, but didn’t take any photos of that. I wanted more balloons all over the top but the balloons kept falling down. Nesko couldn’t figure out how to get them to stay up. Was our tape bad? Greasy walls? I have no idea.

Here’s the cake!

Gordon is a splendid blue engine with red detail. His number is yellow and outlined in red. So I carried that over to the cake. I was going to do a red circle around the cake but then decided not to risk shaky hands and a lopsided circle so I didn’t. I also didn’t level the cake so that red ruffle is hiding gaps in the frosting between the two layers. Niko said he wanted strawberry cake. This was a lie.

My camera is a piece of junk, a point and shoot that takes FOREVER to actually take the photo once you’ve hit the button, and which takes a long time to recover from taking photos. My friend Waldo, who is a photographer, used it and managed to get some good photos despite the limitations of the tool she was using.

I made 12 chocolate cupcakes, 12 strawberry cupcakes (as requested), and the cake is a layer of chocolate and a layer of strawberry. If I hadn’t been doing the “4″ thing on the cake I would have just made cupcakes. They are way easier to serve and eat then slabs of cake. We also picked up ice cream bars so we didn’t have to deal with dishing out scoops of ice cream, but then forgot about them. Uh. Duh. We currently have 10 strawberry cupcakes left over.

Some of the other kids “helped” Niko open his presents, for varying values of the word “help.” Everything he got was super thoughtful and something he absolutely enjoys. He got a bunch of books which was kind of a problem because he wanted to stop everything and read them. Presents? Who cares about presents? BOOKS.

Leah made this hat for Niko and I’m hoping that if I am really really nice she’ll make one for me too.

It was a really great time. Some friends were able to come in from out of town, we had some pretty good food even though I didn’t really cook anything.

I think next year I might have a party that’s just kids and make some pizza or something, and then have our adult friends come over the next day for some board games and happy birthday wishes and leftover cake. It was just too many people in our house and it got a little over whelming. It was SUCH a great time, though.

Nikola is four. FOUR. is a post from: Now Showing! Please stop by and leave a comment! If you like my baby blog, please check out my other blog as well.

Technorati Tags: 4 year old, birthday, child, kid, parenting

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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.

Mother is the name for God… is a post from: Now Showing! Please stop by and leave a comment! If you like my baby blog, please check out my other blog as well.

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Niko’s been having a hard time lately.

He’s been really wild and out of control, ignoring us quite a bit, temper tantrumming, insisting on sleeping with us, speaking in a baby voice/refusing to speak and just pointing at things, and having pants accidents. The kid who’s been potty trained for MONTHS is suddenly soiling himself. It was a pretty big, and worrisome, regression. He’s also been refusing to try to do things like look at letters, count, etc. This is the kind of stuff kids do when there’s something huge and new in their lives: when they move, when their parents divorce, when there’s a new baby, when zombies attack, etc. But nothing is going on!

Last night I sat with Niko as he sobbed and cried, after over an hour of walking him (or carrying him) and his pillow back to his own bed. I told him it was time to sleep. His brain needed sleep. His body needed sleep. He sobbed out that he didn’t WANT to grow up.

Well.

Let’s look at that, shall we?

I asked him some more questions. Why doesn’t he want to grow up? Is he afraid of growing up?

He told me that he didn’t want to grow up because that means I’d go away and he doesn’t want me to go away ever and leave him all alone.

Oh, sweet child.

So we cuddled and we talked about growing up and parents and how mamas and tatas always love their kids and we talked about how Nesko and I are still close to our parents. We love them and they love us. He calmed down and fell asleep and slept soundly in his bed all night.

This morning we had another talk about growing up and I reassured him that growing up is a gradual process. You don’t just wake up one day grown up, it takes a long time. We talked about how long it would take. He demanded to know an exact age when one is grown up and I told him 25. I promised him that I would always love him and would always be his mama. He said he didn’t want to have kids instead of a mama. I told him he could have kids AND have a mama, and I would be his kids’ baba, but that he didn’t have to have kids if he didn’t want to. He could choose not to have kids. He said he wanted to choose to have kids and also have a mama. He told me that he wanted to be a mama and have kids.

IF YOU ARE CURIOUS: the difference between a mama and a tata is tatas have DEEP VOICES and mamas have high voices. He demonstrated for me, including doing a pretty spot on impersonation of Nesko.

He’s been a little less clingy so far today, although the day is still young. We’ll see how he does tonight. I’m really tired of him joining us in bed. He pulls my hair and tries to push me out of bed. He jams his feet up under he and scrapes his toenails along my body. I hate it. I HATE IT. So hopefully he’ll sleep in his own little bed tonight.

IRONICALLY a few days ago he got super pissed and fired me, told me I wasn’t his mama anymore and I needed to go away and find a new home because a new mama was coming to our home. I told him I’d wait until his new mama got here. “NO DON’T DO THAT” he said. “YOU WILL BE HERE FOREVER. YOU WILL NEVER GO AWAY.” My firing offense? Not letting him eat candy for breakfast. WORST. MAMA. EVER. Later that day he forgave me and rehired me, though. And, yes, this current behavior regression predates this event.

Oh well that explains that. is a post from: Now Showing! Please stop by and leave a comment! If you like my baby blog, please check out my other blog as well.

Technorati Tags: 3 years old, parenting

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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.

Niko’s been requesting a haircut is a post from: Now Showing! Please stop by and leave a comment! If you like my baby blog, please check out my other blog as well.

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The past few days Niko’s been really on edge. You know the drill, sleeping poorly and flying off the handle at the smallest inconvenience, being super clingy, wanting to sleep with us, etc. It came to a head yesterday when he got more and more listless and eventually just curled up on his little pink Little Tykes plastic chair, swaddled in blankets, resting his head on the table. He’d only picked at his lunch. I asked him if he’d like to sit on the couch with me. “I wish I could, but I just can’t.” I picked him up and carried him to the couch and took his temperature. 100*. Funtimes.

He lay limply on the couch until nap time, volunteered to lie down, snuggled into bed with his hands folded under his cheek like a Victorian illustration of ideal childhood innocence, and only wanted one story. Then he slept for four hours. He awake mewling piteously for his tata but didn’t really object furiously to my presence. He sacked out on the couch and nursed his 99.9* fever and sipped orange juice. When Nesko came home, Niko ordered him to “go into your bedroom and put on comfy pants!” and then sat on Nesko’s lap on the couch for most of the evening. He didn’t eat much dinner, including the special chocolate cookie Nesko brought him. He didn’t even object much when Nesko trimmed his fingernails.

He went down with no struggle.

He joined us in bed during the tiny hours of the morning, settled right in, and for once did not thrash around and kick and pull hair. He just snuggled and slept. Nesko’s alarm went off and woke him up and Niko got out of bed to give Nesko a hug. Nesko asked Niko if he wanted to snuggle back into bed with me and Niko said no, he wanted to snuggle into his OWN bed. He slept until about 9, and I luxuriated and dozed (already busting up a minor resolution to improve my sleep habits by going to bed earlier and getting up at the same time every day OH WELL). I got up when I heard Niko go into the bathroom.

He was bright and cheerful. And hungry.

“I’m hungry!” he said. I asked him what he was hungry for. “I am hungry for everything! I’m hungry for everything on the earth.” Only he says “earth” like “erff.” I started cutting him up an apple while he told me about his morning.

“I went back to sleep and then I woke up while you were asleep. I said “oh, what a great morning to be awake!” and then I opened up my window.” By which he means he climbs onto the radiator in front of his window (which is off, we have central heat), perches there until he feels steady, then slowly stands up and grasps the cord of his mini blinds and raises them. Then he gingerly turns around, surveys the floor, and scoots down until he’s off the radiator. So he was basically doing mini mountain climbing.) He also told me that Nesko fixed his shelf, which is a recent addition to his room and which wasn’t firmly attached because there’s apparently something big and hard inside the wall. Nesko wound up affixing the shelf to the wall with command strip hook and loop tabs (it is a very small shelf) and Niko pulled the shelf off the wall WITH! A! FLOURISH! because he’s a consummate showman. He prattled on about his day and made his breakfast selections and when I took his temperature it was normal.

He’s eaten about half his breakfast and is now claiming to be full, which is slightly less than he eats on a good day. He’s making a “house” out of our big coffee table and burnt orange velvet chair and various blankets and stuffed animals, is pretty cheerful, but is also getting frustrated really quickly and his temperature’s back up to 99*. We’ll see how the rest of the day goes. He’s singing right now, and moving furniture around, which is a good sign but he’s also pausing to freak out that I won’t move his giant plastic slide over by the coffee table house so he can use it as a door, even though that would mean trapping me on the couch unable to get up. Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, really, oh no! Can’t get off the couch! But I made same bad dietary decisions last night and need access to the bathroom this morning. Oh cheese cake, why don’t you love me as much as I love you?

COFFEE TABLE HOUSE UPDATE:
He’s using his little pink chair and a cardboard box as his door, and installing them some plastic tools his djedo got him. “I just realized! I didn’t install them yet! With my fake tools! I need to screw in the screws! That’s all I needed, my screw driver and my hammer!” Aw, bless. He’s eating more breakfast under the table, crunching away in privacy. “I’m eating inside my little house under the table!”

Sick Kids is a post from: Now Showing! Please stop by and leave a comment! If you like my baby blog, please check out my other blog as well.

Technorati Tags: 3 year old, parenting

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Because I have the light and joyful heart of a child, I laugh at fart jokes and enjoy hiding behind things and jumping out at people. However, in part because I have the light and joyful heart of a child (READ: am really immature) I usually give myself away by giggling while hiding. It’s pathetic and hilarious, I know! But my big question is this: does Niko giggle while hiding because it’s his NATURE to hide and giggle or because I’ve NURTURED a hiding and giggling set of behavior in him?

What sorts of behaviors have you observed in your kid that could be nature or nurture?

Nature Vs Nurture is a post from: Now Showing! Please stop by and leave a comment! If you like my baby blog, please check out my other blog as well.

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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.

The Night I Promised I Would Never Die is a post from: Now Showing! Please stop by and leave a comment! If you like my baby blog, please check out my other blog as well.

Technorati Tags: 3 year old, death, parenting

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