And suddenly I’m a parent

On November 10, 2014November 10, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting7 Comments

Tonight I have to go to an open house for a local Montessori school. Want to? Am about to? I don’t know how to phrase it. Certainly no one is making me go; I think my main objection right now is that I don’t want to be old enough to have to be thinking about this right now. Pay no attention, by the way, to the fact that most parents my age are worrying about high school and not kindergarten. It’s not even that I want him to stay a baby forever or anything like that; as I’ve said on several occasions before, the older he gets the more I like him, so I suspect I’ll like kindergarten-kid more than I like three-year-old kid right now.

I will admit that I’m liking three. It’s a good age. It’s too bad that he had to go through the three years to get to three, where I liked him less, but three is okay.

So, yeah. Point is, I gotta go to an open house for a school I don’t know anything about, so that I can learn things about it, because maybe I’ll want to send my kid there soon, because he’s old enough that I need to worry about that. Blech.

So speaking of parenting: he noticed Halloween, right? We’ve talked about that. Which means he’s gonna notice Christmas this year for the first time, too. Which means that the wife and I have to make a decision about Santa Claus. I am, in general, against lying to my kid, and somewhat generically temperamentally against suggesting that he should adjust his behavior in order to receive rewards from supernatural beings.

I also don’t want to be the parent of the asshole kid who ruins Christmas for the other kids, and “let them believe what they want to believe and don’t worry about it” seems like kinda complicated advice for a three-year-old. My wife has suggested that we simply don’t bring it up and see what he brings to the table, and that seems like good advice.

An anecdote: We are at Meijer. We need to buy the boy a coat. As we pass the coat rack, an idle thought floats into my head: What if he decides he wants the pink one?

I, progressive Dad that I am, decide that I don’t really give a damn if he wants the pink coat. He picks out a dark blue one and tries it on and has a fit about the length of the sleeves. (Note: this is an ongoing thing. M’boy has issues with sleeves.) We try on an orange one. Same thing, only now the fit has a bit of a head of steam behind it and is getting a bit more obnoxious. We get him calmed down and my wife tries one more time to see if he’s interested in trying on a coat.

“The light blue one,” he says. I look. There’s a light blue one. With polka dots. It’s one of the girl coats.

You deserve this, I thought to myself. And the wife and I just sorta looked at each other. Looked at the coat. Neither of us really wanted to be the one to say no, because he’s fucking three, and who cares what coat he wears. At the same time, I noticed quickly that color wasn’t the only thing differentiating the coats. It turns out that girls’ winter coats from the exact same company– coats for three-year-olds, mind you– are actually cut different. They have froofy fur around the hoods, and– and this is the ridiculous part– they’re fitted. They have elastic on them, for the hips that three-year-old girls do not have. Which I suspect actually makes them less effective as winter coats.

Color? Wear whatever you want. My parental liberalism apparently ends at the point where my son wants to wear a coat that is fitted to show off his hips. I suspect he’s not about to start developing an interest in wearing girls’ clothing all the time, because I think we’d probably have seen that by now; he just likes the color light blue.

I shoulda just put it on him. He’d have had another fit about the sleeves and we’d have been done. Instead, my wife sucked it up and told him it was a girl coat and he couldn’t wear it. I’ve got a tiny bit of a dirty feeling in my mouth about it, but only a tiny bit.

In which I am so very screwed

On September 13, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting6 Comments

10689603_10152725579744066_3989070658350097557_n I will note that we have, only just tonight, finally converted my son’s crib to a toddler bed. Developmentally speaking, we probably ought to have gotten to this a bit ago, but he never really got to the point where he was trying to crawl/climb out of his crib so it didn’t make itself a very high priority.

This means, of course, that now, once we put him to bed at night, he can get out.

There are not that many ways in which I look back at my childhood and recognize that I tormented my parents. I’m fully aware that I was a pain in the ass, mind you, as all kids are, but there aren’t many specific ways that I can name. One of them, though, where I’m not sure how my parents got through my early years without killing me, was my penchant to get out of bed over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again to go to ask my parents– well, anything. Requests. Demands. Complaints. Existential horror. Whatever.

I have mostly not wanted to turn the boy’s crib into a bed because I can feel the evil claws of Karma scratching at the back of my neck. The boy, as much as he might not want to admit it, is me writ small in a plethora of ways, and I suspect that we’re about to find one of them. Tonight, it begins. There will never be privacy again.

Sigh.

Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: CURIOUS GEORGE

On July 21, 2014July 22, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Television16 Comments

The boy has been diversifying his television viewing habits lately, there’s no doubt about that; we’ve moved away from talking crayons and melodramatic censors and onto a few different programs, several of which probably deserve their own entry here. But Curious George is absolutely his current favorite.

Now, for the most part, I don’t mind this show at all. I was a big fan of the Curious George books when I was a kid, although at the time there were only a few of them, and the show itself is not really that bad. Eminent blues/zydeco musician Dr. John provides the intro music; William H. Macy did the voice-over for the first season; there’s some quality stuff going on here, and if you ignore the core ridiculousness of the show it’s pretty easy to get along with.

But man, that core ridiculousness. The show never gets into the fact that the Man with the Yellow Hat is a poacher who stole George from the wilderness. Two of the main characters are scientists and they still insist on calling George a monkey when he is clearly an ape; he’s an orangutan, by the way– lots of people want him to be a chimpanzee; chimps are black and George is brown. He’s an orang. Deal. The fact that most of the characters are cool with an ape being around and the fact that the city the Man lives in has no health department of any kind are also just sort of taken as given. Also, sooner or later George is gonna hit sexual maturity, rip the Man’s face off, and masturbate with it. That doesn’t come up often either. As kids’ TV shows go, I can deal.

And then there’s Bill. Bill is the one thing keeping this show from Sesame Street territory where I’m just as happy to watch the show all damn day as the boy is. The Man’s job is unclear; it involves sciences somehow, but sometimes involves just impressing actual scientists with his ridiculous, childish drawings, and twice they’ve tried to send him into space. At any rate, whatever he does, he has enough money that he has an expensive-looking high-rise condo in the city and a country house as well. The country house, judging from the accents of everyone around and the amount of snow it gets, is in Minnesota, although they drive there from the city all the time and the city is clearly not in Minnesota and appears to contain Central Park. But whatever, right? Kids’ show.

When George goes to the country with the Man, he gets to hang out with Bill. This is Bill:

Bill fucking sucks. I’ll get to why in a second, but let’s start with what’s interesting about Bill and to some extent the show in general: Bill was white during the first season. He’s now… that. The show is really good about diverse casting, really; side characters are almost always people of color, especially in the city, and a number of the main ones, including Bill himself, are as well.

Right, though. Bill. Bill’s a bigot. And he’s a bigot in an especially annoying way; he’s the biggest know-it-all on the show. There is nothing in the universe that Bill doesn’t know more about than you do, and nothing that he won’t take half an hour to tediously explain, always arrogantly and frequently incorrectly, although the show doesn’t seem to recognize that he’s wrong a lot.

Bill is the only motherfucker on the show who doesn’t know George is a monkey. Let that sink in for a second. This know-it-all genius asshole doesn’t realize that that’s a monkey.

Well, okay, ape. Still.

What does Bill think George is? A “city kid.”

What’s a “city kid?” An uneducated moron, apparently. There is nothing– nothing— about George that Bill won’t immediately attribute to George being a “city kid,” and I think this is something that started out being intended as a cute affectation but after 630 hours of listening to him it’s actually a serious problem with the character. He’s a huge fucking bigot.

George wants to sail a boat. City kids don’t know anything about boats!

George participates in a corn maze. Let me incorrectly talk about “maize” for ten minutes; city kids don’t know anything about vegetables.

George wants to enter his worm in a worm race. City kids are too stupid for that!

The phrase “city kid” or “silly city kid” is literally probably 10-15% of Bill’s dialogue, which is a lot more than it sounds. They won’t let him get through a scene without a “city kid” reference. Now imagine someone substituting literally any other description of humanity in for “city kid”– “woman,” or “black person,” or “Latino,” or fucking anything— and you should see how goddamn awful the character is.

I like Curious George a lot. But God do I hate Bill.

So this is happening

On July 15, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting4 Comments

…you may remember this post, about my son deciding he’d learned how to swear.

He is in bed at the moment, and I am in the living room with the baby monitor next to me.

He is singing a song to himself that I have decided is called “What the Fuck.” I’ve decided that this is its name because “What the Fuck” are all the words.

Tunelessly. Over and over again.

For the last ten minutes or so.

I’m going to turn on the new Phish album until he stops singing.

Fatheration: In which oh god I’m doomed

On June 15, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting2 Comments

Ruthless self-promotion first: Does your dad read? Sure he does. I bet he likes space ogres! And if he doesn’t, you should buy my book anyway as a Father’s Day present to me. Plus you’ll like it. I promise. Two dolla ninety-nine cent!

(I will come to your house and root around in your couch until I find $2.99 if you want me to. But you have to buy the book first. 🙂 )

Anyway. Ruthless self-promotion ends.

A new thing entered my life yesterday. This probably should have happened much earlier, but I somehow managed to dodge it for nearly three years: the dreaded “play date.” One of the girls in my son’s day care group recently changed day cares, and she was apparently quite fond of my son, so her mother contacted my wife and set up a thing for us at a local place called the House of Bounce. Basically a whole lotta inflatable shit for the kids to run around and do what they wanted on, right? Fun.

It was… interesting. True fact: I am 9% whiter than I was yesterday.

I went back and forth several times on whether I wanted to go. The problem here is that I have two basic impulses that are at war with each other. The first is to not be either literally absent or perceived as absent from my kid’s life. The second, unfortunately, is to never be around other people or do new things ever. I am a homebody, folks, and it’s not far enough into the summer that I’m starving to get out of the house yet. Going to this would require me to mingle with strangers, which I’m not good at. It might even require… horrors… polite conversation. Gah! Run away! I don’t know how to converse with people I can’t say “motherfucker” in front of!

My urge to be Dad won out, as I recognize that the impulses described in the second half of that paragraph are probably best ignored. And it was fine. I had fun. They have two kids, one Kenny’s age and one a year or so younger, and we ended up going out to lunch afterwards, where I was able to watch soccer when I wasn’t trying to help wrangle three different toddlers and wondering what the hell had happened to my life that I had become part of the folks trying to wrangle three toddlers in the restaurant. I’ve never been that guy before. It was weird.

There were a few moments. First, both parents in the other couple came along, which again triggered two warring impulses: 1) Oh, good, my wife doesn’t look like a single parent/ there’s more people to talk to, and 2) Oh, god, he’s not going to want to talk about sports ball or something, is he? Because while I wanted to be watching soccer, I know nothing about soccer and can’t actually participate in a conversation about it, and I know less than nothing about any other typically male go-to conversation topic. As I’ve said before, I just don’t know how to interact with men most of the time, so situations where I might have to go Be One Of The Guys tend to freak me the fuck out. Also, and I don’t mean this as insulting at all and in fact I think she’ll laugh and agree if she ever happens to see this, but Other Mom is… intense? I’ll use the word intense. And high-energy. So, so high-energy. Mildly exhausting, in fact. In a way that I very much am not. I’m too introverted to be that bouncy, especially around people I don’t know. Other Dad’s temperament was much more like mine and I suspect he may well have been going through the same stupid brain calculus I was for most of the day, so I suspect we’ll get along with these folks fine once the initial oh god I’m determining my own social relationships through my kid’s random friendships what the hell has happened to me thing wears off.

Putting this behind a Horizontal Line of New Topic, because in fact it is. One interesting conversation (and I mean “interesting conversation,” this isn’t a sarcastic way of suggesting that this will be funny) that came up was a discussion of why they moved their kids out of our day care. It revealed a very clear difference in how these folks see the purpose of day care from how I see it. They felt like their daughter wasn’t being challenged in day care enough. Her dad made the point that, for example, she recognizes “turquoise” and “mauve” (I think those were the colors he picked) and can count to, say, twenty, whereas the day care is working on primary colors with the kids and counting to ten.

(My son can also count to twenty and recognizes all his letters, but I don’t think he knows the word “turquoise.” This was my first moment of oh god my kid is behind as a parent, too, another impulse I’m trying to ignore.)

Anyway. They want their kid at a day care where her turquoise-knowledge is recognized, so they moved her to another one that’s a bit more academic. And that’s cool, right? I’m not criticizing their decision– it just intrigues me that I don’t give one thin damn what they’re “teaching” the kids at day care. As far as I’m concerned, here’s day care’s job:

Give my son a chance to be around lots of kids his age that he can play with, because I’m sure as hell not going to do that myself, and
Keep him alive.

“Teach him stuff” just isn’t even on my agenda right now. I mean anywhere. Let him play all day, don’t ever even mention letters. I’m fine with that. I figure teaching him to read is my job. Like, he’s only there because my wife and I can’t afford for one of us to quit working. That doesn’t mean that I need somebody else to teach him colors and letters. I need somebody to keep my kid safe when I can’t be there, and I need a way for him to play with other kids his age because for the most part we don’t hang out with anybody with little kids and he doesn’t have any siblings or cousins.

I don’t know that there’s a conclusion to be drawn here, other than a mild ironic bit of entertainment that the person who doesn’t care if his kid gets educated at day care or not is the actual professional educator in the conversation. The difference in priorities just intrigues me. I think I’m cool with continuing to not worry about it, but I’ll spend some time thinking about whether I’m wrong about that. And feel free to weigh in in comments one way or another if you like.

Happy Father’s Day, y’all.

Actual conversation with my son

On June 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Teaching7 Comments

…who, remember, isn’t yet three.

SETTING: The boy has just gotten up, and I’m getting him changed and dressed.

HIM: Daddy, are you a teacher?

ME: Yes.

HIM: Why?

ME: I have no idea.

HIM: But you’re a teacher?

ME: Yes.

(Several minutes pass; various early-morning toddler things happen. I ponder the chain of events leading up to that question; I have never said the words “Daddy is a teacher” to my son, and I’m not sure he knows what the word means. He decides he wants a chocolate graham cracker for breakfast, a request which is denied until other, more appropriately breakfasty foods are eaten.)

HIM: Chocolate graham cracker!

ME: No.

HIM: But I want chocolate graham cracker!

ME: No. You can have a chocolate graham cracker once you eat some cereal or a squeeze pack.

HIM: But I want chocolate graham cracker!

ME: Kenny, do you remember asking me if I was a teacher a few minutes ago?

HIM: Yes.

ME: This means that I am used to disappointing children who want things, and that I don’t care even a little bit when I do it anymore.

(He contemplates this for a moment.)

HIM: …I want raisins.

Exeunt.

Another thing that just happened

On March 29, 2014March 29, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting6 Comments

Well, okay, it just happened as I’m writing it: about 8:00 PM yesterday evening. I’ve delayed the post to keep from stepping on the positivity piece. 🙂

Context: The boy has just had his bath. He is wrapped in a towel and sitting on the counter in our bathroom. He tries to stand up.

DAD: (stops boy.) WHOA. Stop. We don’t stand up on the counter.

BOY: I fart.

DAD: (stops another standing attempt) I don’t care if you have to fart. You don’t stand up on the counter.

BOY: I fart in my butt on my towel!

DAD: If necessary I will put you on the ground so you can fart. (Realizes what he has just said.) (Looks at wife.) We are going to agree I never said that. (Wife cracks up.)

I put the boy on the floor; he insists on being picked up and carried back to the bedroom to be dressed for bed. I pick him up.

BOY: Halfway down the hall, whispering directly into my ear: I like to fart.

Exeunt.

A thing that just happened

On March 28, 2014March 28, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting4 Comments

Actual conversation I just had with my son. Context: I am picking him up from day care, and my wife is already in the car, which is not usually the case.