The boy starting to scream literally the second I got him out of his crib and barely stopping at all until I dropped him off at daycare, at which point he didn’t want me to leave;- Because of said tantrumspalooza, being twenty minutes late to work (also had to drop off the wife) despite getting up earlier in anticipation of everything taking longer;
- Riding the elevator from the wife’s office down to the wrong floor in the parking garage and being briefly, massively confused about where my car had teleported to;
- First and second hour actually went OK. Don’t tell anybody, but third and fourth hour is slowly becoming my trouble class.
- Writing up a thirteen-year-old girl in fourth hour for drawing a reasonably realistic erect penis on a carefully-folded piece of paper and deepthroating it in front of several other kids in that room;
- Finding out that I’m getting a new kid in said third and fourth hour class on Monday. He was first referred for psychiatric treatment for his issues with violence when he was… wait for it… three and a half years old. Oh, joy.
- Numerous hurried investigations of various instances of massive bus drama during seventh hour;
- Realizing that I totally forgot about a really important meeting with my assistant principal yesterday, and furthermore hadn’t done a couple of things I was supposed to have done for said meeting;
- ANOTHER Friday afternoon PAT meeting that was supposed to end at four and I got up and walked out of at 4:30; remind me to never do this again;
- Being delayed to a rather ridiculous extent in picking the boy up at day care;
- The first 2/3 of bath time being another crabby toddler cage fight, and once that was done getting to have another fight with him about getting out of the tub after that last, pleasant 1/3;
- Just now realizing that the two quesadillas I made myself for dinner are seriously not going to be enough and have I mentioned how quickly I can transition from not hungry at all to ragey, weak and trembling since I had my gallbladder out? Because that is happening right now.
- Which means that this is very likely all the posting you’re getting today.
Tag: toddlers
No human would stack macaroni this way…
So while the boy was doing this (over, and over, and over again…)
I was doing this:
Jambalaya with cheddar cheese cornbread is a hell of a way to end a Sunday, y’all.
Creepy children’s programming review: Color Crew
So this “Color Crew” program is the new shizz around here for some reason. TV for little kids is always deeply weird on one axis or another; this may be the weirdest program he’s ever wanted to watch, with the possible exception of “WordWorld,” which isn’t allowed into my house any longer.
Color Crew is the story of ten crayons. The ten crayons are basically identical except for Purple, who is high as hell, and Green, who is… special. The intro song sets up the basic premise of the program:
See, the whole thing is about competing for the hat, which has magical powers and allows the Color of the Day the power of speech. The crayon’s only allowed to say its name, though, so it’s not actually that great as a superpower. The crayons all hop around and compete for the honor of wearing the Hat, which always goes to the fourth crayon in line, a fact that they seem not quite bright enough to have figured out yet. Then that crayon and the crayon to its left get to go color a picture.
Coloring a picture is very exciting! The pictures exist in a weird world without perspective, though, so it’s entirely possible that the piggy bank on the bed is 2/3 the size of the entire bed, or the two cherries on a plate are going to be the same size as the entire piece of cake on the plate next to it:
Note the relative sizes of, say, the two oranges, the frying pan, and the carton of milk. Which is, inexplicably, on a plate. Somewhere underneath them will be some built-in shelves each holding a single carrot.
Anyway, as you can see, the Color of the Day gets to color some of the things in the picture! This is very happymaking for everyone involved, and the crayons get rather indecently excited about it. Like, there are crayon boners going on, I swear. Sooner or later, though, the color of the day will stop shrieking his name over and over again and get a liiiitle bit too excited and color something the wrong color. Objects in Color Crew world, you see, can only be one color, ever, and the other colors will tolerate no bending of this rule. The mixture of horror and sadness on the face of the other crayon when something gets mis-colored cannot be expressed properly in language and must be seen to be believed.
And then the sinister purpose of the second crayon becomes apparent. He’s the enforcer. He’s there to make sure the rules get followed. He’s there to summon the Angry Eraser:
The Angry Eraser is a terrifying mixture of a shop teacher from a 1970’s teen movie and Adolf Hitler. He exists to destroy art and color and is perfectly happy with his role as Pure Evil. He glares hatefully at the miscreant crayon, destroys their horrible mistake, and then grins like a fucking pedophile maniac and skids back off screen. At which point the Color Overseer recolors the deviant portion of the page and everyone gets back to work. Sooner or later all of the crayons zoom in, at which the picture unaccountably becomes colored with markers instead of crayons:
The whole thing is weird and creepy, so naturally my kid loves it. How long until he can watch Walking Dead with the wife and I?
U dad, bro?
I am not a good parent, people, and the degree to which I constantly troll my own son is probably going to bite me in the ass sooner or later.
The boy is in this phase– I don’t know if it’s typical of toddlers, but let’s hope it is because that means eventually it’ll stop— where he really wants to constantly be asserting control over the world around him. This manifests itself in bossiness and occasionally being really picky about how things should be. Since I am a bad person, I cannot stop myself from ceaselessly screwing with him whenever he’s being like this.
An example: my son likes to play this game he calls “in the sky.” It’s basically Catch except he’s two so he can’t really catch yet. In the Sky involves getting Mommy and Daddy to stand up, placing them where he wants them to be in the room, and then assigning a ball to each of them.
Woe betide you if you use the wrong ball.
When the phrase “in the sky!” is uttered, all of the balls are thrown into the sky. Then they land, and he retrieves them, and returns them to the proper parent, and then we play again.
I cannot stop from being an asshole whenever this game is played. I’ve tried. I can’t do it.
I’m always supposed to use the red ball. He gets really mad if I use the wrong ball, so I’m always insisting on trading with my wife. It makes him nuts.
You’re supposed to throw the ball straight up in the air. Sometimes– perhaps, mathematically, a bit too often, my ball somehow manages to bounce off of his head. I don’t know why! The ball must be broken!
This game must be played standing up. I don’t understand how standing up works and must have it carefully explained to me. Every time.
I must stand where he wants me to stand. I don’t. I wander around.
He has to collect the balls and pass them back. Sometimes I get them instead. He gets so mad and it’s hilarious.
Sometimes I bounce the ball; you’re not supposed to do that. Sometimes I don’t even throw the ball when he says “in the sky,” and do it too early or too late. This is sin of the highest magnitude.
This is not the only way I’m like this, folks. I’ll watch him spend ten minutes carefully lining up all of his cars exactly the way he wants them and then nudge one of them out of line. Sometimes we’re playing with his car ramp and I send a car down the ramp backwards. On purpose.
I don’t know why I’m like this, but I can’t stop. Is anyone reading this a therapist? Because either I need one now or he’s gonna need one in the future.
In which I dodge a bullet
Had a bad moment with the boy the other day.
He’s been throwing things lately. This, in and of itself, isn’t such a big deal; toddlers throw things. We encourage throwing when it’s a ball, so long as he’s throwing to and not at, and discourage throwing just about everything else. Generally, something along the lines of “Don’t throw things!” or “We don’t throw books” or “You’ll hurt the dog” has been good enough to get him to stop. Rarely– I mean, it, rarely— we have had to tell him twice.
He is almost 2 1/2, just for the record.
The other day, he threw his fork at dinnertime. This earned a sharper reprimand than usual as throwing a metal fork is somewhat more dangerous than throwing many other objects. We picked it up off the floor and gave it back to him and he threw it again. This time, he missed my head by maybe an inch.
I… reacted somewhat strongly. Verbally only, mind you, but more severely than perhaps he’s used to. He was done eating anyway, so we washed him up and then told him to walk around the table and pick up his fork and give it to me. Which he did– mostly. He walked around the table. He picked up the fork from the ground. I held out my had for him to give it to me.
And he gets this look on his face.
Oh hell no, boy. Don’t you even think what you’re thinking right now, because goddammit I’ve never spanked a kid in my life and I swear to god I may not be able to stop myself if you throw a fork at my face right now.
Out comes the teacher voice.
“Give. The fork. To me. Now.”
He very clearly spends a moment considering his options, and hands me the fork.
Which… good, because I really didn’t know where I was going after that, and heading into a potential You Really Need to Understand I’m Serious Right Now moment without a game plan is never a good idea, either in my classroom or in my house. I’m ambivalent about spanking right now; I don’t see that in general it’s going to do much good with a 2-year-old who wouldn’t know what “I’m going to spank you if you do that” even means, and in general I’d prefer to never hit my kid. But given a choice between hit my kid and have him believe that throwing sharp things in my face is okay… well, I’d prefer to dodge the issue altogether and not have to face that choice, actually.
I may need to spend some time reading up on discipline with toddlers.
You remember the tree that came down in the storm, right? Our insurance company estimated the cost to have it cut up and hauled away at $700, which doesn’t hit our deductible. The first estimate we got was two grand, and even getting that guy out to look at our shit was a huge pain in the ass because of all the much-more-important bigger jobs that were available all around the northern part of the state.
I’ve got a guy coming out tomorrow who will do the job for $575. Which is nowhere near $2000, and makes me very freaking happy.
Cue the normal concerns that you have when you get lowballed, of course, but if they do the job well I’m going to be recommending the guy to everyone I know. I may knock down other people’s trees to drum up more work for him.
In which I kvetch about stupid things
…so, just like every post, really.
The boy’s current YouTube obsession is a video, not even a minute long, where Elmo is playing with a beluga whale, and it is a horrible, horrible video. First, it requires Elmo to twice ask Winston the beluga whale to “please show Elmo what love is,” which is absolutely completely creepy if you are possessed of a remotely filthy mind, and I swear to you that the filth in my brain has made run-of-the-mill perverts run screaming and enter monasteries. Also, in the last shot of the clip, Elmo is leaning over the whale’s pool so that he can receive belugish lovin’, and it is painfully apparent that they’ve positioned his ass off-screen so that the puppeteer can actually make him move. You can see every part of him but the back of his ass and it’s really weird and distracting and creepy.
On the plus side, he– the boy, not Elmo– has learned how to use the remote for the Apple TV to repeat his YouTube videos, so he no longer requires us to repeat the video for him. On the minus side, since he knows how to do this, his new move is to start the video, run out of the room to do something else, then run back in a minute later to restart the video– which means he isn’t actually watching it but I fucking have to because if he comes back in and the video is off he screams.
Did I mention that the video is only a minute long and I have to listen to the sentence “Oh please, show Elmo what love is” twice during that single minute?
I’m losing my goddamn mind, folks.
Currently occupying more braincycles than it ought to: whether I’m buying a PS4 or an Xbox One. I mean that in two senses; first, whether I’m buying one at all, and second, which one I’m buying if I’m buying one. This is a stupid thing to be wondering about for a wide variety of reasons, chief among which being the fact that I’ve barely touched my Xbox 360 since having Paul Revere riding bitch behind me and calling out incomprehensible directions for me to avoid British soldiers caused me to stop playing Assassin’s Creed 3. Combine that with the fact that the game I’d bought before AC3, Bioshock: Infinite, was almost completely devoid of anything interesting and it’s been forever since I tried to play anything on it.
Most of my gaming lately has been on my iPad, honestly; and it’s been playing Baldur’s Gate, which came out when I was in high school or early college or something like that. I could blame the boy if I wanted to; certainly fatherhood has cut down on both my inclination to and my time for gaming, and the fact that I’ve been spending almost all of my leisure time reading in a frantic and pointless attempt to get through 200 books this year hasn’t helped either. But I don’t like the idea of not owning a gaming console. It bothers me. But the Xbox One has a number of features that bother me rather intensely. For example, everything they’re saying the Kinect can do is something that I absolutely do not want a device in my living room to do, and the damn thing makes the system cost $100 more than the PS4. And I don’t really want a PS4 because, well, I skipped the PS3 and I think of myself as an Xbox guy. But I’m mad at Microsoft and the Xbox One is stupid. But I want a new console. But there aren’t really any games I want to play for them anyway. And it’s not like I can find one in a store. But I like shopping for futile things. But I don’t want to spend the money! But I’m frustrated and want retail therapy.(*)
I love it when I’m stupid.
Blah blah blah wank wank wank first world problems. I know. But it was either this or post about work, and the last couple of days require some thinking before I write about them. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll have eight hours at OtherJob and it’s supposed to be cold and snowing so I’ll have plenty of time.
(* Also? Thinking about buying a PS3. I want to play The Last of Us in the worst possible way and if the PS4 was actually backwards-compatible that feature might sell me the system all by itself. And I figure by the time I’ve worked my way through the PS3’s backlog of good titles that were system-exclusive, which will all be cheap by now, the PS4 will have enough of a library that it might be worth buying. Which… this is probably the most sensible approach, which is why I’ll likely not do it.)
Terrible decisions: interlude
Lowe’s wants $2000, sans material costs, to tile our bathroom, which has 37 square feet of floor space and less than 70 square feet of shower wall space. The entire budget for the bathroom is $2500, so… looks like I get to learn how to tile.
I can do this. Really. Honest.
While we were at Lowe’s today getting bad news, the boy was sort of misbehaving. Not really in any large way, just in that toddler “I want to do things that I find interesting, but are not compatible with my health or your desires” sort of way. He got a bit screechy about wanting to push “his cart” (he’s two; everything is his lately) in some direction other than toward the front door after we decided it was time to leave, and I made an Executive Daddy Decision, put my screeching son in the cart, and we took off, mildly embarrassed at the terrible sounds my poor, oppressed little boy was making.
Then we got to the front of the store, where there was a father with three little kids with him. Two boys: the oldest, maybe nine, then maybe a six or seven year old, and an infant of indeterminate gender in a stroller. All three were screaming and crying. The two older boys wanted candy, and were bawling at Daddy’s refusal to buy them candy, repeatedly insisting that he justify his non-purchasing-candy ways for them. The infant was also screaming, probably just because its brothers were.
My son isn’t old enough for me to have had to make any real decision about physically disciplining him yet. I am ambivalent about whether spanking an older child is ever a useful practice. I am certain that it is worse than useless with a two-year-old.
And I’m not sure whether I think this guy should have full-on slapped both of his kids in their faces for their stupid, embarrassing public display of bullshit or whether I respect him for his restraint. One way or another, he got out of the store without beating either of his spoiled-ass kids, although I can’t vouch for what happened when he got them back to the car.
“I forgive you,” I whispered into my son’s ear.
Maybe I don’t want him to get much older.
What’s a “day off?”
My son turned two on Friday. I was thinking about using today to muse about fatherhood a little bit, but instead I’m all OH MY GOD THERE ARE ONE MILLION FAMILY MEMBERS COMING OVER IN FIVE HOURS FOR A PARTY FOR A TWO YEAR OLD BLUE ICING EVERYWHERE COOKING FOR A HUNDRED ALL I KNOW HOW TO MAKE IS DIP JESUS WHERE DID THE VACUUM GO HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN SINCE WE CLEANED THIS HEY I THOUGHT WE POTTY TRAINED THE DOGS WHY THE HELL IS THERE SNOT THERE WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TOILET WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST STEP ON WHERE IS THE OTHER GRAPEFRUIT WHY ARE WE OUT OF PROPANE.
So, maybe not so much on the big posting today.
At least I got my lesson plans done yesterday.
On the plus side: new dinosaur toys.