Category: Fatherhood

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Parenting Philosophies

Universal Laws

I think most parents come into parenting with a “Parenting Philosophy.” It is probably a mix of things that their parents did with them, as well as some personal observation tweaks on parenting skills they have gleamed by watching the successes and failures of other parents.

I am no different. My parenting philosophy goes something like this:

  • I am your father first, and your best friend second (or maybe 5th or 6th after your real friends and your mother)
  • I ate vegetables and so can you. If you don’t eat them tonight, when you get hungry enough, you WILL eat them
  • After the approximate age of 3, you’re old enough to clean up most of your own messes and get your own toys and blankets from wherever in the house you’ve left them. I’m not your maid
  • When you’ve tuned out my threats of taking away your favorite toys, a spanking usually will do the trick
  • Just because we have kids, it doesn’t mean the house should look like a pigsty
  •  You can entertain yourself sometimes
  • anything else that I make up along the way

The problem with a philosophy, is that it’s just that—a philosophy. A philosophy is “a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs” (thank you Dictionary.com). The quick among you will see the fallacy at work here—the fact that a philosophy comprises principles. And what is a principle exactly, but a, “personal or specific basis of conduct  or management.”

Plainly put, a philosophy consists of a bunch of generally unproven beliefs. Which means then, that a philosophy is not proven and therefore seldom holds true in the real world.

Take last night. I met CareerMom and the boys out for dinner at the local binge-n’-purge. Things went well for the first 20 minutes as our oldest contented himself with coloring the little menu thingy and our youngest donned a bib and commenced to eat pretty much whatever we put in front of him. But then all that wore off and we were left with, “I’m ready to go home” whining from our oldest and, “Hey, let’s see how many times I can make mommy and daddy pick this up off the floor” from our youngest.

Once dinner was over, I volunteered to take our youngest home while CareerMom and my oldest went shopping for a last-minute Christmas gift for her Administrative Assistant at work who had made a point of telling CareerMom as she walked out the door that, “I have a Christmas gift for you tomorrow.”

When we got home, I put our youngest on the floor with some plastic containers to play while I washed up bottles and generally cleaned up. Well, he didn’t like that and he decided to cry.

Now, I had two choices here. I could A) Stand by my philosophies and let him entertain himself (or continue to cry) while I cleaned, or I could B) Pick him up, leave the mess and keep him happy.

Have I mentioned I’m stubborn? Well, I am so I stuck by my philosophy and treated myself to pretty much a nonstop 40-minute cry-fest because once he got started, nothing would stop him. It finally got close enough to bedtime, so I bathed him, put his jammies on and put him to bed.

God Bless the quietness!

But I’m at an impasse here because I don’t think he “learned” anything, which is really the whole point of sticking to your philosophy when things go south. So I’m not sure I won anything here and I’m sure that the next time the situation arises, it’ll play out similarly.

The only question that remains is, “How strong is my resolve?” I don’t know the answer to that, but what I do know for sure is that I will be tested; Oh yes, I will be tested still.

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The $400 Health Club

There are things that I love about the holidays; the cool weather, the food, the jolly mood everyone is in, and then there are things that I really don’t like; sweating over what to get the nine (yes, nine) people/couples in my life (not including the Secret Santa gift and the sibling gift on my wife’s side). With kids now, there are even more things to love and/or hate about the holidays.

For instance, our kids’ daycare is closed for all major holidays. In the case of Thanksgiving, they were closed understandably on Thursday and Friday, but of course we still have to pay for a full week. Regardless, this means that instead of the kids playing for nine hours with their friends at daycare, they are either strapped in a car on a long trip or stuck in a boring house with people they don’t know and only a handful of toys carefully selected for both portability and creativity, and unable to generally get out and burn off all that energy that keeps them the sane lovable children we all hope they are come the weekend.

As my friend pointed out over at Pantsfreesia, by Sunday afternoon I’ve got that twitchy eye thing going and if the weather is nice, my wife is urging me to get out-of-doors and go do something that doesn’t involve kids. So, long holiday weekends, such as what we just had for Thanksgiving, are especially trying for me even though I love my children with all my heart.

I love em; I just don’t wanna play with them for 96 hours. And it’s not just the playing either. When my oldest son doesn’t go to daycare and burn off steam, he’s a different person. He talks back, he whines over piddly stuff and he just generally isn’t as well behaved as he is when he gets tons of exercise. And for whatever reason, riding bicycles and hitting the ball are poor substitutes for chasing each other around the playground pretending you’re Spider Man trying to knock down the Red Power Ranger. I know this because I played it for ten minutes and I was done, both because it’s physically demanding, and because it’s a tad humiliating for people to see you imitating a three year old making noises that you haven’t made since you were, well, three years old.

And no, I never bought into that whole, “Dance as if no one were watching” idea. I mean, someone is always watching and even if they’re your parents, in the back of their head, behind the part of their brain that’s saying, “What a good father,” they are also thinking, “My goodness he looks like a total goober.”

Welcome to parenting.

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Beach Trip Deja vu

So my son and I are here on the outskirts of the country’s most popular destination spot—Pigeon Forge, TN. The house is a huge, three-level affair perched precariously (I’m seriously here) on the side of a mountain. The grade is so steep in fact, that halfway below the bottom floor of each house, and the ground, which falls off dramatically, is a catwalk for maintenance people to use to get to the electrical closet located in what might generously be called a basement.

At any rate, the original plan was for my family to spend the night at my mom’s house a mere 20 miles away, but since it’s only my oldest son and I, my mom made such a fuss about our staying for the night that we did. However, this meant that we got last dibs on sleeping arrangements. In this case, last dibs included the top floor, loft area consisting of two twin beds in a “we’ve been married for 15 years and no longer want to be sleeping in the same room” kind of set up. Also sharing this loft is my aunt, and my niece, and then over a half wall is a bedroom where my cousin and her husband are sleeping. So basically, there are six of us sleeping in a loft together.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal except for the fact that the house is made of all wood. I mean, there isn’t a stick of sheetrock anywhere. The walls are wood, the floor is wood and the ceilings are wood. What this amounts to is one giant cavernous noise funnel up to the top floor where we are all sleeping. Last night, when one of us turned over in our noisy bed, the rest of us heard it and were similarly disturbed.

Tonight, despite any arguments to the contrary, my son and I are making the twisty, turny trip over the mountain to my mom’s house where I will sleep in a queen bed, as will my son. We will walk around the house in near-nudity since we won’t have to worry about offending aunts and/or cousins, and we will not worry about snoring or tooting in our sleep, lest we offend those who might be offended.

And then tomorrow morning, we may or may not come back—perhaps opting to rather say goodbye via telephone and loiter around Townsend, TN checking out the Apple Barn and the little train museum. And then, hopefully having worn out my son, I’ll strap him in the car and we’ll hit the road on the way home.

Or, I might freeze my butt off in Gatlinburg tonight looking at the lights cuz I was too stupid to bring a coat. We’ll see.

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To Grandmother’s House We Go…

For the first time in about 8 years, my mom’s side of the family (well, one of my mom’s) decided to all get together this year. And they are doing it in a four-bedroom cabin in Tennessee. This cabin is just over the river and literally through the woods from my mom’s house in Walland, TN and the cabin is located just this side of Gatlinburg, TN. So, from my mom’s house to the cabin, it’s about a 40-minute drive.

Originally, CareerMom and I decided we’d go up there, stay at my mom’s house at night to give the boys better sleeping arrangements, and then drive over to the cabin each day and spend time with family. However, as the time has drawn nearer, this has seemed less and less like a great idea.  For one, my youngest slept almost straight through the night for four nights in a row. This is unprecedented thus far and it is believed by many that dragging him up to Tennessee, where he’d have to sleep in a hard pack-n-play, would ruin whatever miracle schedule we’ve stumbled on. (Author’s Note: Since that four-night sleeping stretch, he’s had two nights of waking up twice, and then four times another night). Also, the car trip. If you’ll harken back with me to the Beach Trip of 2007, none of us were looking forward to spending 4 ½ hours up and down in the car, plus 45 minutes of gut-twisting back and forth turns through the woods to get to the cabin.

So as CareerMom and I lay by the fire the other night, we both confessed how little we were actually looking forward to this trip. Out of that came a plan: I would take our oldest son and go, while CareerMom stayed behind with the baby. There was really no way I could get out of going altogether given that the family made an effort to gather, but we both felt that taking the baby would only be a burden on everyone’s efforts at having fun considering the problems we have getting him to sleep in strange places. (Author’s Note: We took our oldest son down to the beach when he was four months old and despite constant admonishing while he was napping, people continued to yell and bang around and so he did not sleep and was miserable. Same bunch of people, same situation here).

I called my mom to break the bad news and she was, as expected, disappointed. But as I dug deeper into her disappointment, it became clear to me that really all she wanted to do was show off the baby. It was pretty clear that the rest of us coming was secondary. See, she has this little competition with her youngest sister whose daughter has two children. It’s all about whose kid is the cutest see and she’s built up my youngest son to epic proportions of cuteness and now, she’ll have no proof.  She also didn’t seem to buy my excuses, which are very valid and since she’s never raised a child, not something she can relate to.

At one point, she compared my youngest’s traveling issues with her sister’s daughter’s children and pointed out that since they are “in church all the time” (pointing out that we aren’t) her children are used to it. I pointed out, quite annoyed at this point, that having a child around other people in no way compares to traveling with children. Our kids are in daycare all day. They get along with people fine; they just HATE car seats, and they don’t sleep well in strange places.

If you’re in your fifties, and you raised children, you did so in the era of vans, during a time of built-in beds and tables and no car seats. Traveling then was a breeze compared to now. Now, the poor kid has to remain tightly strapped into a nonmovable, hard plastic car seat, with sides that come around like blinders giving the child little to look at for hours on end. It was a different time and traveling today is just so vastly different from thirty years ago.

Suffice it to say that I hung up the phone with absolutely no desire to go up there whatsoever. And what really steams me is that this will be the third time I/we’ve gone up there since spring and they haven’t come here once. But they have the nerve to question my complaints about travel.

It’s the holidays folks. How about we just be happy to get to see each other huh?