Tag: daycare

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My son’s middle name is “danger”

Danger!

Sometime around the 11th grade, I reached the tallest point in my life that I would ever reach—somewhere around 5’ 8”. CareerMom tops out at roughly 5’ 4”. My side of the family comes from short stock, but CareerMom’s side of the family is a mixed bag.

So, there was about an 80% chance that our kids would be on the smallish side. And it appears that will be the case.

My youngest son, of 11 months, is quite the walker. He toddles all over the house and when he gets near something he knows he shouldn’t—like the stairs or the fireplace—he’ll stop, look over his shoulder and if he thinks no one is looking, he’ll hit it full tilt. One of his favorite pastimes is wrestling with his older brother, and if I’m on the floor, he runs over to me and lays across me while I roll him front his feet to his head.

He likes the rough and tumble.

So why then, am I surprised when the daycare ladies asked CareerMom, “Has Aiden been more aggressive with Ethan lately? Because he’s become the class bully.”

And just to prove it, when CareerMom dropped him off this morning, he walked over to one little girl who was innocently playing by herself, and just smacked her on top of the head.

Part of me isn’t surprised. Quite the opposite of his older brother, Aiden is outgoing and loves to be the center of attention. It’s clear he has a dominant personality; but to see that little boy taking on kids older and bigger than him (well, some are younger and smaller, but most aren’t) both warms my heart and scares the crap outta me at the same time.

I don’t think there’s a father out there who, internally, doesn’t swell with pride when his son stands up for himself. But there’s a fine line between standing up for oneself and being a bully. And it doesn’t help that the daycare workers are so enamored of him that they don’t like to fuss at him because they can’t stand to watch his little lip quiver in response to the scolding.

The little booger has them all fooled. He pulls that trick at home and I just laugh at him and tell him “No!” He gets over it and moves on. Daddy doesn’t fall for those tricks.

It seems we have some training to do…and not just with the kids.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Society

I’ve got an ice cream…and you can’t have one…

From the very same institution (or at least a branch of it) that brought us taxes and war, has come the longer school year. For the kids here in Georgia–and the metro Atlanta area to be more precise–this means that next week marks the beginning of yet another year of substandard education at the hands of underpaid mother-in-laws. It also, unfortunately, means that my commute to work next week may very well signal the end of time–Carmageddon if you will. Because this is when all those teachers, who are use to sleeping late and arising well past the “safe to gas up your car due to smog” time has passed, will once again grab their half-caf-espresso with a twist of lime and head out the door clogging up the already busy lanes.

Which brings me (finally) to today’s conversational topic-school. Georgia has never ranked very high in the national school rankings. In fact, in a recent 2007 ranking of public high schools in Newsweek magazine, good ol’ Georgia only had one entry in the top 300 in the nation. Now some will say “It’s just a southern thang,” but even that’s not accurate. In comparison, our border neighbors stacked up thusly in the top 300:

But statistics notwhithstanding, yuppy-snobs here like to brag about how smart their little whipper-snapper is compared to his or her peers. And it doesn’t just start in middle school or high school when the young Democrat starts taking liberal arts classes either. Nossir it starts much earlier.

Try Daycare! Oh yeah, daycare is all the rage too. Well first, you have to find the proper audience. Utter the sentence “My wife and I both work and we have our children in daycare,” in the wrong setting and at best you’ll get condescending looks, and at worst, people will go “Sixth Sense” (can you believe that movie is 8 years old?) on you and pretend like you don’t exist. But, in the right audience (i.e. dual income families with kids), if you utter the aforementioned death-cry, the ensuing “My daycare is better than your daycare” posturing can reach epic proportions.

And daycare is an interesting concept really, because unlike schools where children from generally one socio-economic area gather together and can revel in their similarities, daycare in a relative 10-square mile radius all cost the same and so the driving factor for what kinds of kids attend there is largely based on how convenient the facility is to one or both of the parent’s offices. So, you can, and often do, get kids of all economic levels, ethnicities, etc.

So it is at my kids’ daycare. My oldest son’s two best friends include a little girl a bit older than he, whose mom recently got divorced and now has to move away for a job she hates. His other best friend is a boy his age whose parents are very similar to us. We knew that he would soon be moving on to the next class in daycare because they’ve moved a bunch of new kids in his class and him and his buds are nearly the oldest ones there now. But what we found out yesterday is that instead of moving him to the next class, they are moving him and his friends to the next-next class. Hippity hoppity ho!

My three year old is already skipping “grades.” Well, not really but that’s how part of me wants to spin it to all my friends. In truth, the reason probably has less to do with intelligence and more to do with economics–the daycare needs to make some room in his current class and in the next class because they moved a bunch of other kids a couple of weeks ago, and since him and his two friends are well potty trained and probably the three best behaved, it makes sense that if you need to move some kids to a different, older class, then moving their little group makes sense.

Don’t get me wrong; my boy is smart, but I don’t think he’s a Mozart or an Einstein. And who wants their kid to be that smart, but socially inept anyway? Certainly not me. So, I’ll go on being proud of him for all the other reasons; he generally listens, he’s potty trained, he has a really gentle spirit, he loves his little brother and because in his eyes, daddy knows how to do just about anything.

Even if they wanted to put him in high school tomorrow and started calling him “Doogie Howser” I wouldn’t be any more proud of him than I already am.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Billions of government PSA $$…down the drain.

“Just say no.”
“This is your brain on drugs”
“The more you know”
“Give a hoot, don’t pollute”

Those good ol’ Public Service Announcements. Billions and Billions spent trying to persuade the public towards a viewpoint that someone in the government decided is the right one. And here we are, decades of PSAs later and as a 34 year old adult, I’m still falling prey to peer pressure!

Oh, I’m not taking drugs or setting forest fires or anything like that, but my wife and I have bowed to parental peer pressure and it’s just as insidious as anything you might find peddled on the streetcorners of today’s inner-cities.

At my children’s daycare, in addition to the activities that they provide in-house, they apparently also allow outside vendors to come in. One such vendor is a company called “Playball.”

For a paltry $80, your child can enjoy 8 weeks of 30 minutes playtime sessions (1 per week) with their friends. Do you see the genius here? If you don’t “let” your children take advantage of this wonderful program, then they must endure 30 minutes of exile while their friends have fun. Who wants to be that kid? What parent wants their child to endure such horror?

But let’s do the math. If even 8 kids per class of 14 does it, and they can do 4 classes each day, that’s a cool $360 a day for 2 hours of work. Not a bad racket.
And really, how much does each child get to do in an “instructed” play class in 30 minutes when there are several other children also involved? So really, for each parent that pays for their child to take the class, they aren’t paying so that their child can actually improve their ball skills; what they are really paying for is “inclusion.”

Peer pressure. Criminey! I never smoked pot and I never set a forest fire, but by golly, my children have caused my fall! But it doesn’t have to be so with you.

Remember, “You could learn a lot from a dummy!”