Tag: kids

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Tanks n’…Barbies?

tanks barbiesThis past week, an infrequent friend of ours, whose daughter is also in MLIs daycare class and who is a single mother, was moving. Having lived through this particular brand of hell with our own kids, we offered to watch her daughter during the process; something which she took us up on with hardly a moment’s thought.

CareerMom picked them up from Daycare and within five minutes of being in the house, they both came running downstairs wearing nothing but their skivvies! This has become a common enough thing for MLI lately, it being what he calls his “Tarzan” look; but I was unprepared to have a near-naked four-year-old little girl running around the house.

I mean, we have boys and I’m used to naked fellers running around here, but even though she’s only 4, it seemed like there was something wrong with it! I know, it’s stupid; it’s what society has done to us by crucifying anyone found having “inappropriate” pictures of kids on their computer.

It’s made us hyper-aware and while I’ll admit that overall, it’s probably a good thing, at the same time a person shouldn’t feel weird when their (very young) kids, and an opposite-gender friend, want to play Tarzan together…or take a bath together…or sleep in the same bed together…

(As you can see, the evening just got “weirder” and “weirder” for my personal tastes.)

I realize there are millions of family’s with two kids of the opposite gender, who live with this every day, and that they probably give it zero thought, but I suppose when you don’t live with it, and it’s someone else’s child, you can’t help but feel a little bit, well…creepy!

I was also surprised to find that little boys and little girls at that age (esp. when the girl is a tomboy) pretty much like the same things. I learned a bit about little girls this past week and maybe a bit about myself too…odd how that keeps happening at my age.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

The Baby Swing Dilemma

crossroad.jpgOnce again I find myself at a crossroads where my kids are concerned. On a side note, if you never saw the 80s movie “Crossroads” with Karate Kid’s Ralph Macchio, I highly recommend it.

Anyway, this crossroad decision involves whether or not to wean my oldest son away from the swing or not. With my first son, it was all about the swing. Swing at night, swing at naptime during the day, swing, swing, swing. With my youngest son, almost a year old now, he’s been actually very good about sleeping in his crib, only requiring the swing during the daytime and generally, any time we really just need him to calm down and rest.

This “calm down and rest” time also happens to occur every morning between 4:30 – 5:30 a.m. when we adults are still trying to squeeze a few extra minutes out of our slumber or trying to get ourselves ready for work unencumbered by a clamoring baby. However, I’m not immune to the fact that while this may work for now, sometime in the next additional pound or two, that puny Fisher-Price swing motor is going to go kaput like the two before it and we’ll be left hanging with a crying baby at 5:30 in the morning.

Personally, I’m a cold-turkey kind of person. When I set my mind to doing something, or stop doing something in this case, I just stop. I don’t dial it down gradually—nossir, I’m all about nipping it in the bud—and permanently!

CareerMom is not.

So unless I want to get into a mild argument with her over the swing, any attempts that I make to stop using it will be usurped by her at her earliest convenience. So I’m stuck over what to do. I guess like most things, you just cross that bridge when you get to it.

I also still have about 20 pairs of disposable earplugs if things get too bad.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Baby Spit

It’s fairly rare, but every now and again my youngest son (of 10 months) takes a late afternoon nap at daycare. This means that he’s actually in a relatively good mood when he gets home rather than being a whiney, drooling sleepy head that we have to try to keep awake for another two hours. On those days that he naps past 4 p.m., he comes home laughing and crawling around and is the cute baby we all hope we get from the good Lord.

Last night was one of those nights and after I bathed him, I took him to his room where he promptly grabbed his toothbrush and started sucking on it. After it was good and wet he took it out of his mouth to study it like a cat might study a mouse right before it rips its head off and brings it to lay at your feet.

So he’s sitting there holding the toothbrush in one hand and he grabs the bristles with the other and flips it towards me like you’d do food on a spoon during a foodfight. Baby spit went flying all over my face and I let out an involuntary, “Oooh!”

For some reason, known only to babies, this cracked him up something tremendous and for the next five minutes he flung spit at me while I pretended to be disgusted (it wasn’t much of an acting stretch) and when that wore thin, I’d cry “oooh!” and then give him tummy noogies, much to his delight.

He has a memory like an elephant, so I foresee more of this in the coming evenings. I’m just going to add this to my list of “Things I can’t imagine myself ever doing….ever.” Now if I can just get my oldest son to give up his Spider Man costume, I’ll be golden.