Parental Assessment - Gains/Losses

Now that we have 3 children I am taking an assessment of what we have gained and lost. This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm sure over time more can and will be added. The entries that made the short list of gains/losses are:

Gained:

• Three boys who look similar and act completely differently.
• A firm grasp of the mother's curse. I actually ended up with three boys just like me. FYI the mother's curse is very real. I now understand why I thought my parents were constantly on the verge of going crazy...I thought it was just an expression but it REALLY WAS my fault!
• A deep respect for those with more children. I honestly don't know how they do it. I am ready to waive the white flag and take a vow of chastity. Plenty of time for sex after Misty hits menopause.
  
• A true understanding of how golden silence can be. There is nothing like the 5 minute respite that follows bedtime.
  
• A sense of wonder that children live to become adults. If we didn't love our children there is a large probability that we would forgo the continuation of the species and live comfortably with a pair of Golden Retrievers.
• A comfy pair of flip flops that I wear around the house to avoid stepping on sharp-cornered objects like Matchbox cars and Playmobil pieces. I used to go barefoot but have learned my lesson after what I will call "unintended acupuncture." Hello tetanus shot!
  
• A pair of toy boxes and multiple toy bins to house the aforementioned sharp-cornered items. My kids' toys have more storage than a 747.
• A minivan. Say what you will about the old daddy wagon but there is no way we could cram three kids into an Accord (at least not if both parents wanted to ride in the car simultaneously) nor is there any way I could afford to gas up a mammoth SUV. Ample seating + gas mileage = minivan, no way around it.
  

Lost:

• Hair...a lot of it.
• Hair Color (Applies to Misty only)...my hair that would have gone gray simply fell out.
• Patience. Maybe I had more of it when I only had one child nipping at my heels, but now my concept of patience has changed drastically. My patience now extends to the length of my arm plus a wooden spoon.
• Timeliness. I was always a person who was on time, and if I wasn't on time I was early. Now I consider it a good day if I am + 30 minutes from the desired ETA. (Note the absence of +/-...minus doesn't ever happen).
• There are many things that we go without to provide for our children. I personally gave up on athleticism, a low handicap and reason. Misty chipped in her sanity. Together we make quite a pair. Now our toughest decision is Mojito or Sangria? (After bedtime of course)!
  
• Cleanliness. I used to be fanatical about cleaning up all the toys at the end of the day and before the kids went to bed. Now I am more than content to run the gauntlet and slalom my way through the toys on the way to my office in the morning. It is as close to skiing as I will get until for at least the next 5 years.
  
• Notion of "Free Time." Free time is noted only as the time I can squeeze in between all things that need to be done (laundry, dishes, making the boys' lunches for the next day, cleaning up the messes left behind, etc.). Basically there ain't a whole lot of it.

It is called the daily grind for a reason. If you cannot relate you should definitely come over and baby sit to gain a deeper personal understanding of our daily grind.

What Does It Mean To Be A Child?

Today I was thinking about my children during an all too infrequent quiet moment and I asked myself what it meant to be a child. Clearly being young is a key ingredient but there are many young people who are quite intelligent: cross that one off. Some might characterize it by a lack of responsibility although I know many adults (not the least of which are my unmarried friends) to whom I could apply that logic, so that cannot be the answer. After all of my metacognitive searching I have boiled it down to one thing. Imagination.

To be small and to think big is a hallmark of being a child. Children have a knack for turning a cardboard box into a castle, a belt into a lasso, an empty roll of paper towels into a telescope, and a broken stick into a sword. Children can watch a movie and become a character: blankets become capes and stuffed animals come alive. They are captivated by magical stories, they believe that anything is possible which is a trait they share with inventors and visionaries the world over. Our world is ruled by those who seek to make our tiny planet more than what it was and have the ability to see the future and what can be. This is why imagination is so critical to progress. I think the following quote from George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman explains it best:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Somewhere along the way as we become adults we grow big and think small. This probably happens gradually, but certainly when we have children of our own we begin to think less about grandeur and more about the basics of providing for our families. How ironic that the imagination we outgrew long ago is our key to connecting with our children. Children need discipline, but they need to be encouraged to expand their imaginations and these two need not be diametrically opposed. Discipline is needed at certain times, but not at all times. Children must be free at times to run wild, skin their knees, and bust their lips. They must be allowed to grow through trial and error. We cannot teach them everything (nor would I want to). Some things they must experience for themselves.

It should be the primary concern of parents to strive for the delicate balance between discipline and imagination. If a parent is too overbearing the children will be coerced or scared into doing what is right and once they leave the nest they will surely rebel. No one likes to be micromanaged...least of all children. Yet on the other hand to allow children to do whatever they want to do is not a form of parenting, it is actually quite the opposite and a total abdication of parental responsibilites. If a parent is too lax then the children will show no respect to the parents (or others for that matter) since children need structure to grow into well-formed adults. To borrow a phrase from Suze Orman we as parents need to be willing to say, "No out of love instead of yes out of fear."

An old adage states that "everything is good in moderation including moderation." We should apply this to parenting as well. I believe that we can and should educate our children in the ways of the world, but let us not forget to allow them time to be children. My kids won't be applying to colleges for at least another dozen years so I think we have ample time to let them frolic and not obsess over learning too much too soon. Childhood does not last forever so we should enjoy as much of their young lives as we can before they grow into adults themselves.

How Church Rubs Off On Kids

In a fit of hunger about a couple of weeks ago I was at my dad's house and I grabbed the Betty Crocker Dessert Cookbook off the shelf and set about to find a recipe that would satisfy my sweet tooth that had been gradually increasing over the course of Lent. So many of my friends and family had given up desserts of one sort or another for Lent whilst I decided to give up alcohol. With two preschoolers and a new baby would I have rather given up sweets you betcha, but I digress. So I come across a recipe for Brandy Alexander Pie (which is a decadent chocolate pudding mixed with heavy cream and quite a bit of brandy) and I am salivating. I'm counting down the days till Easter.

Fast forward to Easter weekend. We go grocery shopping for the ingredients to make said dessert and we are short on chocolate wafers. Our choices were either chocolate graham crackers or Oreo cookies. We opted for the Oreo's figuring we would scrape out the white stuff in the middle and just use the cookies. Bonus: feed the white stuff to the boys and get them all hyped up on sugar so that they will eventually go into sugar shock and crash. Always seek the positive: early bedtime for the kids certainly qualifies.

We ended up using almost the entire package of Oreo's just to make the crust for the Brandy Alexander Pie. No I'm not interested in the calorie count. Needless to say we were left with a plate full of "white stuff" chips which our kids begin siphoning rapidly. It is always dangerous to have little hands around the cooking surface (not to mention little trip hazards hovering around your ankles) so Daddy decides to walk the plate of white stuff outside and begins divvying the chips out to the kids. In the process of handing them out I hold out a chip to Antonio to which he looks up at me and says "This is the Body of Christ." So amazed was I that I asked him to repeat what he said just so that I could be sure I didn't misunderstand. Sure enough it is exactly what he said. I am taken aback at a 4-year old who has yet to receive First Communion and recognizes that the "white stuff chips" are so very similar looking to the "Wafers" we receive in the Eucharist. It really validates me as a parent to see my child associate the mundane with something other-worldly.

Now Sunday School will be wrapping up in the next few weeks and Antonio will be sitting through mass with us all Summer. I hope he will be able to listen and retain some of what he hears...time will tell. It will be interesting since he is a typical 4-yr old and generally lacks the ability to sit quietly in one place for more than 5 minutes. Luckily we almost always sit next to families with similar aged children and I can only hope that they will be understanding of our plight. Odds are that over the course of the Summer we'll have another installment of "Kids Say the Darnedest Things." Stay tuned.

Potty Training Update

A couple of weeks ago I was approached via email to participate in a contest to win a 6-month supply of Pull-Ups. The deal was this: since my blog has spoken at length about the woes of potty training and Pull-Ups was promoting a media campaign about the "Potty-Dance" (you can look it up on You Tube) if I went to a website and added my blog postings I would be in the running. Now the "e-marketing machine" is frought with banking deals from Nigerian millionaires and credit card phishing scams, but this one was totally legit. I did a little leg work on the back end and saw that the company promoting this had other large clients aside from Kimberly Clark which gave me a little hope. Well lo and behold late last week I received an email telling me I had won and asked what size Angelo is and my home address. Yesterday they arrived. A box with 6 packages of 3T-4T Pull-Ups. Yeah!

The only thing cooler than free Pull-Ups is not neeeding to have your child wear them. Which is where we find Angelo at this very moment. Talk about irony! You take out a 2nd Mortgage to pay for diapers and a get a truckload of them delivered to your doorstep when you no longer need them. Better late than never I guess. Since they don't expire we may just keep them for Giancarlo who will no doubt need them in a couple of years.

In celebration of Angelo's potty training we took the boys to Chuck E Cheese on Tuesday as we promised to do when Angelo was totally trained. We made a big deal out of it and we made sure we did it up right. We had pizza, played games, and even indulged in a little cotton candy for a treat. My only complaint is that most of the games that my kids want to play are too big for them to play. Now I can play Skee Ball with the best of them, but Angelo has a problem getting the ball up the ramp. I think it is one part coordination and one part length of ramp, but that didn't stop him from giving it his all. Besides I don't think they will remember their high scores so much as they will remember they they had fun.

Favorite games: First off they both had to ride the horse (like that surprises anyone who knows my kids). Antonio anything with a gun. Big Game Hunter 2, some Wild West Shoot Out game, basically anything where you can shoot bad guys. Angelo wanted to play every car, plane, jet ski simulator possible. He is all about racing, down to his little Speed Racer undies.

I am so proud of Angelo for taking the next step toward becoming a truly big boy! He appears to be using this as a springboard toward acting older every day. As if he needed to grow up any quicker.

Making Sibling Rivalry Work For You

Potty Training Angelo has been quite difficult (as I have noted in the past). Misty and I realized a few weeks ago that we needed to rethink our methods of enticing Angelo to the toilet. Taking away things in the past resulted in a standoffish child that was no more ready to use the toilet than our cat. Our tactics have evolved to deal with this omnipresent threat to our collective sanity and the landfills.

We realized that the carrot and stick approach we were offering to change his behavior didn't really speak to Angelo. Yes he enjoyed treats when we gave them to him, but they were very much out of sight out of mind later in the day. We would all forget about them. Then we got the idea that we would promise him a trip to Chuck E Cheese if he would go in the potty for a solid week. I think a week is a difficult concept of time for a child who is not yet three years old. Nonetheless we tried it and it worked for a while, but eventually failed just like the rest of our best-laid plans.

Then a couple of days ago Mommy had a brilliant idea. It was so brilliant that I let out a fiendish snicker after I heard it. Here goes: Mommy parades Angelo around Check E Cheese and shows him everything he will get to do when goes potty all the time. She even goes to the token machine and buys enough tokens to play Skee-Ball until your arm falls off. Then she brings the him home and begins to dole out the tokens (1 for #1, 2 for #2) to which Angelo replied that he would go #3...I think that means both at the same time, but I'm not 100% sure. We also noted that if he went in his diaper we would take the same number of tokens away.

Sure enough this kid is clipping right along collecting tokens until all of a sudden his potty training zealousness wanes. He begins soiling his diapers again so we begin to subtract tokens. His mountain of coins began to dwindle until he was down to one. This see-saw battle had to end.

Enter sibling rivalry. Yesterday we officially announced that every time Angelo went in his diaper that he would not be giving the token back to us, but instead he would be giving them to his older brother.

Talk about a child who is now on fire for going potty in the toilet! My only worry was that Antonio would try to prevent him from going in the toilet, but he is simply not that kind of brother. Angelo hasn't missed a beat since our fiat yesterday. Angelo was even dry when he woke up this morning! He is all about strutting into Chuck E Cheese chest out, chin up, dragging a bag o' coins behind him and ready to claim his spider ring minions. This kid has the potential to buy his own CEC franchise with all the tickets he is going to win.

Now I'm not saying that he is fully potty trained, but he is well on his way. I think a little sibling rivalry can be a good thing every now and then, especially when it is applied to a constructive end.

What's The Deal With Dinner?

I can't understand why my children have such a problem eating dinner as a family at the table. We really don't have problems for breakfast or lunch, but for some reason dinner time is when the wheels on the bus completely fall off. It is so difficult to get them to even eat half of what's on their plates before the antics start. My children think that dinner time is basically their own personal times to be as disobedient as possible. I personally think that they save it up all day only to release it at the dinner table. Everything from crawling under the table, to throwing food, to "he's putting his foot in my face" (don't laugh this happened tonight). I'm really getting sick of this because after a long day the last thing I want to do is play part WWF Referee and part wet nurse.

We have tried so many different ways to get them to eat. We've tried earlier dinners, later dinners, smaller dinners, and feeding them something totally different for dinner all to no avail. We have even tried some carrot and stick approaches. My top 5 are below:

• Promises of Dessert - I personally think that Mommy blew this one for us. She caved in regularly in the past so now the kids are reluctant to believe her when she tells them that there will be no dessert unless they eat dinner. Advantage Kids.
• Promises to Stay Up Later- Right. Totally not a currency they truly grasp at this point in time. Not to mention that Antonio has his own concept of bedtime (more like T + 2 hours if we are lucky).
• Spankings - Oh yes, that's right spankings. Call it an adult temper tantrum, but there is nothing like the crack of a wooden spoon on an obstinate child's hiney. Sweet music!
• We'll Watch Your Favorite Movie After Dinner - Yeah...like they care! This only works if their favorite movie is "Guess What I Hid Under the Table!"
• I'll Give You $1 Million If You Will Be Quiet and Eat Your Dinner - Since they have no concept of money I thought it would be worth a try. Rejected.

Nothing seems to work. I can't get the kids to eat anything we cook no matter how appetizing, but when we go to Costco the kids will eat everything in sight so long as it is served on a toothpick or in a dixie cup. Actually I might be on to something here. From now on we will be serving chicken nuggets, cocktail weenies, and taquitos on toothpicks for dinner. Anything less solid like pasta or vegetables will now be served in dixie cups. Who cares if their dinner plates look like party service trays? As far as I'm concerned problem solved!

Time To Get Angelo Out Of Diapers

I realize that Angelo is not yet 3 years old but I am going to have to put my foot down after the pre-breakfast joy I experienced this morning. First I must set the stage. For those of you who are not acquainted with Angelo (a.k.a the Dr. of Destruction) he could care less whether his diaper weighs 4 pounds and hangs down to his knees. To the untrained eye one would surmise that he was trying to smuggle out a shot put in his 3T pants. Yesterday he was waddling around the living room when I asked him if he needed a diaper change. His response was "not yet." Imagine if you will a diaper-clad penguin waddling through the living room and you will get the gist of what I'm talking about. This has become something of a daily routine as he will hide or go to another room to take care of his business and then waddle in our midst as if nothing has changed. Normally a diaper change is no big deal, but this morning got out of control.

So as I was trying to make toast Angelo insisted that he "help." Help in quotations because when my children "help" it often takes 5 times longer than when I go it alone. So I have to pick up Angelo to put the bread in the toaster, since it resides at the back of the counter top for obvious reasons. About 30 seconds later I look down at my shirt after noticing that all-to-familiar odor and I realized that I had been branded. I immediately took off the shirt and doused it with Spray N Wash when I realized that my wonderful son would also need similar attending to. His clothes had to be removed and I then proceeded to change what had to be one of the worst diapers of my life...I used the better part of a dozen wipes. I told him that it was now officially unacceptable to use diapers and that from now on he would have to use the potty like Antonio. Unfortunately I have a sneaky suspicion that he didn't fully understand the severity of the matter.

Being the eternal pragmatist I insisted that he eat breakfast in just his diaper not wanting him to soil a clean outfit just for the sake of 10 minutes at the table. He offered no objections and ate his breakfast without issue. Interestingly with no shirt on he became concerned with his personal cleanliness, a feat not easily achieved by my son. It wasn't until I returned to the kitchen after donning a new shirt that he began his mischievous laughter after which he proclaimed that he would now "poop on that shirt." Clearly the importance of being potty trained that I had stressed not 10 minutes earlier totally eluded him. If you're scoring at home that's: Angelo 2: Daddy 0.

That was the last straw. I bid adieu to my children leaving them in the ultra-capable hands of my wife and sequestered myself in my office for the remainder of the morning.

Potty training will commence shortly! I am running out of excuses!