Amusement Pops
This parenting junk you really have to make up as you go. The absolute best thing about it is that your kids have no experiential context against which to compare your constant spectacular failures. As far as they can tell either you're doing the best parenting job in the history of parenting or the worst, depending on how you answered the last question they asked.

Dad, can we have soda with dinner? Sure why not. Wooooo! Yesss!

Dad, can we have soda with dinner? No, not tonight. <sound of knives sharpening>

My current problem is trying to figure out what you're supposed to do with a bored 3 year old for the better part of a day. Back when my oldest was 3 it was actually pretty easy. He was used to being bored, so bored was status quo. Now that he's off the kindergarten, I'm here with his 3 year old brother who has gotten used to having someone around of relatively similar size to amuse him.

So it falls to me. I hear him up stairs trying to teach the baby how to play Go Fish, but it isn't taking. This is actually an improvement, despite the frustration and inevitible failure. Usually now the 3 year old has taken to actively torturing his younger brother to combat the lack of something to do. And not in the emotional sense either, oh no. His favorite game is What Kind Of Noise Will This Make If I Bounce It Off A Baby's Head? The only positives at this point are that he's nearly out of household objects to try (he works fast, that one) and, more importantly, at least he isn't bothering me.

The catch-all, one-stop answer is of course the television, but I'm reluctant. It's not that I have any great moral objection to children watching lots and lots of TV, it's just that I can't freakin' take it anymore. There are about 10 episodes of any given children's show. The channels that run them will show them on an endless loop at the same time every day so that every two weeks you're guaranteed to see the same shows with the same songs sung by the same animated talking animals. If I hear "The Helping Song" from The Koala Brothers one more time and I'll be forced to puncture my own ear-drums with a ball point pen.

So you see, that's today's lesson. Sometimes good parenting happens by accident. Positive decisions can be borne out of laziness and a well-stoked failure of patience. Instead of watching TV right now, for instance, my two youngest are upstairs by themselves... um... wow, they could really be doing anything, couldn't they? Come to think of it, it's been pretty quiet up there for several minutes.

I gotta go.


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 11:04 AM