As a guy, I have no experience in dealing with long-term, complicated emotional reactions. For a man, most emotions are created by a single moment of stress and are dealt with. Problem happens, man thinks about problem,man bashes head against problem until it goes away. It’s not elegant, but it does the trick.

But this new category of emotion, the unresolvable kind, is quite a different story. The signs of the little dude’s increasing maturity and the looming inevitable separation that will happen as he gets older is the thing I’m still dealing with. Today, the trigger was the idea of his eating lunch at school. For some reason, I was saddened by the notion that we wouldn’t be eating lunch together for those 3 days a week. Lunch, for the love of pete. A couple of weeks ago we watched Toy Story 3 as a family, and it was a fantastic experience, but when Andy drove off for college and waved goodbye to his toys, I was snuffling and trying to keep it together. There’s nothing wrong with a dude crying, but on the flip side, I really didn’t want to explain why daddy was sad during a very happy family moment.

So I guess the key is that you end up dealing with the separation sadness one step at a time. You acclimatize to each change with some moping or overeating or weeping, whatever gets you by, and you put your brave face back on and greet them with a cheery smile when they come back.So bring on the 3 full days at preschool next year, then 5 days a week at kindergarten the year after that, and on and on.

The rules around the house are pretty lax. We go with the flow of things and if that means sometimes we eat dinner watching tv as a family, then so be it. I think I ate at the dining room table as a child for at least a few years, but we gradually migrated to the couches, so now eating at the table feels a little odd to me. We try to eat dinner at the dinner table, but we don’t always make it there. Such is life.

There are a core of unbendable rules, rules that I enforce with a stern and unrelenting authority: no hitting, no pinching, no kicking, no hurting of any kind. And of course, the little dude will test the absolute nature of these rules. There are timeouts assigned for these infractions, but I’ve also included a secondary punishment: I throw away a treat.

We have a fairly ample supply of somewhat healthy treats, like gummi bears made out of fruit juice, and there are occasional influxes of junk food that come into the house one way or another and are doled out in meagre portions to the excitable young man. And oh does he love his treats. So, when he chooses to deliberately cause harm to someone, I hit ’em where it hurts, and I throw a treat into the garbage. It’s a third strike punishment, because I always give him a couple of chances to rethink his bad choices, but if he is still choosing to strike someone, then I head towards the treat cupboard. And the wailing that rises from this poor tiny soul!

I decided to start doing this as a lesson about permanent consequences, and hopefully it also sends the message that yummy snacks aren’t automatically supplied for a boy regardless of his behaviour. It’s all about the choices he makes, and what happens when he chooses to be naughty.

Someday, he will realize that I only throw out a small portion of a treat he doesn’t actually like, so the actual loss to him is negligible. I’m not sure what I’ll do that day.

You would think that I would have learned by now that the little dude is developing and growing in noticeable increments all the time, but I am still caught off-guard by it. Every few weeks, I watch him doing something and I wonder ‘when did he get tall enough to do that?’. I’ve been here the whole time. This shouldn’t surprise me, but when he’s standing beside the dining room table and he’s now able to comfortably colour the papers on the table, I’m dumbfounded.

The other areas of his growth also keep surprising me. Today I think I’ve finally figured a part of that out. This week, I’ve been more tired than normal, and I’ve been exasperated by Max’s demands on me. The wife was run ragged the entire weekend by the non-stop boy. I realize now that he’s got more energy to spend than he did a few weeks ago, and his cognitive abilities have spiked as well. translation: he’s bored by the same old regular routine and he was looking for more challenging fare. I think today was the apex of this energy surplus (at least I hope so). He was up at 5:45Am with his very tired mom, and he had a full and busy day right up until his bedtime of 7:45PM. He also has a bit of a cough too, so this marathon day of fun and excitement is quite the accomplishment.

We finished off the day by going to dinner at Auntie Jenn’s house. It was a belated holiday gathering, moved to toady so that everyone could get together after a tumultuous December and January. Of course, this meant some deferred presents for Max, and that boy loves to get gifts, so he had a fine time. He’s actually developed an interest in being the center of attention, which is a neat change from being shy in big groups of people. He offered/forced the party goers to kiss the Toy Story Woody doll he had brought with him, and everyone obliged him. The power of a three-year old.

Anyway, back to my point (and I do have one). The tricky nature of parenting is this cycle of acclimatization and change. As adults, we love routine and dependable predictability, but our developing little people are still morphing and transforming at the drop of a hat. If you get too attached to the way things used to be, or the way you think they should be, you’ll end up butting heads with your kids and driving yourself crazy.  Go with the flow, baby.