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.

 

That’s not an accusation, and hopefully it’s not startling news for anyone. No matter how well your child does in living a happy and harmonious life, their life cannot reach back into your past and fix your lingering bad memories. Their scholastic achievements will not erase your F in grade 10 physics, and their popularity will not retroactively get you invited to the high school parties you missed out on.

I’m not someone who looks to right the wrongs of my own past through my child’s life. But, I do sometimes notice a difference in my childhood and his, and some of them are kind of interesting.

In a broad sense, his early years are much better than mine. My mother tried to her hardest to raise my brother and I, but parenting is a two (if not multi) person job. The slow and steady deterioration of my father as his alcoholism sank its teeth deep into his heart was hard for everyone watching it happen, including me. Even in the early years, I don’t think I had much connection or interaction with him. And as the marriage steadily worsened and he began to sleep and spend all of his time in the basement, the gulf between us grew even bigger. I’m in a fairly good place about all of this now, but it does make me happy that Max will never come home on a sunny summer afternoon and find me drunk and passed out in the living room. Ah, the good ol’ days of my youth. Unfortunately, that also means Max doesn’t get to have another grandpa in his life, but there is only so much under my control.All I can do is cover that boy in smootches (and I do).

I’m pretty sure that I didn’t go to school until the first day of junior kindergarten, and I do remember being terrified by my confusion at the new experience. Max is now having a great time at his pre-school two mornings a week, and he’s socializing wonderfully and bonding with his teachers. Score another one for the little dude.

On the topic of his pre-school, I realized there’s a tangential association that will also be markedly different for him. His preschool is on the second floor of a church parish hall, and there is a faint lingering smell of incense and generally churchy odours. For me, the smell of church evokes melancholy and sadness, because being dragged to church irregularly by my mother is not a fun memory. I also went to Catholic school until grade 9, but we were anything but a religious family, so the gap between what we were supposed to believe and act like, and what we actually were like always bothered me.  But for Max, the smell of a church will be associated primarily with his school where he has fun with his friends, and that’s alright by me.