This is not a boot camp, I swear

I shouldn’t spend any time or effort worrying about what people might think of my parenting. Firstly, I’m fairly awesome at being a dad. By this point in the game, I’ve got a good skill set, a surplus of patience, and an overwhelming love for the little dude. And logically, anyone watching how we interact and get through the day would be impressed with us. There’s also the ridiculousness of thinking that anyone is watching in the first place. I’ve always been overly concerned with the perception that hypothetical other people might have of me, which is silly.

There are a few moments, thought, that I still can’t help but imagine how a person wandering by could misinterpret what they saw or hear, like I’m living a sit-com. Two examples:

1)Max is a fan of being nude, like any kid. One day while getting dressed to leave the house, I dove under the covers stark naked  and hid, because I thought it would be funny. Max climbed in after me and we hung out, just two nudies in the bed. How was I supposed to know that he would want to keep having nudie time every day for the next few weeks? I try to focus on the ‘healthy body image and comfort with the human form’ element of the whole scenario, but I’d hate to have to explain it to a passerby.

2) He’s currently a fan of running a circular loop through the living room, kitchen, and hallway, and he gets pretty jazzed when we count the number of laps he’s doing. Were someone to hear me asking how many laps he wanted to do this time, they might incorrectly believe that the running is part of some strange training regimen or disciplinary action. I swear it’s all his idea and he loves doing it. He did run himself into a stitch in side today, which was a novel experience. It took about 12 consecutive laps for the stitch to happen, and it cleared up after a few minutes of rest. His explanation was that he was ‘too full of potato chips to run anymore’. That may be, my boy, that may be.

 

Up and down and all around

A day with a 3-year-old will always have a wild fluctuation between good and not-so-good moments, but some days have neat little variations. When I was picking the little dude up from preschool, the head teacher/owner of the school once again complimented my boy on his clear diction and good singing voice. I know there is a possibility of this being standard sunshine being blown up a parent’s behind, but I haven’t noticed a lot of other parents getting the same kind of feedback about their child, so I’m going to put that in the ‘win; column. This is the same teacher who previously said, with a tone of amazement in her voice, “he is so smart”. Genius! I also heard him singing from outside the room, and it was a thrill to be able to pick my child’s voice out from the communal singing.

But like any genius or superhero, the little dude still has his challenges. Later on in the afternoon I was told “Daddy I peed a little in my spiderman costume.” This happened 3 minutes after I asked if he had to pee. Another reminder of his three-year-old nature was the drive to pick up mom, where he asked me if she was in every building, car, park and miscellaneous structure on the way there. Luckily I caught on that it was going to be a barrage of endless questions, so I took a pre-emptive deep breath and gathered up some good humour to answer ‘nope!’ each time he asked.

Oh my god, THAT’S why they make remakes

As I was cleaning the kitchen and planning a blog posting, I finally realized the justification for remaking movies. And so, I rushed down here (true story) and started typing.

Yes, money is a big motivator. The fans of the original can be counted on to show up to a remake, even if it’s terrible, so the lure of a pre-built audience is a tempting argument in favour of remakes. But when you go deeper down, there’s a more meaningful purpose.The remake re-contextualizes a piece of our modern culture into a frame of reference that can be understood by a new generational audience.

Back to the kitchen: as I was thinking about another post describing my cold war against the crazy parts of my brain, I wanted to talk about how I’m a creature of routine and habit, and disrupting that puts me into a tizzy (even if I don’t realize it). I planned on referencing the movie Rainman  “Definitely watch tv but lights out at 11PM. 10 minutes til Wapner”. And then I wondered if anyone reading this who was under the age of 30 would get the reference. You could argue that those people should watch the original instead of a remake, but the original has a specific existence in our timeline. It’s full of topical 80’s references that would have no real value today. A remake done properly would replace those dated references with markposts of our current age.

So there’s the cultural value in doing a remake. If someone comes along and does a decent remake of Rainman, then a whole new generation will add the memorable lines of dialogue to their language. Our collective societal memory is strengthened and added to by this process. And when we’re very lucky, a remake comes along that stays true to the characters but takes the art to a new level, like Batman Begins.

And for those few people out there who love my ongoing dissection of my own craziness, never fear. We’ll get around to that again. I’m still plenty nuts.