A few notes

This is mostly a story about a parenting moment, but first a few links.

I was on Marketplace's morning report being the voice of a trend (Stay at Home Dad's not in the workforce) on Monday.  If you want to hear my kids being cute, the story is here.

Speaking of Links, I put together a bunch of SFF links recently.

I also tweeted some thoughts about how my reaction to reading women in fiction has changed.  Embedded after the dad story.

So, this morning I took Tadpole & Sprout (5&2) to the grocery store, and for the first time in a while they didn't want to ride in the shopping cart but instead wanted to push kid carts ... the parents among you are cringing already.

Fortunately the store wasn't very crowded on a Friday morning, so I OKed, and we went through three basic phases that had as much to do with me as them.  First, they wandered after me, enjoying the carts, occasionally bumping things or people and behaving exactly as you'd expect while I got increasingly frustrated that they weren't following directions.

Let's just unpack this for a moment: by not bringing my own cart, I didn't really leave myself much out.  I could (and eventually did) pick up Sprout & drag her cart along, but there wasn't a way to corral the girls.  The thing to do here is to engage with them, give them tasks, and focus on making them want to go where I want them to.  Praise the marching and pushing of carts, let Tadpole lead us on a circuitous route, have Sprout practice marching.  Accept that we're going slowly.

But I don't like grocery shopping.  I actively dislike it, always worried that there's going to be difficulty finding an unfamiliar ingredient, and so I tried instead to insist on obedience.  Follow me or else.

This brings us to stage 2.  I realized, later than I should have, that I was losing my temper in particular with Sprout, so I bent down, gave her a hug, had Tadpole join in, then picked Sprout up & carried her.  She didn't really like it, but I can manage a squirming 2-year-old one-handed.  Tadpole managed well enough.

So, now we're on Stage 2, the "let's get out of here as quickly as possible without more damage" phase that many parents will recognize.  The one piece of this that was absolutely good was that I've trained myself when tempted to yell to just kneel down, hug the girls, and absolutely put a stop to the thing within my control that is the most stressful.  I wish I'd done it sooner, but we all got a hug and Sprout stopped being silly with her cart.

Then a miracle occurred: walking down an aisle looking for something I wasn't quite sure was there, a dad in front of us knocked his shopping cart into a stack of soup cans knocking 10-12 over.  This was wonderful.  We stopped & I immediately sent Tadpole to help pick them up.  She's great at helping put stuff away.  (Thanks R for training her at home & her Montessori school!).  So she got to help.  I got to stop worrying about stupid groceries and instead be proud of myself for helping a stranger in need.  Sprout got to wave at the kid in the shopping cart.  Another family was walking by and praised our good deed, so two different people expressing gratitude!  More importantly, all of us got out of the semi-frustrated headspace we were in.  After that moment, Tadpole went from managing to keep up with me to actively being helpful.  The end of our shopping trip was genuinely fun for all of us.

So anyway, that's my story about frustrating shopping expeditions and the kind stranger who knocked over some soup cans and made my grocery run this morning much better.

And now on an entirely different note and prompted by reading a story where "living it up" meant two different women finding sex and a first chapter where a woman's friend was a young thing in a slinky dress is a Storify of a few tweets from this morning on casually objectifying women in fiction.

Settlers

R & I were discussing the recent Wall Street Journal article about the Green Bay Packers playing Settlers of Cataan, and Tadpole announced that she wanted to play, so we played (a variant) this weekend.

I think she enjoyed it.


We roll dice & collect any resources on the board for that number.  (So she's working on some counting and matching skills!)  Then we place a road.  We're trying to make roads for the guy to go on.  Trading resources is mostly ignored.  "Settlers of Cataan is about collecting sheep!" Tadpole informs us triumphantly.



She even came up with a dice cup!

I'll always take care of you

Today was a bit chaotic, with much accomplished, but often left half-done for a while, so the detritus of entertainment, cooking, and laundry was littered through the house.  Also, we have a shower that doesn't leak and a baby who can fall asleep in places other than her crib!

Late in the day after prepping a dinner for Tadpole and another for R and I, I set a few dishes to soak and headed upstairs to check on R and the baby.  We chatted for a bit and then headed downstairs to discover that not only had I left the water running, but the seal I applied on the kitchen sink the last time we discovered it leaked when it overflowed was not as watertight as hoped.

With a bit of prompting, I got some towels.  A bucket under the sink caught most of the water, and was mostly filled with things that can take getting wet.  It was, in the grand scheme of things, just one more of the ways in which life was chaotic today, but all worked out for the best.

Tadpole (of course) wanted to help, which was the last thing I felt up to dealing with as I pulled various cleaning supplies out & set them to dry.

Daddy, are you sad?

No, I'm not sad.  I'm just very ... frazzled right now.

Oh.  OK.

(long pause)

Mommy, daddy is very frazzled.  Frazzled is like sad.  I'm going to bring my friends to watch from back here.

(aside - I *love* watching her try to figure out how words and concepts fit with words and concepts she already knows.  Even in the midst of cleaning up overflowing sink, this was fascinating and delightful!)

Later that night, as we were getting ready for bed:

Daddy, I'll always take care of you when you're frazzled.

Thank you Tadpole.  (big hug).

Yes, I'll help when there are spills, and I'll always be here to take care of you.

Hopefully she'll feel the same way when I'm in my dotage.  But for now, there are days when Tadpole's driving me to distraction, and others where she's the one saving me from it.  Today was the latter, and I needed that.

Celebrating victories

After the past few days, celebrating some parenting victories seems necessary, so here goes:

Tadpole hasn't had an accident in a long time.

We took Sprout to the doctor*, and when he handed Tadpole a sticker, she said Thank You unprompted. He made a point of complimenting me and R since that's uncommon and takes work from the parent. I'll take it!

Tadpole and I went for a long walk with Sprout today. Tapole walked on the sidewalk, occassionally dashing ahead or waiting behind and running after me. When I called her back to me, she came quickly and without protest.

Tadpole sprayed water into her little pool today.

For dinner, Tadpole initially objected to pasta with sauce (Pasta should be served with oil and Parmesan, none of this barbaric sauce!), but ate it all!

We have two amazing girls. And things we have pushed for a long time regarding bathrooms, courtesy, and following directions on walks are starting to come to fruition.  Today is a good day to celebrate those victories.

Also pictures! 

* it turns out that about one in 20 babies doesn't have their tear ducts open on time. Tears flow to the wrong places, eye goop is disturbed, and the skin gets red and angry-looking. Sprout is one of the twenty, as we learned today.

All the Muffins and Bagels in the Land

With apologies to Josh Lyman, had I not been leaving the bedroom of one sleeping child and walking into a room with another, it's likely I would have recreated his famous scene. As it was, I contented myself with a few fist pumps.

Tadpole's bedtime routine has been on a rocky road towards improvement, with last night a near-total disaster in which I had to call in R to finish things off.  But last night I articulated one very specific change I needed to make: if Tadpole was having trouble settling calmly after we finished books, I would default to assuming she needed to go potty. Tonight I did exactly that, she went potty, then fell asleep easily.  Hence, Josh Lyman.

Two observations and a few other nice things:

First, a successful bedtime tonight does not mean tomorrow will be easy.  After last night'a disaster, it was comforting to be able to approach tonight as a whole new bedtime. I've learned the hard way that one good night does not a pattern make, but it can get my hopes up and lead to frustration down the line.

Second, bedtime has taught me that parenting often provides many opportunities to get it right. I might be happier when I handle a situation well the first time, but as long as I can look back on tough situations and think of something new to try, I'll probably have another opportunity to handle it well later. (Any suggestions for a girl who signals she's ready to end the bath by trying to drink dirty bath water? :)

Other things that have made me happy recently:

N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy is coming out in an omnibus edition with a new novella. Jemisin is one of my favorite authors, so this is fantastic news!

In the latest "What If?", the creator of XKCD answered a 4 year old who wanted a billion story skyscraper. 

Twenty years ago this week, Internet came to NPR. Melody Kramer (@mkramer) has the initial memo. It's delightful. 

 Today, happy thoughts. Soon, why it's been so tough to be three, recently.