Playground Posse

A few weeks ago, we took Simon to the park playground and encountered a pack of unruly kids.  They were all clearly friends with each other, had come to the playground together, and were mean and disrespectful.  They were unsupervised and ranged in age from maybe 5-8 years old (although, who am I kidding, I'm one of the worst age guessers ever).

Simon stayed away from them, partially because we guided him to other parts of the playground, but partially due to some emotional instinct.  Another kid on the playground was not so lucky.  He was playing in an elevated tube connecting two parts of the playground and some of the mean kids in the group were pushing him down and calling him names.

Would Smell as Sweet

There's this book that I read in high school, which was turned into a movie in 2006.  The book is called Perfume: The Story of Murderer and it was recommended to me by our school's resident gay gothy creative writer type.  I say that with all the affection in the world, as I really admired this guy's writing and candor, and I'm fairly certain in hindsight that he was one of the main forces that kept me writing throughout school.

Anyway, the story is at turns captivating and gruesome.  It is about a man with an uncanny sense of smell.  He ends up in the perfume business and gets into trouble when in order to bottle the perfect scent, his methods sometimes require dabbling in homicide.  Without giving away too much, as I want to encourage you to find a copy of the book and read it, the reason I'm referencing it here is because it is at its core about attempting to hold on to smells that we cannot truly create.  (The movie may also be decent, but I've only seen some of it, so I can't rightly say.)

The First Rule of Parent Club

I'm going to let you in on a secret.  It's the #1 rule of dealing with parents.  Any parent.  Every parent.  Ready?  Here it is: don't give parents unsolicited advice on their children.

Let me elaborate.  Every parent is the expert on his or her child.  That's it.  Nobody else is.  If everyone just realized this and stopped attempting to give unsolicited advice to other parents, the world would be a much more peaceful place - or at least, the portions of the Internet where parents congregate.

Potty Time

So, Simon's learning how to use a potty.  I'm not exactly sure what compelled me to decide to embark on this grand adventure when we have an infant in the house, but we bought Simon an adorable seat that looks like a frog, so he can pee in it.

I actually do kind of know why I decided to push for potty training Simon now, actually.  First, he's almost two-and-a-half.  All the books and websites and advice animals suggest that you wait until your child "is ready" to start training them to use the toilet (or a mini toilet that looks like a frog).  Let me tell you what's challenging: trying to get a 2-year-old to respond intelligently to a question like, "Do you want to use the toilet and not have to wear diapers anymore?"

Like Sunday Morning

Infants are easy.  They eat, they sleep, they poop.  They scream when they're upset, and they lie there (and sometimes scream) when they're happy.  As long as you can deal with a crying little person who can't tell you what's wrong, infants are cake.

And toddlers are easy, too, right?  They can talk, so they can actually tell you what's bothering them.  They can understand you, so you can tell them why certain things are good and certain things are bad.  And they've been around long enough that they've established a certain routine.  You know when they'll want to eat, sleep, and play.  Heck, they can even take care of themselves most of the time!  Toddlers are a breeze.

Big Pancakes

There's something both awesomely wonderful and awesomely terrifying about the autonomy that Simon has begun to show.  He's not quite two and a half, and he's already begun to turn into a real boy.

Up until pretty recently, he's been pretty much a parrot and a yes-man.  He would often reply, "OK" to almost any demand or request, and would obediently do whatever we would command him to do.  At some point, like every human who has escaped the yoke of oppression, he suddenly realized that he can have his own opinion.  And like every American who finds their way to an online political forum, he discovered that he can assert this opinion, even if it is wholly misinformed or simply factually incorrect.

...and the Strangest Things Seem Suddenly Routine

I knew it would happen.  I knew it.  The moment I hovered over the Publish button on my last post, I muttered to myself, "they're gonna call." And they did!

If you remember, in my last post, I mentioned going to the emergency room for what turned out to be a kidney stone.  I also went on to explain how I managed to successfully pass it the same day and joke about the episode like it was something funny that had happened on Who's The Boss.  However, despite my casual tone and the fact that I was pain-free in less than 24 hours, my parents kind of wigged out, leading to me looking at my phone at one point, having missed three calls from my mom.

They called to make sure I was OK.  Which I was.  Because, you know, I had said so in my last entry.  I had laid out the whole sordid tale, as it were.  And I know I'm being a bit hard on them, but I guess I've felt that way since I turned from a precocious math-loving child into a surly math-liking teenager.