A Stay At Home Dad

Well, the boy’s big week has continued. After winning “scariest” costume at his dojo’s Halloween party this past weekend, his instructor promoted him into the children’s level class. That means he get a solid colored belt.

Technically, he skipped a number of intermediate belts, but because of his size of coordination the instructor felt he would benefit from an early promotion into the new class. They’ll be longer and a little more demanding in general.

So congrats to the boy. Keep up the good work.

Been meaning to comment on this, but it’s kept slipping my mind. Three stories that were well worth the time it took to tell them: Mr. Popper’s Penguins, How to Train Your Dragon, and James and the Giant Peach.

The kids thoroughly enjoyed all three stories. For that matter, they’re enjoyable stories for any age I’d wager. The kid’s kept after me to finish both of the books. Of the two, James and the Giant Peach really captured their imaginations. We even let them watch a Disney-fied movie version of the story we found on Netflix.

HTTYD continued the recent history of excellent animated stories that are entertaining for kids and adults alike. From my quick reading of the book it’s based on, they took a lot of liberties with the movie. But they made it work.

The boy and the Wife were out selling popcorn for Scouts today, so the lass and I had lunch together. I gave her a ham sandwich. She wanted a banana and some of her candy from the Halloween party last night. I told her she could have some when she finished her ham sandwich and the banana she requested.

For the record, the sandwich was only a half. And I could tell after the first bite that she really didn’t want to eat it.

I finished my own lunch and then went downstairs to check my email. She came down after a couple minutes with a banana. She couldn’t peel it. I asked her if she’d finished her sandwich and she said she had.

I can’t really say why, but I suspected differently. So when I went upstairs with her, I went trash diving. Sure enough, there, buried in a box and wrapped in a wad of paper towels, was her unfinished sandwich.

She didn’t get her candy. But I could swear, after I was done calling out her lie, that the only thing she was really sorry about was that she’d been caught.

Our first Halloween party is history now. The boy’s martial arts school threw one and it was a lot of fun. They had a lot of good activities and dancing. The Wife said no one knew how to do the “Electric Slide.” I told I wasn’t going to be any help.

The highlight of the night for the boy was his winning the “scariest costume” part of the competition. From the get go this year, he wanted a scary costume. No more super hero getups. He couldn’t have been happier when they picked him and his “swamp thing”-ish getup as the scariest costume there.

Getting the lass to her dance class has become a trial. Each week I try to get her going a little earlier because of the foot dragging. But the boy’s arrival time on the bus coincides too closely with departure time for her, so she gains the upper hand regardless how early I get her prepped.

All of this is just … weird because, once she finally gets to class, she really enjoys it. Of course, she doesn’t want me to think that.

The Lass: “Dad, I didn’t have fun in my class.”

Me: “But you were jumping and twirling and smiling the whole time.”

The Lass: “That’s not because I was having fun.”

Me: “You were definitely having fun.”

The Lass: “Was nnnoooootttttt”

Me: “You are so OBSTINATE.”

Her reply (naturally): “Am not.”

With regards to kids now-a-days, I have one particularly bad habit: I don’t buckle my seatbelt immediately upon my rear hitting the car seat.

I suspect I’m not alone. I also suspect I’m not alone in getting the following question fairly regularly:

“Dad, why don’t you buckle your seatbelt?”

Now, to be fair to me, the question isn’t entirely fair. I almost always buckle up by the time the car is on the road. I just don’t do it right away. But the kids don’t always notice that. What they do notice is that Dad didn’t buckle in at the same time they did.

The lass put the question a little more directly to me today:

Lass: “Dad, when can I buckle in like you do?”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Lass: “You don’t always put on your seat belt when you get in the car.”

These little exchanges always remind of the one overt piece of advice my father gave me when our first was born He said “Remember, kids do as you do, not as you say.” In fact, I’d say that particular chestnut has been reinforced to me more than anything else where kids are concerned.

Got back from my workout at the Y and I’m still wiped out. Probably not the best situation considering I’m solo with the kids again. I’ll have to exert more effort to extend my patience.

I’ve noticed that the workouts have been taking more of a toll lately. Wonder what that’s about.

Being a parent of two kids in the process of learning to read, and thus spell, I can honestly say I never realized how many different ways there are to spell ‘NOTHING’:

CHILD: Dad, what does ‘d’-‘l’-‘e’ spell? ME: Nothing.

One thing I meant to mention was something important I learned regarding how children learn to read. As it happens, I had a misconception of my own corrected by a teacher recently and I’ve been a little more persistent in my attempts to correct pronunciation issues in the kids’ speech.

My reasoning, prior to being corrected, was that I was sure I hadn’t pronounced words perfectly at their current age. So, I figured, I must have learned proper pronunciation once I learned to read since then I would understand spelling and would know the letters, how they sounded and thus, how to pronounce them.

Turns out the causality runs in the other direction. In fact, proper pronunciation allows kids to learn how to sound out words and learn to read faster. In retrospect, this knowledge seems so obvious I’m embarrassed that I got it wrong in the first place.

Now, I’ve always worked to correct their more egregious pronunciation errors so the kids pronunciation has always been pretty good. There have just been some words that I’ve allowed them because of their age and, to a degree, assumed time would correct those mispronunciations. However, since being corrected I’ve been more aggressive in getting them to pronounce sounds like “tr”, “dr”, “th” and “ss” properly all the time.

Under the premise that others might be making the same mistake, I wanted to pass this little nugget along. If I’m the only one, well no harm reinforcing good habits now, is there?

At dinner tonight the boy stated to his sister “You’ve got a big butt.”

Now, he was laughing and basically trying to be funny in that kid way. You know, where butts and burps and farts are funny all the time. (Actually, they’re still funny now, except when used like the boy did here.) The lass laughed it off in short order and started sing-songing it.

No harm, no foul. They’re only 4 and 6 after all.

But I couldn’t help but think if she were about 10 years older, the havoc that would likely ensue from such a statement. It wouldn’t be pretty.