Consuming

I took Jack and Dimitri to Target yesterday to get some food shopping done and to give Erin a chance to do some work without having to mediate any toddler disputes. Those of you who live in the New York area know that yesterday’s weather was cold and rainy, which seemed to mirror the mood of the suburban shoppers who were trolling the isles with blank looks on their faces, piling mounds of useless crap into their carts and muttering about the economy.

Jack was asleep when we got there, which was a relief, as he has been in some kind of foul mood lately, probably brought on by the onset of cold weather and the concomitant restriction of his daily access to the local playground. Target has these nifty carts with baby seats attached, so I slung Jack’s sleeping body into the seat and put Dimitri in the basket where I proceeded to cover him up to his neck in juice boxes, cereal and chicken nuggets. By the time we got around to the toy isle I was starting to become concerned that someone was going to drop a dime to Children’s Services, so I pulled him out of the cart and let him wander around the toy isle.

Whenever I go to Target I invariably end up spending $50 or more on crap that we don’t need, but I am a fairly soft touch when it comes to children begging at my feet. I talk a good game when Erin is around, but will fold fairly easily if presented with a quavering lower lip and moist, teary eyes. They boys haven’t quite figured this out yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Yesterday’s haul was an old school Pac Man Video Game and a DVD of Cars, the movie. Whatever I saved by buying my chicken nuggets at a big box store, I lost in extraneous spending on consumer goods. Such is life in the suburbs. I thought after years of living in New York City I would be immune to the hustle, but suburban shopping malls have elevated the task of separating you from your money to an art form.

Well, at least I paid cash and didn’t kill anyone in my rush to the electronics department like some other consumers did in Valley Stream the other day. Jack slept the whole time and only woke up when I wheeled the heavily laden cart out into the parking lot. When I pushed out from under the protected awning he was pelted in the face by freezing rain and sat bolt upright trying to figure out where he was. It was an interesting feat of manual dexterity to steer the cart, hold Dimitri’s hand and keep Jack from jumping off the seat simultaneously. Fortunately, I have been working on my juggling skills lately and am happy to report I can keep several balls in the air at once. We made it home without incident and had a fun day overall.

Name Calling

I’ve been having a bit of an identity crisis at home lately. I used to walk in the front door at night to Jack greeting me with some variation on the word “Daddy” and Dimitri saying something like “hello Mark”. Very nice; it’s always pleasant to be greeted by one’s family when you get home after a hard day of work. Lately, I’ve been opening the door and hearing a chorus of Marks from both boys. Jack has apparently demoted me from “daddy” to “Mark” because he hears Dimitri call me Mark and figures that since his big brother is worthy of emulation in most other areas, it must be so with his father’s nomenclature. In the beginning, I admit that I harbored some resentment against my own son for what I perceived to be an unwarranted informality in our communications; it bothered me for a few weeks, now I don’t care so much. After all, these things have to be put in their proper perspective. I’m sure he’ll call me much worse when he becomes a teenager. I do attempt to correct him by repeating “daddy” over and over right back to his little smiling face when he runs after me calling, “Mark, Mark, Mark”, but it hasn’t worked. He either doesn’t get my point or, as I suspect, just enjoys seeing my minor freak-outs. It’s entertainment for the boy. In the scheme of questionable behavior, this one doesn’t even rate.

Discipline

I have been struggling with the concept of discipline lately. I read somewhere, not too long ago, that spanking is a sign of lazy parenting; it might be effective in the short-term, but it also reinforces the idea that physical force is an appropriate way to solve problems. This is not a message you want being internalized by toddlers who, by nature, have poor impulse control. Small children are nothing if not master mimickers. That swat on the behind you dole out to your four year old will eventually trickle down to the behind of your two year old. I have therefore, somewhat regretfully, come to the conclusion that spanking as a way of imparting discipline is not somewhere I want to go. I say regretfully because despite the evidence to the contrary I feel like it is appropriate in some circumstances. Unfortunately I realize that I am not enough of an expert to be able to discern which circumstances. Ultimately, I would rather err on the side of less spanking than on the side of too much.

A close second to spanking in the chest of parental discipline tools is yelling. I think yelling can be utilized effectively if it is administered in small doses; otherwise it loses its shock-value and makes the yeller (i.e. you) appear foolish. My experience is that yelling is effective to stop your child from wandering into the street and to keep their hands away from the stove but is of limited utility beyond that. After all, chances are they can yell louder than you. A band-aid on a bullet wound, yelling is.

So what does work? The American Academy of Pediatrics consensus conference on corporal punishment and guidelines on effective discipline identified three essential elements of an effective discipline program: a learning environment characterized by positive supportive parent-child relationships; a strategy for systematic teaching and strengthening of desired behaviors; and a strategy of decreasing or eliminating undesired or ineffective behaviors. A concise paper which expands on these elements may be found here.

While these techniques are no doubt effective, they also require a scientific approach to child-rearing which is often difficult to keep in the forebrain when your darling son is pouring yogurt all over the rug or creating a Picasso on the living room walls in permanent magic marker. This is where parenting becomes an exercise in detachment. While your initial impulse might be to wallop the behind of the budding young egocentric artist and truck him off to his room for an extended period of shrieking behind a closed door, the conscientious parent takes a different approach. Instead of spanking and yelling, the conscientious parent should schedule a time-out. The time-out has to be used carefully though, lest you simply take a bad discipline situation and make it worse. Time Out is the place to teach the child about his behavior, but the screaming the child causes the sleepy/overworked/underappreciated/stressed out the ass parent’s brain to become confused. The confusion from the crying, screaming or constant demanding short-circuits the parent’s ability to think clearly about what to do next. Not being able to decide what to do next makes the parent frustrated or angry, and can cause yelling to begin. When yelling begins, the child shuts down. As we’ve already seen, yelling is ineffective.

Ultimately, the disconnect between a parent’s expectations for behavior and the child’s ability to conform to those expectations is where the problem lies. It is hard for a parent to remember that adults have the ability to use reason but preschoolers won’t even develop the ability to use logic until around age 7. Sharon Silver, the “Mommie Mentor” thinks that sometimes the best way to get a child to do something is to “speak their language”, i.e. the teaching a parent does needs to be done at the preschool level, a time-out has to be structured to take into account the true amount of time your preschooler can pay attention and hear you when he’s emotional, and the ability to “try again” needs to be included with your discipline.

This is a lot to think about in a stressful situation. This is also a very long post so I’ll pick up on this tomorrow.

Flying

An airplane, twenty-five thousand feet over the heartland. The man is tired but cannot sleep. The plane rocks gently with turbulence and the man is suddenly aware of his life. Not of the day to day activities like eating and brushing his hair, but of other things. He is getting older, he has a young son at home, and he is hurtling through the sky at 600 miles per hour inside of a tin can. The man tries to occupy himself, first with a book, then with a magazine, finally with his I-pod. No relief. The man peers out the window and watches the clouds, then underneath the clouds, the ground. The man is flying west, over Pennsylvania, and the fruited plains stretch out before him. There are dots far below. These may be houses, or office buildings, or factories. Inside there are people. There is no difference between the man in the plane and the people in the buildings. Correction. There are small differences. But the differences are insignificant. All suffer. All will die. Life is a terminal condition. There is no cure.

The luckiest among them will scurry around for 70 odd years doing this and that before their bodies succumb to sickness and they die. At their funerals, people will say nice things about them and then these people will return to their buildings to go on with their own lives. The people try not to think about the fact that one day there will be another funeral where, hopefully, people will gather to say nice things about them.

Not all are lucky. Some will die early. Accidents, disease, sudden medical complications. The man knows about sudden medical complications. They caused the death of the man’s wife. She was giving birth to the man’s son and then died. Unforeseeable, they said. One in a million, they said. Even then, standing at the foot of the bed with his hand on the button of the respirator, the man knew that the last thing one could say about death was that it was unforeseeable. Only unexpected.

The man remembers. He remembers leaving his wife’s room and walking to the elevator. He remembers taking the elevator to the nursery, picking up his son and going home. He remembers that the day was cold. He carries his son into the house quickly and looks into his eyes. Love. Acceptance. Determination.

The man’s biggest fear is that he will be one of the unlucky ones. This fear gnaws at him in strange places, like when he is riding in airplanes twenty-five thousand feet over the heartland. It pops up in his mind when he is driving a car, crossing the street, and every night before he goes to bed. The man knows of impermanence. He has seen life’s fragility first hand. He worries for his son.

Home. Far below and far away. The man’s son is almost two. The man lives with a woman and her son. The man loves the woman and she him. They are a family. The man is happy; he has found a person to share his life with. His son is happy; he has found a brother. Things have gone well-better than he ever hoped for. And yet. Even in his happiness the man knows. He knows that at any moment it could end. But not right now. Right now, sailing above the clouds, the man is very much alive.

Children Of The Corn

A New Post, Finally

So, it’s now fall. October is a busy month in my line of work. Over the course of the next three weeks I have to attend a conference in California and a mock jury proceeding in Indiana. I also have two weddings and a visit from Becky’s parents that have to be fit into the schedule. I don’t mind being busy; I feel like I have been constantly busy since Jack was born, but I do like my downtime. Erin and I rented a cabin up in Woodstock for the Columbus Day week-end and plan to do some fall related activities involving apples and pumpkins. We’re also bringing the bikes and will be able to bike around with the boys and watch the leaves change. I’m really looking forward to some time in the woods.

My plan to run the marathon has devolved into a plan to run the ½ marathon. I simply do not have the energy to dedicate all of my free time to putting in long miles on the road. I was running a 12 mile training run last week and somewhere around the 9th mile I started asking myself why the HELL I was putting myself through this again. 40 year old knees are much weaker than 30 year old knees. My current training schedule has me hobbling around like an old goat and eating like a young pig. I actually put on 4 pounds since I started this training routine, which is the opposite of what I was trying to do when I started running last year. So, I’ll accept the Buddha’s “middle path” and set my sights on something more manageable. 13.1 miles is enough.

Jack is starting to put together words into things that approximate sentences. He is also answering my questions with a string of words delivered in an authoritative tone that makes me believe that he knows what he is talking about.

“Are you ready to go to bed Jack?’
“No, not me!”

“Jack, would you like a cookie?”
“Coo-Key….thank youuu!”

That sort of thing. When tells me he wants to read a Thomas the Train book, he goes and gets a Thomas the Train Book. (Of course, he still calls his stuffed giraffe a monkey, but in all fairness, the giraffe has no neck and was inartfully sewn with vaguely simian features so I’ll give him a pass). I find this all to be endlessly fascinating, the development of my child’s mind. I can see a whole lot of innate laughter and happiness in his personality which makes me very happy. He has a twinkle in his eye and a spring in his step and he dances whenever there is music playing.

Jack’s exposure to other kids in the park every day has been good for his social skills and he has also been learning a lot from Dimitri. My own relative misanthropy aside, I suppose I can accept the fact that humans are social beings at heart and thrive in the company of others. Jack certainly has taken off with his development since he has been hanging around with Dimitri every day. I don’t know where he stands in the playground hierarchy, but he is hardly the shrinking violet around the house. Last night he and Dimitri were taking turns hurling themselves off the sofa onto the floor and when Dimitri wasn’t jumping fast enough he was assisting him with a little shove in the small of the back.

The one place that I have been slacking off is in the television arena. Like every single other parent in the United States I vowed before he was born that the television would not fulfill the role of loco parenti. No, I would be an engaged parent, reading the great words of literature to my attentive son who would reward my efforts by spontaneously playing Rachmaninoff pieces on the piano by the age of three. Yeah, you know how that goes.

At least I try to keep the idiot box tuned to Noggin, whose slogan is, “like pre-school on TV.” The channel is way better than the endless commercial that is the Cartoon Network, but I still worry when Jack stops what he is doing to stand mesmerized at the blues guitar stylings of Moose A. Moose and the Business Mouse. Plus, the repetition of themes in the shows is so grating and the songs so insipid I have caught myself thinking extremely uncharitable thoughts about the Backyardigans and reminiscing in silent glee about the guinea pig I ate in Peru that looks exactly like Linny on the Wonder Pets. Mmmm.

Running and Jumping

Yesterday I decided to sign up for the Philadelphia Marathon. The race is scheduled for November 23, which gives me nine week-ends to fit in training runs ranging from 12 to 20 miles. I figure I can fit them in either on my work from home day or on the week-end day when Bin Ladin comes over for a visitation. Back in 2006 I planned to run a marathon in 2007, which would have been the 10th anniversary of the last marathon I ran. At the time I was interested to see whether, at the advanced age of 39, I still had enough gas in the tank to get through 26.2 miles without permanently damaging an organ or body part. Obviously, 2007 turned out quite differently than I had envisioned so I now get to attempt the distance at age 40, which will officially put me in the “master runner” category. “Master runner” is a term bestowed on people who have reached the apex of their running careers and are starting the long slow slide into physical disintegration. I first found myself placed into that category in the Long Island ½ Marathon I ran in May. Let me tell you, I found the competition pretty stiff. The older guys have more to prove and you always move faster when you can feel the grim reaper pacing you a few steps back.

It is hard to believe that I have been running consistently for 16 years. By “consistently” I mean that for the last 17 years, aside from the odd vacation and bout with the flu, I have run between 15 and 45 miles per week, every week, since 1992. There were times when I ran less, and times when I ran more, but putting foot to pavement has been the one constant thread running through the fabric of my bizarre-o life.

Last year I wholeheartedly embraced running as a way to help me retain my sanity in the face of Becky’s death and my own terrifying responsibilities as a new father. In early February I joined a gym and drastically stepped up my mileage. The end result was me losing 40 pounds in six months. I literally ran out of my old life into a new reality, which is a strange feeling. I look in the mirror and I don’t even physically resemble the person I was in January 2007.

I remember thinking quite consciously that I was going to need a huge increase in energy reserves to succeed as the single father of a small boy, especially in light of the fact that I was considerably older than the average dad and probably not in the best shape of my life. The first step towards building up more energy was taking the weight off. Taking the weight off meant that I had to stop eating so many bacon cheeseburgers and start shaking my rapidly expanding ass on the treadmill every day. On the week-ends, I loaded Jack into the baby-jogger and took off for the park. That kid logged more miles in his first six months than Ryan Hall did training for the Olympic marathon.

Somehow, it worked. I lost a lot of weight. I have more energy. The constant flow of endorphins into my bloodstream has also made me a very even-tempered and pleasant daddy to be around. Now I’m putting in a base of 40 miles a week and in 9 weeks time I’ll be toeing the line in Philly. I credit Jack for motivating me to put down the cheese doodles and get out there back into life. For that reason, I’ll be running the race for him.