Showing posts with label parenting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parenting. Show all posts
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Parenting Lesson #101
When your toddler poops in the bathtub, you should let her finish. If you whisk her out of the bathtub after the first round is launched, you will only scare her into disrupting the procedure and she will have to finish when she finally relaxes again: like when you've put her back in the now-clean tub.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Scenes of Fall
I love the fall. I love the cool mornings, the leaves, the strange feel of socks on your feet after five months of freedom. I also love the back-to-school feeling, even though it's been years since I've gone back to school. I love it so much that for at least the first three years after I was done with school, walking into Target in September made me very sad because I had no reason to buy school supplies. I could happily spend an hour wandering through the notebooks, pens, markers and backpacks.
When I worked on a university campus, I would wander through the campus bookstore looking at all the class codes to see which books were required for each class. I almost always bought at least one book from a literature course, wondering about the kid who would show up the day before class and find out they were one book short, because I doubt the bookstore thought they would need extra copies of DeLillo's Underworld. Sorry kid! But in the case of Underworld, I think I did you a favor.
This year I still don't have a reason to buy school supplies, but now that we live in a neighborhood full of school-age kids, I can get a glimpse of what back-to-school will be like as a parent. In the mornings when I'm getting Harper into the car to drive to day care, a mom walks by our house with a pack of kids to wait at the bus stop. A few minutes later down the road we pass another bus stop where a big group of excited kids stands waiting, their parents in a separate group off to the side, shoulders hunched against the cold, legs doing the "I'm chilly" dance, drinking coffee out of thermoses. On the first day of school, the parent and kid groups were mixed, almost every kid holding Mom or Dad's hand.
These sights make me smile, because they seem so classically fall, and because they remind me of walking to elementary school as a kid in my small hometown. They also are almost shockingly wholesome after the neighborhood we just moved from. It's not that our old neighborhood was exactly dangerous, but you were far more likely to stand next to a punk teenager at the bus stop or a homeless person for whom the elevator did not go all the way to the top. I witnessed more than one drug deal while walking to the bus in the first few years we lived there, and Joe once jumped onto the bus and yelled, "Drive! Drive!!" because someone came running out of the house next to the bus stop chasing his girlfriend and waving a gun.
By the time we left there were less drug deals and no other gun-waving incidents, but there certainly were not young elementary school children holding their parents' hands. In fact, the last time I drove through the old neighborhood, right when I was telling Harper, "And there's the street where we used to live," an old man with a long dirty gray beard, even dirtier ragged gray clothes and dusty worn-out boots crossed the street carrying a club-like walking stick and a rucksack made of a tied up sheet. Two blocks later I saw a woman strolling slowly down the sidewalk, one hand on her hip and a large green parrot sitting on her shoulder. I suppose the vagabond man and the lady walking her parrot were enjoying the fall day as much as the school kids and their parents, but I was glad we'd decided to raise our daughter in the neighborhood with the more wholesome--though admittedly less colorful--scenes of fall.
When I worked on a university campus, I would wander through the campus bookstore looking at all the class codes to see which books were required for each class. I almost always bought at least one book from a literature course, wondering about the kid who would show up the day before class and find out they were one book short, because I doubt the bookstore thought they would need extra copies of DeLillo's Underworld. Sorry kid! But in the case of Underworld, I think I did you a favor.
This year I still don't have a reason to buy school supplies, but now that we live in a neighborhood full of school-age kids, I can get a glimpse of what back-to-school will be like as a parent. In the mornings when I'm getting Harper into the car to drive to day care, a mom walks by our house with a pack of kids to wait at the bus stop. A few minutes later down the road we pass another bus stop where a big group of excited kids stands waiting, their parents in a separate group off to the side, shoulders hunched against the cold, legs doing the "I'm chilly" dance, drinking coffee out of thermoses. On the first day of school, the parent and kid groups were mixed, almost every kid holding Mom or Dad's hand.
These sights make me smile, because they seem so classically fall, and because they remind me of walking to elementary school as a kid in my small hometown. They also are almost shockingly wholesome after the neighborhood we just moved from. It's not that our old neighborhood was exactly dangerous, but you were far more likely to stand next to a punk teenager at the bus stop or a homeless person for whom the elevator did not go all the way to the top. I witnessed more than one drug deal while walking to the bus in the first few years we lived there, and Joe once jumped onto the bus and yelled, "Drive! Drive!!" because someone came running out of the house next to the bus stop chasing his girlfriend and waving a gun.
By the time we left there were less drug deals and no other gun-waving incidents, but there certainly were not young elementary school children holding their parents' hands. In fact, the last time I drove through the old neighborhood, right when I was telling Harper, "And there's the street where we used to live," an old man with a long dirty gray beard, even dirtier ragged gray clothes and dusty worn-out boots crossed the street carrying a club-like walking stick and a rucksack made of a tied up sheet. Two blocks later I saw a woman strolling slowly down the sidewalk, one hand on her hip and a large green parrot sitting on her shoulder. I suppose the vagabond man and the lady walking her parrot were enjoying the fall day as much as the school kids and their parents, but I was glad we'd decided to raise our daughter in the neighborhood with the more wholesome--though admittedly less colorful--scenes of fall.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)