DADWAGON

Among the gifts JP received for Hanukkah this year was a checkerboard that I picked up at the dollar store. Last night we played for the first time, and not surprisingly (I hope), I won. Unfortunately this disturbed JP quite a bit, and the end of our two checkers games included some tears, a rather lengthy hug, and an explanation on my part that he shouldn’t be sad that I beat him, that he needs to practice and get better to beat me, and that, no, not everyone in life gets an equal share of victory, and while that may or may not be fair, it’s kinda the way it is.

As I was telling him this—and congratulating myself on being a rocking good checkers player—I realized that in practically every other instance, I let JP win. If we race down the block, one of our more common pastimes, JP either beats me by a nose at the end or we tie. I take care not to beat him. Or if we’re having an eating race—another fun game!—I generally contrive some way for him to share in the victory (no, Daddy didn’t win—he hasn’t finished the entire bottle of wine yet).

Judging by his reaction last night, never letting JP lose probably isn’t a good idea. I don’t want to get all squishy, but learning to lose properly is a rather important life lesson. I guess I always figured he’d learn about it when he got a little older and grew competitive along with his peers. No sense rushing him into it, particularly given the current mania for drilling anti-competitiveness into little boys among the learned set in our great cities. I just never wanted to make winning or losing an issue, so I suppose I copped out—he got to win or tie, no losing.

Now, let’s be clear: I take no great pleasure in cleaning a 4-year-old’s clock at a board game. But I think he’s getting nearer to an age when earning a win might be more beneficial than protecting him. But I don’t know. Really, I don’t. I want him comfortable with winning or losing, but I certainly would prefer that in his life he wins more than he loses. Who wouldn’t want that?

You know what’s worse than being home sick from school? Being home sick on your birthday. Unless, of course, you’re not really all that sick, so you get to enjoy your birthday presents.

Which in Sasha’s case were/was a scooter. I don’t know if this is just a New York thing, but the three-wheeled Mini-Kickboard is THE toy for 2-year-olds these days. I see them everywhere, and so does Sasha, who’s always trying to borrow other kids’ scooters at various parks.

Anyway, she was quite happy to receive it and started learning how to glide around the neighborhood until it got too cold and we had to come home. The only slightly odd thing is that to Sasha, it’s not a scooter. It’s “Sasha skateboard,” I guess in contrast to Daddy’s skateboard, which hangs on a ladder in the hallway and doesn’t get used very often these days. At first, I thought of correcting her—”It’s not a skateboard, it’s a scooter”—but I didn’t bother. If she thinks it’s a skateboard, fine. One day, perhaps, she’ll move up to an actual skateboard, and then she won’t have to change her vocabulary. Great! But still, I wondered if that was the right choice to make.

This came up again that night, as I was giving her a bath. She was all clean, and was just playing in the tub, when she suddenly looked down at her nether regions with a thoughtfulness and concentration she’d never shown before.

“This is pigu,” she finally said, pointing at her bits and using the Chinese word for “butt.”

“Well,” I said, “this is not pigu.” I pointed at her butt. “This is pigu.”

“This is pigu,” she said. Then she pointed at her front. “What’s this?”

“This is…” I paused for what felt like minutes but was barely a second. What to say? I hate the babytalk word “gina,” but I also knew if I said “vagina,” she’d miss at least one of the three syllables. Also, there’s just something simply awkward for this father in saying “vagina” to his daughter. (Why?) Other, darker possibilities suggested themselves to me, and I had a nice internal laugh imagining Sasha repeating them to her mother, her classmates, her teacher. Finally, I knew what I was going to say and so finished my sentence: “This is cooter.”

“This is cooter,” she repeated, pointing.

I sighed. That just didn’t sound right either, but what could I do now? The word was lodged in her mind now, and changing it to something else would only confuse her. Maybe it was better to just let her keep saying pigu.

No, you know what? I like cooter. It’s neither clinical nor crude, and frankly, it’s fun to say. And according to Jon Stewart, it may not mean what you think it means:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Cooters!
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

As in, please see nearly all articles published on the Internet about parenting. Your daily dosage, from Babble, in this article on “one mom’s refusal to lie about vegetables.”

Apparently, if this article is to be believed, my son JP hates vegetables because I didn’t convince him that the amusing phonics of the word “rutabaga” correlate with an advanced state of deliciousness. Doesn’t rutabaga sound yummier than chocolate, chum? It sure does!

Along with not lying, I was supposed to start him on vegetables at a young age (did that); cook with him (did that; still do); garden with him (don’t do that, but fuck you; oh wait, I reread that—I can just take him to the farmer’s market; check!); and last, “practice what I preach,” as in, eat my rutabagas as well (check, check!).

Hmm. I did all all or most of these things, still do, and yet—shockingly!—JP still doesn’t like his spinach.

Here’s a bit more from the article:

My 2.5 year old happily eats Brussels sprouts, beets, kale, peppers, broccoli, spinach, zucchini, asparagus, cabbage, artichokes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, tomatoes, onions, and a whole lot more. I know, you parents with picky eaters think I’m just lucky. But I like to think I have something to do with my son’s garden-greedy palate. I’ve worked hard to make it easy for him to love vegetables.

Bully for you, lady. And I don’t doubt you worked hard. But then again, I don’t really care. The mere fact that your little monster eats his/her greens doesn’t necessarily entitle you to offer advice to other people, does it?

Which gets to the heart of my complaint about this prevailing genre of parenting article: you take a normal person who succeeds at a normal thing via normal methods (in this case, please see above brain-dead tips for getting children to eat vegetables); dismiss obvious random factors such as luck, genetics, the personalities of specific children, etc.; present your fairly normal success as remarkable (we’re talking about eating vegetables at 2.5 years, not changing the oil on the hybrid); imply that anyone could repeat your normal success via normal methods, which may or may not be true depending on the factors already dismissed; logically extend to the notion that anyone not able to achieve this perfectly normal success through the normal means has either failed to make a good faith effort, is a bad parent, or has an evil, spirit-sucking child destined for Super Max prison; congratulate yourself for your normal, unremarkable success; concede that either way none of this is very important (“I’m confident that he will not be an adult who subsists solely on pizza pockets. And that’s really what I’m concerned with — not how many peas he ate last Tuesday.”); use the terms quinoa and chard in your conclusion, thereby confirming the fact that you are, to use some of the language found in our comments, a fucktard; and finally, earn the disapproval of lazy bloggers who were pleased that their children didn’t spit out the lasagna last week even though there was spinach in it and considered that a major victory but didn’t share it with people as it was a normal victory via normal means.

Ta Da!

Look, I’m not saying that the Chinese students who got insanely good scores on the recent international standardized tests were cheating. Oh no. Certainly not. Don’t you see those quotation marks up there around the word “cheat”? I’m definitely the last person to suggest that the many news reports and anecdotes I’ve heard about Chinese students cheating in general would apply in this case. After all, a guy who had absolutely nothing to do with administering the tests told the New York Times “he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable”:

“The technical side of this was well regulated, the sampling was O.K., and there was no evidence of cheating,” he said.

Did the Chinese students cheat? You didn’t hear me say that. All I’m saying is that their success proves that U.S. students aren’t cheating well enough. Yet another way we’re falling behind as a superpower.