Staying Home With ‘Sick’ Sasha: A Milestone (for Me)

sickchildMonday afternoon I got a call from Miss Maggie, one of Sasha’s teachers at Preschool of America. Sasha had a fever, 102 degrees, and I needed to come take her home.

My reaction was one of instant worry: Was my precious 2-year-old okay? Was 102 a potentially dangerous temperature for one of her age and size? How could I make her happier and more comfortable?

Actually, no, none of that is true. The first thing I thought was: Dammit, how am I going to finish rewriting this travel feature to meet my deadline today? The second thing I thought was: Is there any way I can get Jean to take care of Sasha instead of me?

As it turned out, I got lucky on the first concern and unlucky on the second, and so on Tuesday—because Preschool of America has a policy where sick kids have to survive at least one full day without a fever before they can return to class—I embarked on my very first “stay home with a sick toddler” day. Yeah, everyone loves those days.

It did not go perfectly smoothly. A 20-minute midmorning walk to the Carroll Gardens branch of the Brooklyn Public Library taught me that I should really check the schedule before leaving the house in the bitter cold. (It opens at 1 p.m.) A visit to the playground at Carroll Park and a 10-cent lollipop at Stinky kept Sasha’s spirits up, but once lunch was served back home things deteriorated. She didn’t eat much, didn’t nap much afterward, didn’t want to play. Finally, I relented, and sat her in front of “Yo Gabba Gabba!” for an hour, then let her jump on my bed like crazy until Jean came home at 4 to relieve me.

I’m not sure I learned anything from the experience. It’s more that I was reminded of something I often forget, which is that playing with very small children is boring. I mean, I like to play some games with Sasha: We dance to the new Girl Talk album, and we read together, and put her doll in the stroller and walk it around the apartment. But there’s an obsession with repetition that I find it hard to deal with, especially since the tasks we’re repeating happen to be the kinds of things that you have to be 2 years old to enjoy in the first place, like pushing small plastic toys back and forth, or “drawing,” which tends to involve picking up one crayon and then exchanging it for a different crayon and then doing that again. Singing “Five Little Monkeys” while Sasha jumps on the bed is great—until you start getting deep into negative numbers.

No doubt these activities are fascinating to children, but they drain my energy and enthusiasm, and Sasha seems to want to do them much more than she wants to, say, go through my RSS feed looking for amusing blog items.

In the end, of course, I’ll suck it up and do what it takes to keep her happy. I’m her father and I want her to love and trust me and have good, if vague, memories of our early years together, so that a few decades from now, when it’s time to put me in a home, she’ll pick one where they don’t beat the elderly residents too hard or too often.

With Apologies to Brian: Parenting Magazine isn’t entirely terrible

For those of you who read the offering of DadWagon’s newest guest blogger yesterday, it might seem that this site’s official position is anti-Parenting Magazine. In general this would be true. Typically we are more inclined towards the publishing aesthetic of Parents.

Yet, we here at DadWagon strive, as ever, to resist a monolithic approach to the world of shitty parenting-oriented publications which seem to exist as little else than vectors for disseminating information on shit that shitty parents can buy when they’re not paying for other shitty things they need as parents.

All that is a long way of saying I found this blog post at the Parenting website funny and well-written, even if I have no interest—or sympathy—for its primary topic, namely, “apps” for the shitty dad and his shitty iPhone. Please enjoy:

The first great invention for fathers was the vas deferens. I like to imagine that this vital duct in the male reproductive system—like every gadget available today—once had its own product launch party. I can see it now: it’s 50,000 B.C., and cavemen and cavewomen are standing around eating grilled mammoth and gossiping about each other (“Ugh, look at that pelt,” one of them says. “That is so last Ice Age.”). After the big unveiling, they learn that not only is the vas deferens the best gadget for producing babies, but it comes standard with all members of the male species.

I basically agree, at least in reference to my own equipment, which is, quite frankly, as cutting edge as it comes. [Editor’s note: No, I will never stop making bad sexual puns on this website.]

Parent Crap, Reviewed: Little Pim Videos

The first thing you need to know is that my wife, my daughter and myself are assholes. Not the mean type, but the annoying type. The kind of horrible, disgusting yuppie parents you see in this wonderfully entertaining video:

The second thing you need to know is that that video, written in probably 30 minutes, is hundreds of times more interesting and informative than the Little Pim series of language education videos. That is, the Little Pim videos, which are intended to help small kids learn French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and half a dozen other tongues, are boring. Here’s how they go:

Picture 21The series stars an animated panda, Pim, who rolls around and doesn’t speak or really do much of anything. There is no story. Rather, things progress thematically, through subjects like food. There’s a video clip of an apple and someone speaks the word “apple” in whichever language you’re watching. Kids eat apples, the word is repeated a bunch, and then it’s on to the next fruit. Whee. Every time Sasha, who’s 2, saw this, she demanded I give her an apple.

And that, sadly, was about as involved as she ever got with the series (Little Pim had sent me the Chinese and French DVDs for review). She never requested us to play it again, and I can’t imagine she learned anything from it.

Not that she doesn’t want to learn languages! This is a kid who speaks a good deal of Mandarin already (thanks to her Taiwanese mother, Chinese nannies, and bilingual preschool), as well as some ASL, thanks to the “Baby Signing Time” series of videos. But Little Pim just didn’t capture her imagination.

What’s the difference, then, between Little Pim, Baby Signing Time, and Sasha’s Chinese education? Well, far be it from me to cast scientific doubt on the Entertainment Immersion Method™ developed by Julia Pimsleur Levine, daughter of the renowned language teacher Paul Pimsleur, but it’s missing what I consider a vital element: song.

Sasha’s Chinese education is, for example, far from organized. My wife tries to speak it at home, but as often as not she ends up combining English and Mandarin within a single sentence. And at Preschool of America, Chinese is just sort of thrown into the mix, but not necessarily “taught” explicitly. Sasha, however, knows tons of Chinese-language songs—”Twinkle, Twinkle,” “Ba lobo,” “Liang zhi laohu“—and even sings them to herself, often without our prompting. She’s learned them from CDs we have at home, and from song circle time at school. And whenever we let her watch “Ni Hao, Kai-lan!” she’ll actually say “Ni hao!” to the TV. She loves this stuff because it captures her imagination, instead of presenting her with the preschool version of facts.

Likewise with sign language. The Baby Signing Time series was built entirely around songs—”Sunny Day,” “I’m a Bug,” and so on—and although Sasha’s kind of outgrown the series, she continues to sing the tunes and reference their lyrics out in the real world. And this is in a series of videos that are teaching her how to communicate with deaf people!

So, look. I won’t say Little Pim won’t effectively teach your child how to say a few words in Russian. But it’s hard for me to imagine any kid becoming truly attached to the roly-poly digital panda, or screeching demands to watch the videos again and again and again. Which is, as much as we parents hate it, a pretty damn good sign that our kids take something seriously.

Who Loves You, Baby?

JP has entered an interesting phase of his development. A couple of weeks ago I received an irate phone call from his mother. She told me that JP had refused to do something she had told him to do, and his rationale for telling her no was that he always got to do exactly what he liked at my house, and furthermore, he liked my house better than hers. That this was delivered with a smile seemed to have no impact on my ex. She was furious and wanted to know just what kind of show I was running.

Of course, this was all a crock. JP may not receive the discipline of a Iowa farm boy milking the herd at sunrise, but he is certainly not allowed to call his own shots. He had, however, figured out a pretty solid way to hurt and anger his mother. She calmed down when I explained that JP was messing with her mind, but clearly we both now have to be cognizant that our sweet boy is playing a more sophisticated game than we were previously accustomed to (although this kid has always been a crafty one).

Now the shoe has been shifted to my none-too-comfortable foot. Yesterday, JP was in something of a mood: wasn’t listening, wouldn’t finish his dinner, throwing his toys around. We had a few discussions, and eventually I had to send him to bed. Earlier in the day, when I took away one of the offending toys and opened a discussion about an embargo on his Nintendo DS, JP had announced that as of that moment he loved his mother better than me. Again, smiling when he said it, but said nonetheless. I’m not entirely sure what would have been the best way to react to this, but this is what I did: I reminded myself to stay calm and just said that it made me sad for him to say that. And I took the toy anyway.

Now to the evening. When the final moment came and JP’s punishment was announced and the crying began, he yelled that he wanted to go to his Mommy’s house. Immediately. I don’t want to downplay the importance of this kind of stuff in a divorced household: it hurts. I didn’t sleep well last night. It pushes up against one of the key insecurities that one can feel as a parent in a divided household; namely, that your child can be taken from you, and worse, that the child can be the agent of that departure. Nor does the emotional discomfort release you from your responsibilities: I have to put aside the urge to convince him that he loves me and still go ahead and just parent. He can say what he wants, but I still have to send him to bed, even if some part of my brain is saying, “He’s going to run away and never come back.”

Right now, JP’s young enough that his attempts to play his parents against each other are easily read and countered. What’s more, he doesn’t get to choose much these days. He can say he never wants to see me again, but he still will. Later, though…

It’s a game of chicken with my ex. We’re both heading down a road full speed, awaiting the collision of JP’s developing desires, our own ability to be good parents, and the urge—always there—to hold him as close as possible, no matter the cost.