Zoobie Zoobie Zoobie

I recently read a news article saying that Sesame Street songs were being used on detainees at Guantamo Bay, Cuba.  I'm not kidding.  Apparently blasting Ernie's ode to his rubber duckie is more effective at wearing down suspected terrorists than other established forms of torture, such as waterboarding or the waiting room at the DMV.  Of course, news of musical torture is making some people furious.  The music industry has demanded that the government stop weaponizing their jingles.  Human rights groups are protesting, while parents of young children are saying, "Is that the best you've got?  You should spend a week at our place."

Kyle loves Sesame Street.  He watches it every day.  More specifically, he watches the SAME EPISODE every day, thanks to the power of Netflix instant (and the dim-witted dad who introduced him to it).  He does this for weeks at a time, then moves on to another episode and watches that one over and over again.  I can't tell you how many times I've seen Elmo, Zoe, and Telly nearly fight to the death over who has the best pet.  I've also watched, time and time again, the episode in which Natalie Portman convinces Big Bird that she can run Hooper's Store by singing a song about change and teaching a hyperactive neurotic elephant how to make an omelet.  Then there's the episode Kyle's watching now, a retelling of "The Sword in the Stone" featuring Baby Bear, who has a voice that only a deaf mother can love.   It's enough to drive a parent crazy sometimes.  I suppose I could get out of this cycle and just force Kyle to watch the next episode, but I don't because I believe it's about Elmo going to the DMV.

(Above: Kyle doesn't just listen to music;
he's an accomplish musician himself)

Fortunately, I have not suffered through repetitive children's music like many parents have... not yet, at least.  We just don't have it playing in our home.  I don't know if I deliberately meant for this to happen.  I do know I was traumatized years ago, when we visited my young niece and watched Barney and Friends.  The episode featured one of her favorite songs at the time, "Fruit Salad Yummy Yummy."  If you need to know what I'm talking about, go ahead and look it up on YouTube - there's no way I will subject you to that myself.  I swore then that I would never have that song in my home.  Yet I don't think I intended to keep all children's music away.  I just never attempted to listen to it.  As a stay-at-home dad, my own music has been a source of sanity, and the kids usually enjoy it.  In fact, Kyle has adopted some of our songs as his favorites, and now he likes hearing those songs over and over again.

These days his two favorites are, in his words, "To-nah-nah-nah, We are Yun" and "Zoobie Zoobie Zoobie."  The recording industry prefers to call the first song "We are Young," and it's by a group called Fun.  It's a great song that came out this year, and I enjoy hearing it each day with Kyle, even if it makes a passing comment about the singer's friends "getting higher than the Empire State."  Big deal - they could be on swings, right?  The other song is "Zou Bisou Bisou," a French tune sung by Don Draper's new wife Megan on the season premiere of AMC's Mad Men.  From what I understand, the song's lyrics are harmless; loosely translated, they're a cooking recipe for frog legs.  The song doesn't exactly fit in my classic rock collection, but Jennifer and I are fans of the show and thought it would be funny to hear the song from time to time in shuffle mode.  But then our almost-four-year-old started bouncing to it, and now he wants to hear it nearly every day.  Even our almost-one-year-old, Adam, shakes his arms to the beat.  Jennifer and I do get a kick out of watching them, though it's still a little strange when you consider how we first heard this song (click here).  Kyle has not seen this clip, and I have no plans to show it to him. To him, Mad Men is about a bunch of guys in suits and fedoras who look at pictures of bears and honey, determining what emotions they bring about (and, yes, one picture makes them "mad").  This impression, of course, is from Sesame Street.

I doubt I will introduce children's music in our home.  It's too much of a risk.  Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of good children's music out there. I often enjoy hearing it now and then. But "now and then" never happens in a young child's home.   If the kids ever fell in love with "Fruit Salad Yummy Yummy," we'd have to play it every day, sometimes several times a day.  Now that would be torture.

Mayday! Mayday!

To those of you who have been wondering why I haven't posted anything in a while, I offer this video, which was recorded tonight:

I hope to be back soon.

Potty Time! Excellent!

I am not exactly a potty person.  Some parents out there love to go into detail about their children's ability to use a toilet, as if it's as cute as their first smile, first word, or first spit-up.  I like to spare my readers details, since they might be reading this during a time when it would be inappropriate for them to suddenly throw up.  So today I will write about potty training without going into many of the details.  Besides, if you need details to find out what's really going on, then this might be a good time to take a step back, look at your life, and ask yourself, "Am I a robot?"

(Above: Meet the enemy)

I hate potty training.  It's disgusting, it's exhausting, and it can make a person miss having a desk job to go to during the weekend.  In many ways, potty training is much like military training, except that the trainee is the one barking orders and the trainers are like the guy who signed up for the military but can't take it, and is begging and pleading with the trainee, telling him he'd do anything he wants just to end this misery.  For months, my three-and-a-half-year-old son refused any attempt to get him to sit on a toilet.  It's not something that's easily forceable, especially if you want to keep your clothes clean.  Trust me, I know.  But we had to do it, especially with Pre-K happening this fall, and diapers are frowned upon there.  We were told by the experts that potty training is something that will happen once the kid's ready, and apparently our son was not yet ready.  Or he was, but he was incredibly stubborn about it (I tend to think this was the case).  So, over and over again, I try to get Kyle to go.  "Do you want to use the bathroom?" "No." "Do you want to use the bathroom now?" "No." "How about now?" "No." "Do you not want to not use no bathroom right now?"  "Err... Yes."  The kid was on to me.

We weaned him off diapers by buying him Pull-Ups, but those are really just expensive diapers, and he used them as such.  We then bought him special Thomas the Tank Engine underwear, which apparently is made with pure sandpaper fibers.  He wore them for half a minute before wanting them off.  We then bought him something more comfortable, which he liked wearing, but not enough to give up diapers.

We tried incentives.  Use the bathroom and you get M&M's.  Use the bathroom and you get a lollipop.  Use the bathroom and you get a sticker.  Use the bathroom and you can drive the car around the block.  Sadly, nothing worked.  We also had a bag of wrapped children's books, gifts for Adam (don't tell him) that we didn't open because Adam would rather eat the gifts than open them.  We told Kyle he could have one every time he used the bathroom, but he still didn't budge. Then, during a free weekend earlier this month, we decided to throw a potty party.  One of Jennifer's coworkers did that for his child, and it worked, so we figured we'd give it a shot.  We filled the bathroom with balloons, put a cup of lollipops by the sink, kept books nearby for reading, hired acrobats, and had an iPod set up to play Kyle's favorite music.  Kyle loved the idea, up until he realized that it involved actually using the toilet.  Then the screaming and shoving began.  It soon became the WORST PARTY EVER, and, by the end of the night, we had to give up because of a digestion problem (again, I won't go into details here).  Kyle wins, and parents lose again.

Our kid is stubborn, and once he makes up his mind that he doesn't want to do something, he will kick, scream, fight, fall to the ground and go limp.  He wasn't going to face the toilet or sit on it, no matter how hard we tried to get him there.  That's pretty much how that party went.  I dunno... maybe we were doing it all wrong.  We had no clue as to what would actually work.  We just knew that our child is the ultimate flip-flopper: he will be completely against something one moment, and then, all of a sudden, he'll be for it and act as if he was for it all along.  It's like he's a 3-year-old John Kerry or Mitt Romney.  One night he hates sleeping with a pillow, the next night he loves it.  One day he's not walking, the next day he's doing laps around our friend's apartment.  One day he can't stand cucumber, the next day he's muching away on it.  We just needed that moment to happen with the bathroom, and we were hoping it would happen before puberty. 

(Above: Kyle gets lollipop fever)

Kyle was on vacation last week, and on Wednesday we decided to give the potty party another try.  Kyle resisted at first, but then that evening, he surprised us by going a couple times.  We don't know what changed his mind, but we weren't going to risk anything by asking him.  He then said he'd like to try it again the next day.  And that's what he did.  He's been going every day since.  Just like that, he was potty trained.  We still rewarded him each time (just to make sure it kept going), which meant he had plenty of lollipops and M&M's, and a slew of new books for us to read to him.  That didn't matter, since he had me read the same Curious George book to him each time he had to go.  It's the one where the monkey gets into trouble but somehow manages to find a way out of it.  Yeah, you know the one.  After reading it each bathroom time for several days straight, I was starting to miss the diapers.

Fortunately, Kyle stopped asking me to read to him earlier this week.  The lollipops quickly disappeared and we're now weaning him off the M&M's.  Kyle's been a pro at using the bathroom, and he's already using it to his advantage: he's discovered it's a great delay tactic for brushing his teeth, getting ready for school, cleaning up, eating dinner, and taking a bath.  The hour it used to take to get ready for bed now seems quick compared to the four hours it takes now.  Ah, three-year-olds.  But I'm not complaining.  Not me.  I'm a happy guy.  Potty training is now over until the next kid tries it years from now, and I'm in no rush to start that.

Art School

Sometimes I wonder how my kids view me.  Now I know, thanks to Kyle's nursery school.  This is what I look like to my three-year-old:

Those who know me well can see the resemblance.  I think Kyle got my nose perfectly, though my hair seems a little off.  But I suppose that's artistic license.  This picture hung on the wall of my son's nursery school classroom, with a note underneath: "Kyle says, 'This is my Dad.'"  As if anyone would have thought otherwise.

(Above: the artist and his contemporaries
pose for a class photo)

This masterpiece is one of many works of art that Kyle has created at that magical place called nursery school.  Since his first class in mid-September, Kyle has brought home, among other things, a big Valentine's Day heart, a construction-paper Christmas stocking, a jack-o-lantern made from a paper plate, and a picture of dots that looks like his mother.  They're very sweet, and I might be able to auction them off for a few bucks.

My favorite work of art is the one on his classroom door right now.  It's a construction-paper cutout of a little child wearing winter clothes, including a hat, gloves and scarf.  At least, I think it's a scarf; Kyle's guy is wearing his up the side of his face, over his right ear. 

The artwork itself is nothing extraordinary when compared to previous drawings and paintings by Kyle and his classmates.  No, what makes these images of bundled-up children stand out are the quotes next to them, given by the artists themselves.  From what I understand, each kid was pulled aside and asked to tell the teacher what he or she plans to do this winter.  Most of the artists shared many of the heart-warming images of childhood: building a snowman with mommy and daddy, going sledding with a brother or sister, or just running through the snow.  This is what my boy said:

"I will build a snowman, and then eat the snowman."  Hmph.  Maybe my kid's hungry.  Maybe he doesn't quite understand snowmen.  Or maybe he's slightly cannibalistic.  We'll probably get a better idea when he has to make an Easter bunny.  Until then, I'll assume the quote is just him exploring his own imagination.  He is an artist, after all.

Big Blues

The sports gods are screwing with my attempt to brainwash my kids.  I used to think that getting my kids to root for my teams would be easy, even though I am from Boston and we're living in Enemy Territory.  I figured, as the kids grew up, I'd somehow convince them to ignore their own hometown teams, either by telling them they are instruments of the devil (the Yankees) or they don't really exist (the Mets).  By age two, Kyle was already saying "Go Red Sox," adding that Big Papi was his favorite player.  The kid also regularly wore a Red Sox hat and jacket, making him my own human shield against the barrage of New York insults.  For the most part, it was working perfectly.

(Above: Adam and Kyle experience the agony of defeat
with their friend Julia)

But then there's football. Football was supposed to be easy. The animosity between New York and New England isn't quite as strong on the gridiron as it is on the baseball diamond.  The Jets are obnoxious, for sure, but they don't stir up the kind of hatred reserved for the Yankees.  I don't see myself banishing my kid from our home for being a Jets fan, though I might deny him dessert after dinner.  As a Pats fan, I was more concerned about Peyton Manning and his Colts, anyway.  Kyle has become a fan of the Patriots, too, and whenever I asked for his favorite player, he says, "Tom Brady!"

Then the sports gods smacked us with Super Bowl XLVI.  New England versus New York. Rematch of Super Bowl XLII.

"Who's going to win on Sunday?" asked Kyle's nursery school teacher when I arrived to pick up my son last week.

"The Giants," said Kyle with a devilish grin.  I gasped.  Kyle's nursery school teacher laughed and laughed.  She said they had been practicing it.  It took her just an afternoon to undo three years of hard work.

I never really disliked the Giants.  After all, the greatest coaches of the Patriots, Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick, were with the Giants first.  The current head coach, Tom Coughlin, has Boston ties and quarterback Eli Manning just seems too goofy to be loathed.  I like the fact that he's having more success than his attention-grabbing brother; I just wish it wasn't at the expense of my Patriots.  Twice. 

So now everyone outside our home has been celebrating, while our family is just carrying on.  This year's loss didn't hurt as much as the 2008 loss, when a perfect season was on the line.  Back then, though, I didn't think about my kids.  Now - I can't believe this - I'm actually starting to feel a little guilt for carrying on with my plan.  Is that right?  This year I could avoid anything to do with the parades and celebration.  But what if the Giants win again when Kyle is six?  or eight?  He'd be too aware of it then.  If it's not against the Pats, I think I might go along with it.  Maybe the Giants can still be #2 in our home to the #1 Pats.  If the kids have to root for a New York baseball team, maybe they can root for the Mets.  But is that the start down a slippery slope, with my kids building even more love for the New York teams?  I'm hoping it's not.  I will continue to brainwash as best I can, knowing now that the loyalty fight might be tougher in the days ahead.  Hopefully the Pats will find a way back to the biggest game in sports, but against a team other than New York.  I'm sick of rematches.