ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

because appu series is the best & I hope all your kids get way into it, it is the best, for instance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60k0xNhw05g

so far the clear winner for "most enjoyable kid's series to watch as a parent" for me is Peg + Cat, largely based off of their episode that was an extended riff of The Magic Flute

(and yes, they did the big Queen of the Night aria with at pitch with a legit actual coloratura soprano)

We watch Peg/Cat, Daniel Tiger, the Sesame Street roku channel which basically just ends up being all Elmo clips, regular episodes on Hulu, Backyardigans, Pocoyo. I think that's it. Sometimes she'll want to watch some random crap. I put it on and it's so awful.

I long for the episode of Sesame Street where they go into Elmo's World and set Mr. Noodle on fire

Ours never cared about video of any type until maybe the last month and now will point at our laptops after breakfast and yell "puppy!" or "trucks!" depending on what kind of youtube clips he wants. And the Sesame Street roku channel is great and buys us a good ten solid minutes of not having to pay 100% attention.

That truck video upthread reminded me of this ad we used to see. It's basically the Girls Gone Wild format adapted for trucks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EimkV5MYJjk

lol. I remember those ads, but I hadn't made that connection before.

Ever since Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey came to Netflix, it has been the only show my little girl will watch to go to sleep. There were only 13 episodes and I really wish there would be a follow-up series.

The single funniest moment in an episode of children's programming I've seen so far is in the episode of Peppa Pig where she is trying to learn how to whitsle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI8KSgx418I

(The sequence in question is 2:43 - 3:43)

Haha.

That reminds me - the boy has been watching these videos of an English dude playing Minecraft incessantly. Like, the only times he doesn't watch these things is when he's actually playing Minecraft.

Anyway. We're at the city park a few weeks ago, where they've got this decommissioned tank set up. He's rambling around on top of it with a bunch of other kids, and I tell him, "Just think, if you can get that hatch open, you'll be able to drive it around the parking lot."

Boy plays along and says, "I'd do it, but I can't find the LEE-ver."

This chubby redheaded kid with freckles near the gun turret stops what he's doing, looks up, and says in the thickest Sling Blade accent to no one in particular, "Did he just say LEE-ver?"

J isn't into TV but LOVES nursery rhymes on youtube. Really have to ration it. That and videos of buses just driving around.
Re toys, we have this octopus thing that you drop plastic balls into and you have to find which shoe it's under. It's second-hand and the sounds are all screwed up and sometimes in the middle of the night I hear it going 'red. red.'
'want to play?'

Recycle it before it kills again.

There's a kid in our neighborhood who worries my wife and I a lot. He's very quiet, keeps to himself, always scowling and speed-walking around the neighborhood, and has a history of punching other kids around the neighborhood. We learned a couple weeks ago that he apparently pushes my son and calls him "bitch" when they see each other in the hallways up at the middle school. So my son was walking home from school today and this kid apparently punched him in the face and ran off.

Trying to sort out what to do here. Go over to the kid's house and talk to the parents? My wife apparently has met both the parents from when the boys were younger and they would meet up at the bus stop. Or would you think this is something to call up to the school about? Talk to the principal or a guidance counselor or something?

How old is your son? Do you have any sense of what he'd want done about it? My impulse would be go to the school once it reaches the level of a physical assault, as long as I didn't think it was going to put him in a bad situation (depending on school culture, responsiveness of admin, etc.)

school's not gonna deal with something that happens outside the school ime - and even if they were to intervene the first thing they would do would be to get the parents together. So if you have a communication line open to the parents, I would recommend going that route.

yea talk to the parents

My gut instinct response would be to murder the child's immediate family in front of him and say "if you EVER touch anyone in my family again, I will destroy everyone and everything you have ever touched"

My actual, rational response would be to notify the kids' parents that the physical altercation happened and that you are notifying the school about the hallway harassment that led up to it (which obv also means notifying the school that this kid is harassing your kid on school property and highlighting the off-campus assault as an outcome of it)

Fwiw my school reacts ASAP to things that happen off school property because they know perfectly well it's going to continue ON school property because junior highers are morons with no impulse control. So you might get help from that quarter depending on yr school?

oh are we talking jr. high age here? I wasn't sure

I remember that when I was in 3rd grade and a couple of older kids were bullying me, it made me feel good to see my dad come into the school to deal with it. When I was older I felt less like I wanted my parents stepping in, and I didn't tell them about some occasionally pretty bad stuff as a result (e.g. a kid following me after school, shoving me, and saying he was going to bring a knife to school and stab me).

do we have a books about childhood / children thread?

Yes

Wait, no. I misread that as children's books.

Timesaving tip: they are all terrible

anyway i thought this - http://carcinisation.com/2014/10/04/the-last-of-the-monsters-with-iron-teeth/
- was really interesting and mentions a lot of books i'd like to check out particularly this one:
http://www.nybooks.com/media/doc/2010/02/16/lore-language-introduction.pdf

also i'd be interested in discussing the new orenstein - "girls and sex" - book (and maybe nancy jo sales "american girls: social media and the secret lives of teenagers") - if ppl are interested tho i understand why hurting things all childhood books are terrible and i'm sure these aren't exceptions (tho i do enjoy reading orenstein). otherwise i'd love to chat about truce terms which may put us on more anthropological (safer?) grounds

thinks* not things

We ended up calling the cops. I hate like hell to call the cops on people, but my child's face was pretty swollen up and he had cuts inside of his mouth. An officer came out and we chatted with him about the situation for about an hour. When the officer asked us if we wanted him to just go over and talk to the kid's parents or whether we wanted to press charges, we were originally on the side of just a quick chat with the boy's parents to explain to them the seriousness of the situation. After discussing it with his sergeant though, the officer strongly recommended that we have a juvenile citation issued for the kid, so that we'd have a paper trail in case there was any further aggression. This means he has to have a hearing with the department of juvenile services.

I called his principal this morning and reported the other bullying that had been going on. She explained that the school was aware of behavioral problems with the other kid and had been working with the parents on it and they had been very cooperative. The school didn't have any authority over kids walking home from school - only at bus stops, on the school bus, and on school grounds. She seemed to think that perhaps involving juvenile services might be a step that could potentially benefit him.

It's been really stressful. This was my kid's first day back at school after being basically bedridden for two weeks with the flu.

this situation sounds tough - my heart goes out to you. i'd personally be reticent to bring the police in (though obv in this case i defer to your judgement) only bc i know that when you get juvenile citations, legal authorities, etc involved it can make these kinds of situations much worse (not necessarily for you + yours but in terms of doing longterm damage to the child + family bc of overzealous police and/or child protective type services). "my child's face was pretty swollen up and he had cuts inside of his mouth," sounds horrible - i hope yr kid is feeling better :/

I wasn't going to suggest it, but TBH, that's probably what I would have done too.

Not an easy decision, but sounds like you did the best thing you could. One problem with going to the parents in that situation is that if the kid's behavior is already at that level of violence there may already be something missing in the parenting. You made the best of imperfect choices.

Yeah, like I said, I hate like hell to involve the police in things. It was a difficult call to make. This kid has a long history of physical violence in the neighborhood. When it extended to my family and I saw my kid sitting there roughed up, I wanted to at least get a cop's input about what they thought we should do. And I didn't want to wait to see what the principal would suggest the next morning because I wanted the cop to be able to document my kid's physical injuries if necessary (the swelling had gone down by this morning; hopefully his mouth will heal quickly).

whoah had no idea the situation was that extreme, I retract my earlier comments

because I wanted the cop to be able to document my kid's physical injuries if necessary

seems like a good thing to do, i didn't know it was that bad. i'm sorry for your poor kid!

I mean, he's a little upset about it, but mostly he just wants to get it behind him and not have to even deal with the other kid. I don't think he's as scared of the bully as his mother and I are. He wants the freedom to walk home from school unbothered - he likes the exercise and he's an outdoor kid, but that puts him on the same route as this child we're trying to keep him away from. He was pretty pissed off because oranges are his favorite food at the moment and due to the cuts in his mouth, he couldn't eat them last night.

whoah had no idea the situation was that extreme, I retract my earlier comments

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, April 5, 2016 2:12 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I got into afterschool fights when I was his age and my parents never noticed my injuries. This kid must have a hell of a right hook or something. No need to retract your comments though. It's just a weird and sucky situation for us to be in and we're muddling through it the best we can.

I too got into all kinds of fights as a kid (although this tapered off through high school, as getting in fights then had way more serious consequences both physical and otherwise), and yeah nothing ever really left a lasting mark. worst case scenario was usually a bloody nose.

yeah was gonna say pretty rare to see legit injuries from kid fights

Bloody nose is pretty serious, imo!

was going to post in the 77 feeling like a lump thread but i don't want to bog down the childless w/ complaints about parenting

i feel like a goddamn lump

i just had two of the worst sleeping nights in months, i probably slept like two hours last night. this is after a few months of waking up every 1-2 hours every single night to get our 1 year old back to sleep

it is just one of those days of such extreme exhaustion that i feel ... like... broken

i am so incoherent at work, i wonder what my colleagues think sometimes, especially those who don't have kids which is quite a lot of them, i just feel brain-dead and completely inarticulate

Having gone through all that and having seen other new parents go through it since then, I'll say that it feels and looks a lot worse from your POV than it probably does from your co-workers.

Doesn't change the fact you feel like shit, but it probably feels worse than it looks.

That's rough man. How do you split up the wakings with the lady? Functioning at work is important, but I think we've all been there.

yea the division of labor w/ my wife is a major issue, we haven't quite found a good rhythm with that

you guys both working similar schedules?

we never solved the division of labor at night problem since my wife was devoted to the tit & I don't have them. or I guess we did solve them: she dealt with the wake-ups. she stayed at home most of those years & I had jobs so our relationship could weather it...but it sucked. when #2 was born I was still finishing my dissertation too so I only slept every other day. I'm happy to have had kids so young (first was born when I was ~25); it must be even harder when you're older.

yea my wife did all the wake-ups for nursing previously, but we've been gradually trying to wean him at night, cutting out feedings one at a time for a few weeks. since last week, we dropped all night feedings so i'm doing most of the wake-ups. it is doable, i guess, on weekends when i can sleep in, but still sleeping in until 9:30 or 10am or so doesn't really compensate for being up all night. weekdays we've been trying to split up the shifts a little but its still been terrible.

as I've posted before my wife nursed our kids for a long time, like 4-5 years, and whatever I might think about that on my own, the fact that it meant she'd still handle night wakings with tit didn't dissuade me.

I'm working and H is home and still nursing so she handles most wakings, but I'm usually up much later and help as long as I'm up. Not to try to scare you Marcos but my job can be high pressure and my performance actually did suffer when I was getting less sleep. A bad night once in a while is manageable on adrenaline but persistent lack of sleep is a problem.

yea it has been a major problem, my boss still thinks i'm doing great work bc i can kind of manage pulling things together for our weekly meeting but i basically show up every day and struggle to do things. procrastination has always been a struggle for me as i've posted elsewhere but when i'm consistently sleep-deprived my ability to concentrate and commit to things just completely tanks