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

last night my little one, the near-tween, was crying because a lot of kids at school have suddenly gotten into "summoning spirits". Evidently they write yes and no (well, oui et non) a few times on a piece of paper, set up some pencils in a stack, then chant a song about Charlie and see if the pencils end up pointing to yes. If yes then Charlie the spirit is present and everyone panics. My daughter doesn't want to believe in it but everyone's scared by it and yet big crowds of kids keep doing it.

I remember at around the same age doing similar things, going into the bathroom with other kids and turning off the lights, then doing some weird "ritual" around the garbage can to talk to the dead. as I told my daughter, it's probably rooted in a desire to control things that seem uncontrollable, the possible permeability of the material world; what I meant was awareness of death but I didn't want to put it that way.

she was pretty spooked!

Dude!

She was worried about whether to tell on the kids and I said go ahead, probably there's a bunch of spooked kids. Evidently there was something similar at my older kids' school last year (also in France) and it was banned by the teachers. Maybe it violates laïcité? Or it just ends up with kids who haven't slept enough because they're worried about "spirits".

My kid has mentioned that game. I guess it's worldwide.

Ouija boards and the like were a thing when i was a kid in 80s england and probably for decades before

Hasbro makes them...

Well yeah. This is like half ouija board, half Bloody Mary.

Maybe it violates laïcité?

loooooool

It was probably banned because it was annoying

I can't believe there's anything that harmful in this sort of thing, it's kids experimenting with being scared when there's no actual scary thing present, which has to be kind of even good maybe?

yeah. my daughter told on them today, but the teacher just said she'd keep her eyes open. apparently kids in the class above hers did it again today and all ended up crying because they got freaked out.

Maybe yr daughter needs to clue them in on Slenderman and up the ante.

Candyman candyman candyman

xp: looool. good strategy, imo.

This weekend, I checked my kid's search history prompted by Tracer's story. I came up clean! He could be using some sort of "Incognito" mode though. I wouldn't put it past him because he's pretty savvy, but I didn't worry about it today.

I did find out that he has a YouTube channel though! He makes videos of himself playing Call of Duty and other games while telling little stories about his life or trying to be funny. His history of liked videos was mostly the same. Anyway, there wasn't any worrying content in the videos except for at one point he inadvertently doxxes one of his friends from school, who also has a channel doing the exact same thing: "Oh, and let me tell you about [channel] name. His name is [the kids' full name]..." *sigh* The video doesn't have enough views though for me to be worried about it though.

Anyway, just wanted to share the results of my snooping.

Yeah it seems young boys are massively into those Lets play type videos. Mo watches them 94/7. God knows why.

so my wife suggested Charlotte's Web for the kids to watch last weekend and you know what turns out I hate that fucking movie. Looks terrible, the songs are terrible, the story (what there is of it, anyway) is nonsensical and the "message"... well, what the hell is the message anyway? Don't kill whiny pigs? Always rely on the skills and sacrifices of those more capable than you? Aspire to be a lazy, incurious slob?

SOME PIG

Spekaing of snooping kids search history made me think of this:

http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/i-looked-my-sons-google-search-history-and-it-was--2265

6 yo wants to know how buy Pokemon schwag online

rip

Anyone have any luck teaching an older sibling how not to harm baby? 4 and 1, 4 year old defies instructions not to handle baby in certain ways and is always pulling/pushing/lifting etc. Today we had a huge scare bc she somehow managed to pull the high chair over face down with baby in it, by pulling on the baby's arms (I wasn't home but this is what I heard) -- it's a pretty heavy, sturdy Keekaroo chair and IDK how she managed to do it. Baby was miraculously fine but it was the kind of thing that could have led to severe injury or even death. Scary as fuck. We made a pretty big, serious deal out of it, major consequences and a lot of talking about the job of being a big sister and why it what she did could have hurt the baby and put her in the hospital.

It honestly seems like she is looking to both push the limits wrt potentially harming the baby and get a rise out of us. This is tough.

Aaaargh, sorry, that sounds awful. We're having similar issues with 3yo girl and 14yo dog, but at least the dog can get up and leave the room

Positive reinforcement (I sound like a broken record, sorry) and plenty of quality one on one time with you both, so she's not jealous of the baby. Try giving her tasks she can do to help with the baby, maybe task her with keeping baby amused during nappy changes, etc. so she has supervised fun interaction.

^^^
also 4 years is old enough to try to explain why she's doing it. are you sure trying to harm the baby is what's going on?

I mean she isn't "trying to harm the baby" in the sense that she actually knows what that really means, but she is definitely acting aggressively toward the baby.

So....yuppiest thing I have ever done: run a criminal background check on a potential babysitter via care.com.

Result: she was convicted of conspiracy to commit credit card fraud. She saw that we ran the check and messaged us "I fell in with a bad crowd." Ok, genuinely wish her the best but it's not gonna happen.

That's kinda wild

I just gave a potato chip to my 3 year old and feel like I just ruined his life

Today's manifestation of severe sibling envy -- K smacked me in the nads super hard, and after I walked into the other room so as to avoid lashing out in anger, she came in and said "Daddy, I did something really funny to your sunglasses." She had snapped them.

I'd have... not dealt with that in a sane parental manner I have to admit :/

Marin is currently at the height where every time I pick her up her feet are in the perfect position to kick my nads, whether intentionally or by accident. I think I need to get a cup.

yeah, already happens to me a lot by accident but this was p clearly on purpose. Like I said, I walked into the other room to avoid raging, but she clearly wanted to get a rise out of me and was disappointed by that. They were nice Ray Bans too, the first and only "nice" pair of sunglasses I ever owned. But even in the moment you remember (hopefully) that a four year old has no concept of what that means, and they're only sunglasses anyway.

Welp, we decided to take all the refined sugar sweets and empty carb snacks out of the house. Wish us luck.

baller move

It was H's move ultimately, although tbf I had originally suggested we not buy them at all. We had the old debate a couple years ago of whether it's better to just not have them around to avoid the habit vs do "moderation" so they don't develop some weird relationship to the foods. I advocated not having them at all at the time but H convinced me that we should try to just do it with rules and boundaries. H now has rethought that -- the rules are too easy to let slide and they become a crutch for the parents as well, like basically you bend the rules so they'll shut up tbh.

I think seeing that even the one-year-old was getting addicted to "veggie straws" was sort of the breaking point.

there is a whole universe of, like, organic junk food

I feel like all that stuff exists to give you cover to enjoy junk food rather than to actually trick you into eating junk food you think is healthy. Like I never *really* believed veggie straws were good for my kids, given that I read the labels, but it still somehow allowed me to look the other way.

I wish we could cut out all the junk in our house. I've prob gone over this already but the youngest has coeliac and on top of that is vegetarian and has some strange kind of pathalogical food fears (possibly due to trauma from the coeliac before diagnosis)

All he will eat - and they have to be very specific brands and types - is potato chips, corn chips, cheese, bananas, those chewy fruit bars, Zooper Doopers (ice lollies) and if you cajole and push past his crying, he might eat poached eggs or spagetti with tomato sauce. Try anything else and he has crying/screaming meltdowns. I hate that he eats the iceblocks and chips but if he didnt hed be eating next to nothing. Hes way too old to still be throwing such fits over food. I want bf to send him to a dietician tbrh.

I have a cousin whose daughter literally only eats honey sandwiches and ice cream, nothing else. She's now 14 and has been on this diet since the age of 2.

guys that's not good

poached eggs are great tho. maybe that and the spaghetti could be the starting point? i.e. sneakin stuff into the sauce

There's very little my 20 month old won't eat, and I swear he's eaten a wider variety of foods in his life than my 72 year old father has. He seems to love everything we've given him, even stuff that was kind of a joke like olives and pickled onions, everything except melons. I hope this keeps up.

Like we went to russian and indian restaurants in Portland last month and he was eating all the cod liver pate and cilantro chutney with a spoon and demanding more.

our kids were very adventurous, voracious eaters and, fortunately, will still eat a wide variety of things but one of them now defaults to bacon and sausage and the other defaults to french fries and cheese

like, every single meal is "what do you want to eat?" "BACON!" "CHEESE!" "um okay, here is some baked chicken and Brussels sprouts (or some other non-bacon non-cheese meal)" "YAY"

There's very little my 20 month old won't eat,

Our daughter went through this phase – she loved the attention and approval she got when she ate everything willingly. She developed a few dislikes later – I think those were an extension of learning how powerful "No!" was – but got over them.

It's very unscientific, but I can't help but feel like I noticed a correlation between the introduction of carby and/or sweet snacks and "kid" foods and the decline in my kids' interest in other foods. It's hard to say though because these things also just change with age.

in my experience there's a bit of a curve - at first they'll eat almost anything, then around 3 or so they start to narrow their tastes down.

yeah it may just be that. Still, I already see some positives from the removal of the junk snack foods. K is eating more at meals.

I got a sales robocall on my cell phone last night. It was a woman's voice informing me that my student loan (which I have never had) had been flagged for consolidation at an approved interest rate, or some such nonsense. An obvious scam, I cussed out the recording as I hung up: "You stupid piece of shit."

I returned to my daughter, who I'd been playing with when the call interrupted us. She looked astonished and asked "Who was she?" I immediately felt horrible for behaving that way in front of her. She thought I had been speaking that way to an actual person. "Oh that wasn't a person, it was just a robot," I tried to explain. "A robot?" Her bewilderment grew here. Her eyes were wide. She must have thought I had Bender on the other end of the phone or something.

At this point, my wife stepped in and rightfully called me out: "...but we shouldn't talk that way about anybody, right?"

Not much of a point to this story, but don't cuss out robocalls in front of your kids.