Heartwarming Teaching Moments with Mr. Fob

The scene: Dinner at the Fobcave.

S-Boogie: Rolls are rolls.

Mr. Fob: Really?

S-Boogie: Yeah. Everything is everything.

Mr. Fob: That's what Lauryn Hill says.

S-Boogie: Who's Lauryn Hill?

Mr. Fob puts The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in the CD player and plays "Everything is Everything," then shows S-Boogie the pictures of Ms. Hill on the CD cover. They share A Moment.



Excuse me while I wipe a tear from my eye.

Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence

Okay, there was no whizzing involved, but it's such a great title (and board game).

As Little Dude approached the barbed wire separating the cows from us outside the petting farm, I told him not to touch it. Ever since burning his hand on the curling iron a couple weeks ago, he's come to associate the concept dangerous with the word "hot" (and its accompanying sign), so I told him the wire was hot. I didn't realize how accurate this was until he grabbed the wire and I simultaneously grabbed him to pull him away, and a shock jolted through my arm and down my leg. We later found a sign that had fallen into the grass, warning us that the wire fence was electric.

I don't remember enough from my high school physics class of how electricity works; is it because I grabbed Little Dude that he didn't seem to be bothered by the shock? Because the current only had to travel through his short arm and then through my body instead of all the way through his? He did say "Mooooo" very sadly as I carried him away from the electric fence, but I think that was regret that he couldn't get closer to the cows, not physical pain. Or, you know, maybe he did feel the shock but just didn't care. He's macho like that.

My Constant Fear

That just as I've gotten comfortable on the toilet and gotten into my book, the four-year-old will bang on the door--or just open it--and say, "I need to go potty."

A Few Quick Thoughts on Parenting

...before I get back to work on my graduate portfolio.

• I wasn't too stressed about FoxyJ going to Davis for two days last week because (a) I was excited for her, (b) being stressed about parenting by myself would show weakness that as a card-carrying member of the Involved Fathers Movement I am not allowed to show, and (c) my future vision is generally too rose-filtered to imagine that any coming situation might be anything less than peachy. Despite all this, Thursday and Friday were the culmination of a very grumpy week for me, parenting-wise, and I noticed the effect Foxy's absence had on my grumpiness when, after talking to her on the phone while the kids took a bath Friday night, I transformed, at least temporarily, from Angry Dad back to the Perfectly Cheerful and Patient Parent I usually am.
  
• Interestingly, Foxy and I have been more consistent about having family home evening (almost) every week since I've left the LDS church than we were when I was a believing member. This is due mostly to the fact that S-Boogie is now old enough to remind us. And because we like treats. I've found that I enjoy taking my turn to prepare a lesson, because without the standard religious topics to fall back on I always have to think hard about what exactly I want to teach my children and how I'm going to do so. Last night I decided to do a lesson on the environment and conservation. I found this Happy Earth Day coloring book and printed one of the activities (on the back of a used sheet of paper, of course), then took the huge stack of paper collected from S-Boogie's daily arts and crafts, together with a large piece of butcher paper I had left over from making a scroll for one of the plays I'm in, and we made this papier mache Earth:
  I think she picked up a vague idea of what it means to "take care of the Earth," but the geography teachers of the world should rest assured that I am doing all I can to ensure their continued job security.
• Cleanliness is next to godliness, and for agnostics that as close as we're going to get. I was babysitting for some friends the other day and I looked around their living room and said, "Hey, they don't have scraps of paper and pieces of tape everywhere. Maybe I don't have to live that way." So yesterday I cleaned up the living room a bit (thus producing the pile of paper that is now part of the Earth), and this afternoon while the kids played I vacuumed. Then tonight when it was time to clean up, rather than rushing through it like I usually do because I'm anxious to get the kids in bed, I actually had S-Boogie find a place for every random thing that was in the living room and then take the floating scraps of paper to the recycling bin. And suddenly the world's a happier place, and Angry Dad is so last week--though that may also have something to do with the fact that the miracle of Daylight Savings gave me an extra hour of sleep this morning.
  

A Very Cheesy Post for FoxyJ

(Because I know she loves her dairy products.)

Yesterday morning Foxy flew to Davis to tour the school and be wined and dined by important people. She'll be back tomorrow afternoon.

This morning the very first thing S-Boogie said when she came into my room was "The house isn't pretty without Mommy."

Who's Your Daddy?

This evening Little Dude and I were looking at one of FoxyJ's mission photo albums. He enjoyed pointing out Mama on every page. When we saw group shots of the district Foxy and I were in together, I asked him where Daddy was. He consistently pointed to the missionary Foxy used to have a crush on (i.e. not me).

The 684th Law of Parenting

If your children are playing quietly in their bedroom, enjoy it while it lasts, but know that you will pay a price for your peace when you find out what they've been up to.

When I opened the bedroom door tonight I expected much of the mess that awaited me--clothes, toys, and books strewn across the floor--but what I didn't foresee was the dirty diapers extracted from the diaper pail and spread around the room. I hope I found them all.

(Un)Employment

I have not been employed since September. I quit my reference job at the library in order to volunteer in the cataloging section of the library. We've been able to cover our expenses, more or less, with my Foreign Languages and Area Studies fellowship stipend and Foxy's teaching income. In the next few weeks this may change as I take a job cataloging materials for the Spanish Department's Center for Spanish Studies. I'm making this change not just because this job is offering to pay me money, but because it'll give me a chance to diversify my cataloging experience and to use my Spanish language skills in conjunction with library stuff, which is the whole idea behind my FLAS fellowship.

Meanwhile, Foxy and I are seriously considering the possibility of me returning to unemployment after I graduate. For years now we've been looking forward to the day when I have a real job with a real salary and insurance and all that fun grown-up stuff, but now we're having second thoughts. We're realizing that Foxy's PhD program is likely to require a lot of time and energy on her part and, oh yeah, we have kids. S-Boogie will be starting Kindergarten in the fall but Little Dude will only be two and he generally doesn't seem to enjoy being with people other than his parents as much as his sister always has. So we could go ahead with the plan to get me a full-time job, find a good daycare option for him, and put Foxy in the position of juggling her full-time student responsibilities with the full-time parent responsibilities of making sure kids get to and from daycare and school on time and caring for them herself instead of having time to dedicate to homework and research, OR we could live for another few years as poor students and have one of us--me--available to do the parenting thing. We don't know yet exactly how much Davis is offering her in terms of money to live on and we still haven't heard from the other two schools she applied to, but we know that at least one school really wants her and has said they plan on funding her well. It's likely that I'll still need to get some kind of part-time job--and even if I didn't need to I'd want to do something to keep up my library experience--and Little Dude may still need some daycare, but at least this option means that one of us will be able to dedicate most of our time to parenting and that Foxy will be able to give her studies the attention a PhD program deserves. I've read too many stories recently of mothers who have had to perform scheduling gymnastics in order to get their degrees, and I admire them for accomplishing what they've accomplished while their husbands worked full-time, but I figure why do that if there are other options? We are, after all, quite experienced at the financial gymnastics of living on a student income. What's another few years?

Truthfully, I'm excited by this idea. While I've been excited at the prospect of starting my career, the one thing I've been dreading is the reality of a 40-hour job that would take away from the time I spend with my children. I'm ready to be done with school but I'm not ready to give up the flexible parenting schedule school has given me. Maybe I'll get a real job when the kids go to college.

Happy Valentine's from the Love Monster!

Last week S-Boogie and I made Valentine's decorations (at her request). We spent an hour or two making heart chains and cupids and then made, with the leftover pieces, the Love Monster. It will love you... to death! (I refer to it as it because I'm undecided on whether it's a he or she.)


My proudest creation is my Cupid heart, which I think of as my interpretation of Tolkien Boy's theory that if full-scale human cloning were a reality homosexuality would be much more common. Either that or the difficulty of flying as conjoined twin angels.


Tonight S-Boogie and I spent another two hours making Valentines for her classmates and teachers. After all that I am Valentined out. It's a good thing FoxyJ isn't expecting me to do anything Valentiney for her tomorrow.

Right?

Honey?

One Down, Thirty-Nine To Go

With all the hullabaloo yesterday about Super Tuesday, I forgot that it was also Mardi Gras, which means today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. I'm going to try again this year to give up yelling at small children, so it's a good thing that I had a nice little yelling fit with S-Boogie yesterday when I found her in the middle of a pile of styrofoam pieces just minutes after I'd told her NOT to pick apart the styrofoam container. It must have been my subconscious mind telling me to spend Mardi Gras reveling in sin before entering a forty-day fast.

Today, I'm happy to say, went well. It's easy to keep my cool when the kids are in a good mood, and they were in a good mood today. My challenge will be not screaming back when they are screaming at me.

It's funny because I think most people who know me would say I'm a fairly even-tempered and easy-going guy. I'm not usually one to get angry and throw tantrums. Something about the irrationality of children, though, messes with my rational mind. The aspects of my personality that my children bring out in me are not pretty: my obsessive need for order, for control, for reason. When I don't have these things I become the type of parent that kids grow up to write bitter memoirs about. I don't want my kids living in fear that at any moment, if they don't do everything exactly right, their smiling, cheerful dad will snap and call down the wrath of God on them.

On the other hand, on days like today when I manage to behave how I insist my children behave--treating others with respect and finding appropriate ways to express our feelings--I like myself a lot more and I like them a lot more. And everyone goes to bed feeling happy. And hopefully S-Boogie and Little Dude will grow up thinking of home as a safe place, not as the source of their PTSD to be worked through in years of expensive therapy sessions.

A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Doodle

Daddy by S-Boogie, 2008

Weekly Confession: Indoctrination

Forgive me, Blogger, for I have sinned. I am indoctrinating my children in the ways of my religion.

It all started, I suppose, when S-Boogie was a baby and I got in the habit of putting on Justice League DVDs while trying to get her to go back to sleep in the middle of the night. That planted the seed. Then when she was two, I dressed her for Halloween as Supergirl. This past year I've brainwashed her with the full canon of our scriptures, starting with the complete series of Justice League and Justice League Unlimited DVDs, then on to Teen Titans and Batman and most recently Superfriends. I have put the icing on the cake of indoctrination, as it were, by buying her her very own idol as a Christmas present:I justify this blatant projection of my own values onto my daughter by reminding myself that just last week, while watching Superfriends, she said of her own free will, "Superman's my favorite." (I later asked, to clarify, whether she liked Superman or Supergirl better; she replied that she liked them both the same. I debated with myself as to whether Supergirl would provide a strong female role model or simply yet another example of a teenaged girl dressing like a skank in order to impress men. Ultimately the comic book shop decided for me by having only Superman figures.)

Obviously her statement of preference is more proof that the brainwashing has already happened than justification for further acts of brainwashing. (Though, truth be told, I like Batman better myself.)

I'll be honest; I have no intention of stopping this rampant brainwashing of the innocents. I will likely continue to watch superhero cartoons with them, buy them superhero toys now and then, and encourage them to read superhero comics when they're older. I will, however, encourage them to explore other faiths as well. And most importantly, as they grow up I will support them in whatever choices they make, even if they decide they like Marvel Comics superheroes better than DC Comics superheroes or (Krypton forbid!) that they don't like superheroes at all.

So I guess I'm not all that sorry for this sin, Blogger. But at least I admit it is one.

Why I [heart] Dora

I was first exposed to Dora the Explorer when my niece was about three and in love with her. FoxyJ and I were new parents at the time and therefore even more self-righteous about parenting than we are now, so of course it appalled us that parents would ever let their children lay an eye on a television screen. Add to that the fact that Dora talks loudly in a sort of annoying voice and the plot of each episode is about as formulaic as you can get, and you get a rather disgusted Mr. Fob.

Fast-forward a couple years and now you have a Mr. Fob and FoxyJ who, through the course of parenting a real life child, have been forced to lower our standards a bit (but don't worry; we still sneer appropriately at those parents whose standards are even lower). We've learned that it is good for the sanity of the parents for the child to absorb the soporific radiation of the television god for an hour or two a day, and it so happens that S-Boogie's drug of choice is Dora the Explorer. And you know what? It's precisely that formulaic plot and loud, annoying voice that make the show appeal to kids her age. Duh, they're kids. I would feel worse about so willfully not recognizing this earlier if not for the fact that, if I'm to believe the end credits on each episode, it took about thirty people with PhDs to figure it out.

Apart from the fact that Dora does an excellent job of exposing children to Hispanic culture and the Spanish language in a very natural way, I love her because she is a strong, relatively gender-neutral female character. There's an interesting conversation happening on a blog I read about gender in children's toys. It seems most toys marketed to boys are relatively gender-neutral, made in simple primary colors with few frills, while toys marketed to girls are all pink and sparkly. The message most girl toys seem to send is that you can aspire to be either a princess, waiting for your Prince Charming to come rescue you, or a teenage sexbot.

Dora, on the other hand, is a little girl who has adventures exploring the world, presumably inspired by her mother, an archaeologist. Even the episode "Dora's Fairytale Adventure," which is an obvious sellout to the Disney princess phenomenon, has Dora complete certain tasks in order to become a princess, which she does in order to save her friend Boots the Monkey. In this loose retelling of Sleeping Beauty, the male monkey is the passive "damsel in distress" and the girl is the active "knight in shining armor."

Telling of Dora's success in avoiding gender stereotypes is the fact that boys like her as much as girls do. Now, the existence of the spinoff show about Dora's cousin, Diego, says that marketers did see the need to create a boy character to appeal to boys, but within my social circle at least I know of several little boys who are as obsessed with Dora as S-Boogie is.

And the little boys who think Dora is a "girl show" obviously have parents who are not as stellar in teaching egalitarianism as FoxyJ and I are. Thank goodness for parents like us.

Weekly Confession #3: Fostering Dependence

Forgive me, Blogger, for I have sinned. I seem to be hellbent on raising children who are entirely dependent on me.

We had a family conference with S-Boogie's teachers at her preschool the other day. The conference went well and I was happy to hear that S-Boogie is having fun, being friendly with all the other kids, and adapting well to change. The areas of improvement that the teachers would like to work on with us don't surprise me. They want to help S-Boogie manage her emotions better (i.e. not break into screaming fits every time something goes wrong) and to encourage her to develop better problem-solving skills.

This goes right along with something SkyeJ noted after spending the afternoon with S-Boogie on Friday. S-Boogie had asked to do construction paper art, it seems, and Skye quickly realized that what this meant was that S-Boogie wanted her to do construction paper art while S-Boogie watched. If Skye encouraged S-Boogie to do her own cutting or gluing, she would insist that she couldn't , that she needed Skye to do it for her.

This is basically how any project goes with S-Boogie. And I take full responsibility for encouraging it. In the past couple weeks she and I have made some cool-looking butterflies, mice, cats, boats, and fish with construction paper, and in each case her involvement is limited to telling me what to make and what colors to use. I don't insist she do cutting and gluing herself because I don't want her to hurt herself with the scissors or make a mess with the glue, and when it comes down to it I don't have confidence in her ability to make that butterfly look nearly as good as I know I can. She wants to make something pretty, and I want to help her. So I do it myself.

There's a similar dynamic when I help her brush her teeth. She is fully capable of doing everything by herself except turning on the water (because our sink has a particularly difficult knob), but I tend to rinse off the brush, put the toothpaste on, and fill up a rinsing cup myself because I know that if I do it the brush will actually get rinsed off, toothpaste won't be wasted, and it won't take us all night to get through a simple process.

The emotional management part of the equation comes into play when she gets frustrated that she can't do things. She'll be trying to build a Duplo tower, for example, and when it falls over she'll cry and scream. I don't like to hear her crying and screaming, so I'll rush in and fix the tower, rather than helping her work through those emotions of frustration and encouraging her to solve the problem herself.

In short, I encourage my children to be dependent on me because I'm a perfectionist and I don't trust children to do everything perfectly.

As penance for my sin I will slap myself every time I start to solve a problem S-Boogie can solve herself or do something for her that she can do herself. I will work together with FoxyJ and S-Boogie's teachers to teach her to manage her emotions and to find creative solutions to problems. And I will buy her some children's safety scissors.

I am sorry for this and for many other sins of my past and present life.

My Post-Thanksgiving Brag

FoxyJ has much more to brag about than I do, as she put together an amazing meal yesterday and did so while hardly breaking a sweat, but I want to show off the very cool namecards that S-Boogie and I made:


What's so cool about those namecards, you ask? Well, since you're so fascinated by every little thing I do, I'll tell you. Knowing that I was in charge of the crafty decorative stuff, Foxy sent me a link to a website that has cool Thanksgiving crafts to do with kids. The site did have some good stuff on it, but unfortunately if you want anything bigger than a thumbnail to print you have to pay for a membership. I could have searched more for free templates, but the site had given me enough of an idea to do it on my own. So I drew the pictures, cut the cards out, and penciled in the names. S-Boogie colored the pictures and traced the names with pen over my pencil.

What I really want to brag about, though, is not the cards themselves, but rather the innate talent for literary criticism shown by my four-year-old daughter. The observant among you will notice that I followed in the colonial tradition of my white ancestors and other-ized our Thanksgiving guest, Foxy's sister SkyeJ, by representing her as a stereotypical "Injun," feather headdress and all. (I also dehumanized my children by turning them into traditional holiday food items, but that's another story.) S-Boogie, in true postcolonial form, subverted my colonization of her aunt by other-izing Foxy and myself, turning our pilgrims into a Smurf and a demonic scarecrow. She also highlighted the crudeness of my caricaturization of Native Americans by making Skye look like a black-face minstrel show performer. S-Boogie's postcolonial "reading" of the "text" of my Thanksgiving namecard pictures reveals not only the oppressive history behind the holiday tradition but also my own latent racism. In my defense, I did extensive research to represent 17th-century Native American clothing accurately; SkyeJ's dress is based on the one worn by Pocahontas in the Disney movie.

The Child from Bizarro World!

As many of you know, my daughter, S-Boogie, was Supergirl for Halloween this year:


I'm beginning to wonder if a more appropriate costume wouldn't have been Bizarro Supergirl:


Besides her naturally pale skin and her backwards logic, there is her handwriting to consider. Take a good look at this picture of Bizarro Superman, then look at the handwriting sample below. Notice, particularly, the "S" in her name.



Keep in mind, folks, this image has not been flipped. That's how she writes her "S"es. There is no possible explanation for this peculiar phenomenon except that she's a spy from Bizarro World. Or she secretly wants to be Z-Boogie. I'm banking on the former, though, as at least that way I'll always be a winner in her eyes.

Booga Basement Ban

If you are in the habit of reading S-Boogie and Little Dude's blog, send me or FoxyJ an email so we can invite you to continue reading it. We've decided to limit access to people we know (either in real life or in the blog world). Sorry, I know this means it won't show up automatically in readers, but we've decided there are enough psychos in the world that we don't want to regularly share pictures of our children with.

Costumes, Candy, and Poop

S-Boogie wore her costume all day. Me too. I was the only one in my metadata class this morning wearing a costume, but that just shows how much cooler I am than everyone else (last year a classmate dressed up as the FRBR model, which I thought was one of the coolest costumes ever). After class I headed over to S-Boogie's preschool to help with pumpkin carving and trick-or-treating. It was a lot of fun to see all the kids' costumes and to see how excited they were to get candy. The school gave parents the option to have our kid's treat bag swapped for a healthy treat bag after the trick-or-treating, and FoxyJ and I decided to take that option since S-Boogie already had a bunch of candy from trunk-or-treating on Saturday and we knew she'd get more tonight. She was suprisingly cool with this, very excited when she got home to eat her bag of "special treats"--fruit leather, apple sauce, carrots, and juice.

After school and snacks, S-Boogie and I went to the comic shop to pick up my comics for this week. I figured that if anyone would appreciate our homemade Supergirl and Bruce Wayne costumes, it would be comic shop people, but no one said anything. I figure it's because they were amazed to the point of speechlessness.

This morning I had wondered if it was a good idea to dress Little Dude in the red turtleneck onesie he needed for his Robin costume this afternoon, but I figured it would be fine. When I got home from the comic shop and opened his bedroom door to find him sitting pantsless in his crib, licking poop off his fingers, I realized that I should have listened to that still small voice of Halloweeny wisdom. FoxyJ gathered up the dirty clothes and bedding and threw it in the washer while I cleaned off the child, then on her way out the door suggested I use LD's red coat for his costume, since it was cold outside and the turtleneck onesie was no longer an option. A poopy disaster turned into a blessing, as the red coat ended up looking even better than the onesie (under the coat he's wearing a red short-sleeve onesie with some car design printed on the front; if I'd had a green onesie under the coat it would have been perfect):


So S-Boogie, LD, and I went trick-or-treating at the shopping center that doubles as our backyard while FoxyJ headed off to teach her class. My only complaint with that experience, besides the crowd, is that everyone was giving out lollipops and Smarties. Where's the chocolate, folks?

The best part of the day, I have to say, came at the end: after sloppy joes and tater tots for dinner, then a quick bath (eliminating the final remnants of poopiness), we turned off the lights, put The Batman vs. Dracula in the DVD player, and ate as much candy as our stomachs could handle. I'm all for encouraging kids to eat healthily, but c'mon, it's Halloween! That's the point! And in my defense as a responsible parent, LD went to bed halfway through the movie and after only one package of Smarties and one lollipop. One-and-a-half-year-olds don't get to decide how much candy their stomachs can handle.

S-Boogie went to bed just a little late, a few minutes after FoxyJ got home from work, and then I lay down in bed and read my comics. The perfect end to a perfect holiday.

If Only the ER Had a Frequent Flyer Program...

This afternoon at 2:30 I came home to find the following note on the door:


The fact that the arrow was pointing away from Neighbors' apartment only threw me off for a moment. So I picked LD up from Mr. Neighbor, came back home, put him down for a nap, and enjoyed my afternoon. At 5:30 S-Boogie came home with this:


There are seven stitches under that Band-Aid. According to the preschool teacher, the conversation after S-Boogie's fall went something like this:

S-Boogie: AAAHH!!! THE PAIN!!! IT HURTS!!! MY CHIN!!! HORRIBLE MURDER MOST FOUL!!! MY CHIN, IT HURTS!!! MAKE THE PAIN STOP!!! AAAHHH!!!

Teacher: Come with me, S-Boogie, let's get that cleaned off.

S-Boogie: WHY DOES THE PAIN NOT STOP?!!! HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE PAIN!!! THE SKY IS FALLING!!! ALL IS LOST!!! DEATH, I HEAR YOU CALL MY NAME!!!

Teacher: We should put a Band-Aid on that.

S-Boogie: OH, THE PAI-- Band-Aid? Can I have a Dora Band-Aid? I like Dora Band-Aids.



According to FoxyJ, the three hours at the hospital went something like this:

Doctor: Ooh, that looks deep. We're going to need stitches.

S-Boogie: Is that Batman over there I watch Batman with my daddy and did you see my clothes I'm wearing Halloween clothes I'm going to be Supergirl for Halloween hey everyone look at me I'm the cutest little girl ever and I'm oh so happy to be here where I get Play-Doh and colored pencils and stickers and cool Band-Aids and look at me look at me tell me how cute I am yes I know I'm beautiful tra la la.

Doctors and Nurses and Random Passersby: Ahh, aren't you so precious? Say something else, cute little girl, so we can tell you how amazingly cute you are again.



I figured she'd do something that required stitches sooner or later. I am mainly grateful that I was not there when it happened. The chin-splitting fall or the stitches.

Papa Fob's New Skills

French braids:


Toddler haircuts:


The braid needs work, but I'm pretty happy with the haircut.