Common sense generally tells you not to reason with a three-year-old. And yet, I hear parents do it all the time. Like there will be any type of favorable ending to you begging your child to put a raincoat on to play at the water table to which he will refuse and then soak himself entirely.
Just put the damn coat on him and be done with it already.
The huz and I aren't pushover parents. I suppose the Parental Gestapo -- you know, the ones that drag their kids out of the store by their underpants -- might think otherwise, but for the most part, we're in charge.
But parenting gets a whole hell of a lot harder when you get a preschooler, mainly because it's now painfully obvious that they're indeed smarter than you. Granted, it's nice to know that they'll able to survive in the cold hard world, as evidenced by you being convinced that they must eat brownies and ice cream with a side of video games for dinner in order to make it another day on the planet.
It doesn't help that the huz chooses to create his own path and blaze new trails of preschool relations, taking his own vigilante approach with our 3.5 year old.
It generally blows up in his face.
Take his insistence on forming every single request of our daughter as a question.
"Would you like to get out of the tub now?"
"No fanks, Daddy." [Hey. At least she's polite.]
"Um, okay, but it's time to get out of the tub."
"But you asked me and I said 'no fanks' Daddy. I want to stay in for awhile."
[Cue him trying to get her out of tub, her screaming, and me intervening].
Or the four-thousand choices game. You do know that one right? Generally speaking, the key is to make your kids think they are making a choice (which, technically, they are) so that they feel empowered.
My choice offerings generally go as follows:
"You can clean up your room or you can go outside and collect dog poo with a pair of ice tongs."
Okay. So maybe it's not that bad, but I don't mess around. It's apples or oranges. Juice or water.
But the huz likes to pretend that life is a multiple choice question. Or that we live at Tavern on the Green.
"You can have juice, water, milk, or a chocolate smoothie with raspberries and oreo chunks."
Who in the hell is making that for her, freak?
"Well we have turkey, ham, or a prosciutto stromboli with sage and arugula."
Huh?
Now before you jump all over the huz, to his credit, he's an actively involved parent who really just wants to make his kids happy. Besides, whenever she takes the uber-gourmet option, it just so happens that I have to "go blog."
Funny how that works.
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