Man o man, just back from NY visiting grand daughter bandolier-saturnalia, her partner atticus and our great grandson petit henri deux, aka phd, who was celebrating his 2nd birthday. For those unfamiliar with the daily schedules of two year olds vs 78 year olds, they don’t gel, and as the detective in psycho so eloquently remarked, “If it doesn’t gel, it ain’t aspic.” And this was absolutely not aspic.
When one of them was napping the other was up and at em, when the other was konked out the other was ready to paint the town taupe. One of them moves like a bat out of hell, the other a three toed sloth with a bad set of bunions. Being the referee is exhausting, it’s also frustrating. Here mje is in the ultimate consumer candy store and didn’t have a moment free to blow a bunch of dough on stuff I don’t need.
That said, it was wonderful to watch bandoliera and phd interact. The new “parenting” regime prohibits not only any sort of physical punishment, but also any harsh, loud or “hurtful” language. For instance phd flipped his lunch plate of dubious looking carrot meatballs and broccoli onto the floor (and frankly I don’t blame the little fellow). In the olden days that would have resulted in at the very least an angry outburst from whoever labored over those ersatz meatballs, not so these days. Instead bandoliera simply told him that his throwing his food on the floor made her sad and hurt her feelings. WHAT???? That’s it? She calmly pulled him out of his high chair and he dramatically slithered to the floor into one of those positions you see in tv where they trace the dead body with chalk. And lay there. This is what I think shrinks might refer to as passive aggressive behavior. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a two year old, maybe he was trying to communicate that he threw the food on the floor specifically to get a big reaction and that by not getting one, hurt his feelings. I swear I felt like I was through the goddam looking glass.
Whatever happened to histrionics, drama, time outs, standing in a corner, not to mention spankings, you know, real bedrock parenting. Hey our parents all raised us like that and look how we turned out. Ouch, it hurts when I disprove my own point. My older brother bidet was a humdinger of a teenager. He went through schools like mje goes through glasses of rose. Finally our parents had had enough. After his last expulsion and having run out of local schools and patience they picked him up as he sat on the school curb, never said a word, drove six hours to alabama from new orleans in stony silence and threw him and his trunk out onto the entrance of a military academy and drove off.
He, against all odds, became a marginally successful lawyer, who credited his deep knowledge of the law to his having been on the wrong side of it so often.
