So I asked the Venerable “Dear WeaselMomma” over at Dad-Blogs for some help with my increasingly Tyrannical 4yr old. Her advice was sound, but I feel like I must expand the scenario. In her defence the examples I gave of this behaviour were simple ones and her suggestions for dealing with them were good, but I’ve already exhausted those tactics. So let’s set the stage.

For those of you who are new to BBDR and now that my archives are lost in cyberspace I have two girls known affectionately as ThingOne and ThingTwo. Both are strong willed, independent, beautiful girls. ThingTwo has had more of a battle with her young life. She has been saddled with a host of life-threatening allergies and because of that has had a very different first four years than her elder sibling, and we have parented her quite differently as well.

ThingOne was in a day-home at 1, A day-care program at 2, Pre-school, and then Kindergarden, as most children of working parents are. ThingTwo has never been anywhere without myself, my wife, or more recently my mother with her, supervising her every move. She has never been in a normal toddler/pre-school type situation. The short-lived Day-Care facility she attended (with my mother) lasted only two months at the end of which various factors dictated the facility was not adequately equipped to handle her unique situation. So, she has been protected, from everything, her entire life.

This has lead to the situation I currently find myself in where she does not know how to deal with NO for an answer. I know that this is not unusual, and that most children her age go through some form of this. ThingTwo is not your usual 4yr old and that is partly nature’s fault, and partly ours. She has always been catered to differently because of her allergies, and we have had to make huge life changes because of them. We had to rid our house of Dairy, Peanuts, Shellfish, and a few random other things that seemed to cause allergic reactions. Now Shellfish, whatever, I don’t care for it, but dairy and peanuts, milk and peanut butter sandwiches!? These were big things! The first year after we learned of her allergies were hell, we spent every day terrified that something we were not yet aware of would land our child in the emergency room, or worse. So we did what any parents would do, we protected her, from everything.

But she’s older now, and needs friends, needs to interact with other children, needs to see more than her own backyard. The problem is, most other parents, don’t get it. They don’t get that feeding their kid yogurt, in a public play place, and not wiping their kids’ hands, and that kid touching the slide with his unwashed hands, and my kid touching the slide, ……could kill my kid. Yes, I said kill my kid. It’s that simple and that easy. We don’t go anywhere without benadryl and two Epi-Pens. Thankfully we’ve only needed the Epi-pen once. Let me tell you a baby, jacked up on adrenaline, is not a pretty sight.

I’m a pretty laid-back guy, I like reason, logic, and rolling with the punches.  I worked at a summer camp for under-priveledged boys for almost a decade, and dealt with a lot of crap, both figuratively and literally. I thought I had this parenting thing well in hand, second kid and all that. I have never been so man-handled in my life! This little being is a force of nature, like a hurricane. She is relentless, and will not stop until she gets what she wants. Case in point, the other night she convinced SugarMomma to make cupcakes, after dinner, before bedtime, before SugarMomma even realised what she was doing. It went something like this.

T2: Momma, let’s make cupcakes.

Momma: No.

T2: FINE! I’ll do it myself!

(T2 opens the baking cupboard, looks, lingers….)

T2: (with fluttering eyelashes and twinkling eyes) Momma,……how do I make cupcakes?

And you know the rest.

ThingTwo has willpower that would make Thor look like the Cowardly Lion. She’s had to endure a lot in her short life which has fueled the intensity of her temper, and she’s used to people jumping to help her with anything she needed or wanted for fear that something “else” might be motivationg the emotions. She has little sense of authority, and there is little that you can use as leverage. So we are now entering the “Bootcamp” phase of swift and definite consequences, which is as tough or tougher on the parent than it is on the child. It takes commitment and resolve. The time between instruction and consequence is getting shorter, and the grace period for the “Please, I’ll listen, I’ll cooperate now!” is almost non-existent. For Example:

1. Ask nicely. > If ignored >

2. Remind nicely. > If ignored >

3. Drop the Hammer.

BBD: T2, time to get jammies on.

T2 ignores BBD.

BBD: T2+middle+last name, it. is. time. to get your jammies on.

T2: NO! (followed by giggles and evasive manoeuvres)

BBD: Get your jammies on now or there will be no stories.

T2: NO! (followed by more of the same.)

BBD: Fine. NO Stories.

Which if I’m on my game I stick to it,  is followed by 20 minutes to an hour and a half of hysterical begging, crying, screaming, growling, door slamming, toothbrush throwing, and sobbing, depending on how tired she is when this all starts. The next day, she remembers, a week later…not usually.

We are having to find ways to make the consequences relevant, not only to what she is doing, but also something that is relevant  to her. The consequence has to mean something to her so that when you pull out the “Remember what happened last time” it means something and she remembers. This is the challenging part, and so, the battle continues.

A bathroom door with a lock.

New computers, and old computers, living together, sometimes in harmony. We have a few computers and not all are on the same frequency, if you know what I mean. 802.11b vs 802.11g and all that. My computer lives mostly in my office and is connected to the interwebs by a cable, but occasionally ventures upstairs to the kitchen table to hang out near the other computers. I also almost exclusively use a wired mouse as well even though my computer is a laptop. So imagine my surprise and shock while I was sitting at the kitchen table, typing away and my cursor starts moving around my screen, of it’s own accord. When it stopped I thought, that’s weird, and kept on going. Then it did it again, randomly moving about my screen, and then it closed a window, and brought something else to the front of the pile, ……WTF? I have no idea why this occurred to me but I looked over at ThingTwo who was using one of the other computers, the most recent one prior to mine, and she was using the BlueTooth mouse right next to it. As I watched, my cursor was moving in time with her hand and clicking movements. When I think about it that mouse was paired to my computer at one time, so it must have sensed it in the vicinity, and reconnected to it without me realising it.

I thought three things before I figured out what was going on.

1. Am I nuts? Did I just see that?

2. Is my machine about to die?

3. Is someone hacking into my machine?

I can exhale now, it was just the BlueTooth Fairy. Now, how do I turn that shit off.

Welcome to The Gold Medal Sunday edition of Big Bad Daddy Rant. Sunday morning, Hockey morning,  and it feels like nobody has talked or thought about little else since the buzzer sounded against Slovakia, which I have to admit was a little unnerving, but truly Canadian. We don’t believe in easy.  We believe in Hard Work, from the ground up. Do I want to see Canada win the Gold Medal today? YES, of course, I mean, um, duh! But do I want to see a good game, a game where the outcome is uncertain, where they fight for every inch, every check, every shot…….YES, because ultimately that is what hockey is about, what the olympics are about. I have loved watching all the sports over the last two weeks, and seeing so many of our athletes perform beyond expectations, what an amazing thing! I may actually take up a new sport because of it. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next 4 years for winter sport in Canada, whether or not the resounding success of these Olympics, and our Canadian athletes will translate into more support for grassroots sports in Canada. I know my interest is peaked and with two young girls, getting involved is going to be a no-brainer. I said to my wife last night, “I want to be an Olympic Daddy” I want to be one of those parents they show up in the stands, ectstatic to be watching their children’s accomplishments.

GO CANADA GO!

Canadian women. what can I say. Our Canadian women have made us proud once again! I am not a huge sports fan, but I do like the Olympics, especially the Winter Olympics. I have found myself watching quite a few of the events and am amazed at the performances of the Canadian Women. Being a father of two daughters, the elder of which has taken an interest in the games, it adds a new perspective on the whole thing for me. Watching our amazing women win so many medals, on home soil to boot is so inspiring. I want to congratulate our Women’s hockey team for once again bringing home Gold medals, three in a row! I also want to congratulate the U.S. team on making it a contest by holding it to a 2-0 game unlike the final scores of most of the other games. My daughter said to me this morning she wants to be two things when she grows up, Olympic Halfpipe Champion, and a Dancer. In terms of sport, snowboarding is my first love, so it was pretty cool to hear that. Now, she changes her “What I want to be when I grow up” statement almost daily, but for today I can dream right? We watched a bunch of different events together, it was cool, it was the first time in a long time I felt like we were sharing something, and she was interested of her own accord, and not just because I wanted her to be.

Flat Weaselmomma has been excited too! After spending over a year in Canada she has fallen in love with our national obsession, hockey, her favourite colours are now red and white and she now knows what a “toque” is (the thing on her head). She said seeing the olympic torch was one of the highlights of her trip and once the Men’s Hockey Gold Medal game is over she would have to say goodbye to her adopted home and return to her homeland.

Go Team Canada, eh!

Do we have any other Olympic hopeful parents out there?

I posted this in my old blog but that has since died and I’m just so damned proud!

Reply with a photo. Try it, it’s new! and only available for the next 48 hours..

While not exactly strange in and of itself, I believe it is the marker of a semi-secret local society and I have no clue how it came to be on the floor of my van.

What is the strangest thing on the floor of your car?

So, after a pathetic year for BBDR in 2009, I’m ready to party like it’s 199…… I mean 2010. I have changed my title from SAHD to SWAHD and am trying to bring some wisdom back into my life by “getting over myself” and getting back to talking about what the hell is licking my ass this week. I was at a workshop yesterday talking to another guy about trying to work out of the house and, it’s all the same. Focusing on a task at hand while all of the chaos swirls around you is a weighty task and on a good day I’m very good at it, other days not so much.

I want to ask other SWAHD’s (Stay and Work at Home Dads). How do you stay focused, and when are you most productive? Daytime? Nighttime?

I also want to ask in general, How does anyone get anything done now that there’s Twitter?

Discuss.