On the stacks

Last night, Kevin started pulling computer books off my shelf when I wasn’t fully paying attention, and doing his favorite thing, stacking them:

Lily the Lizard Hunter

San Antonio Big Penguin Surprise

San Antonio Big Penguin Surprise

Directed by and starring Lily Maxwell

Produced by Kyle Maxwell

Two people and their penguin discuss going to an assembly, then they sleep (with lots of snoring!) before doing their own puppet show.

Fatherhood is doable

Many TV sitcoms and animated shows continue to portray dads as dolts or, at best, well-meaning but misguided large children whose wives have to mother them as well as their offspring.

Nice article entitled Fathering in America: What’s a Dad Supposed to Do?. A few of the points that really stood out to me personally:

• Embrace your responsibility
• Be there throughout their childhoods
• Balance discipline with fun
• Be a role model of adult manhood

There’s more and it’s worth reading. But what really spoke to me was the quote at the beginning of this post. Popular culture has absorbed feminist values and turned them into something grotesque and extreme. Women and wives and mothers are to be valued just as much as men and husbands and fathers in our society — and make no mistake, they certainly should be. But doing that at the expense of either group demeans both, as if the only way one can have value is if the other cannot.

The reality is that despite what the 24-hour news cycle would have us believe, truly horrible fathers are aberrations. And even though there are a lot of other not-so-great dads (for various degrees of that adjective), I believe that most of us are doing like our own fathers and grandfathers: going from one day to the next, trying to do the best we can to give our children the best start we know how. And for those out there who are thinking about becoming dads, or soon will be, or recently became them, listen to me:

You’ll be fine.

You don’t know what to do? So what? Neither did our dads at first. But from the moment you start taking care of that child, you’ll be trying as hard as you’ve tried at anything. If there’s anything in life at which you’ve succeeded, then you can be a father, because you have the tools and you have the ability.

Kevin going to sleep

Lately, we’ve been having trouble getting Lily to go to bed by herself. She cries and cries for Niky to go sleep in her bed, then gets up during the night. This has been a source of a lot of stress for all of us, and is tied in to some other issues with Lily’s behavior (keeping in mind her age).

So on expert advice, we explained to her that she could not come into our room, and that once she was in bed, we were doing the same and locking our door. Of course, we weren’t going to sleep yet. We wanted to listen, see how she reacted, and respond accordingly as needed.

Surprisingly, she did really well with that last night. Not perfectly, but much better than previous nights. This was probably also due to the fact that she won’t be allowed to go to the park with her aunt on Sunday unless she starts handling bed time better.

The most surprising bit was Kevin. He really lost it. He got up and wanted to come in, and we were struggling with what to do. He’s much smaller, of course, but he’s been “learning” from his sister and becoming unwilling to go to bed without Niky. So we’d occasionally answer him through the door, but mostly let him cry it out.

During his crying, he was doing anything he could imagine to get us to come with him. Asking for The Wiggles, asking for milk, telling us he loved us, putting a flyswatter under the door, saying he wanted a bath, etc. Several times we heard him walk off for a bit, then come back, and once or twice we checked on him because we wanted to make sure he wasn’t causing more problems (like breaking things). But then he pulled something that just broke our hearts.

He went into the living room, grabbed two family photos (one of him and his sister and another of his parents and sister) and pushed them under the door. That did it. Maybe it wasn’t what the doctor ordered, but we calmed him down and I laid down in his bed for a while until he went to sleep.

Tonight, we’ll have to figure something out.