Saturday, Oct. 20, 2012: Gun Control

I woke up yesterday morning in between sheets soaked in pee that wasn't my own (for once!). You can probably guess where the pee came from. Especially if I tell you that Gavin was sleeping next to me. He has a habit of waking up between 1 and 4 in the morning and getting into bed with us. Quite honestly, I don't usually even wake up so I have no idea that this under-the-cloak-of-darkness-sleeping-quarters-relocation has even happened until morning. Stacy, on the other hand, tells me every morning at what time Gavin came into our room. She's said in the past that she doesn't sleep well with him in our bed, but she also says she doesn't mind that he's doing this because she finds it endearing. I don't really mind, either, but, like I just said, I sleep through most of it so it really doesn't effect me. What I don't like is how early Gavin wakes up -- weekday, weekend, it doesn't matter --  and how he stands and turns the lamp on that hangs over our bed (sometimes he steps on my hair as he does this). This is usually followed immediately by Gavin saying, "I'm hungry."

But back to the pee. I've always had a lingering fear about Gavin peeing in our bed because, unlike him, we do not have a waterproof wet-the-bed emergency sheet on our mattress like he does. So when I woke up and found a very damp Gavin sleeping next to me and sheets all around me equally damp and smelling like pee, I knew that my fear had come true. But when I asked Gavin if he peed he said, "No, I just sweated." Truth be told the boy does often sweat a lot at night, but sweat was not the culprit this time. He even had a night time diaper on (I should say that all diapers are night time diapers in our house now. Gavin is a chonies champion these days) and even though he rarely actually pees in said diapers, last night he apparently peed all the pee in the world, or at least more than could be contained underneath his green-striped footie pajamas. Although stripping pee-sheets off of my bed is not my ideal way to start my morning (so close, though), I am happy to report that the allergy cover we use on our bed saved our mattress from an absorption catastrophe.

Gavin found a witch hat in the basement that I'm pretty sure Stacy wore for Halloween last year. He puts it on and then gives us "rotten apples" since his main reference point re: a witch is this old Snow White puzzle he has which I have described to him as a picture of a witch giving Snow White such an apple. When he gives the apple to me, I pretend to smell it, declare it unfit for consumption, and toss it into a compost bin. Stacy, on the other hand, proceeds to pretend to take a bite, throw up, and pass out, waiting for a prince to come kiss her awake. Gavin likes to play multiple roles in this game, which led him to declare, "I'm the witch. And the prince." Which, as Stacy said, "pretty much sums up my relationship with my son at age 3." And how. I'm happy to report, however, that last week Gavin and I had a couple of really amazing days in a row. It was awesome. He listened to his moms and was polite. No freak outs. No broken hearts.

Well, until yesterday, that is, when something really sad happened. No, not Gavin falling down the front porch steps -- though that did happen. Literally head over heels, landing on his noggin at the bottom. I was standing at the front door and Stacy was standing at the bottom of the steps and while people often say, "It all happened so fast," it actually seemed to happen in slow motion. He was shaken up but not really hurt and Stacy held him while he cried for a bit. And then I said, "I told you to hold onto the goddamn handrail." Actually, I didn't use those words, but I did ask him if he was holding the railing (he wasn't, which I already knew) and pointed out the fact that falling is not fun is exactly why we need to hold the railing in the first place. I wasn't trying to say "I told you so," as much as trying to help him establish a clear cause and effect in his head since he's been really cocky about not holding the railing on steps these days. So many of the parenting books talk about how important it is for kids to experience real-world consequences and so I capitalized on that teachable moment. Lo and behold today he and I were coming upstairs from the basement and he was goofing around on the steps going up "like a frog," he said, and near the top of the steps he fell backwards and landed on his butt a step below. Had I not been right behind him with a firm grip on the clothes hamper he fell against, we both would have probably fallen. Which is why, involuntarily, what came out of my mouth was, "Jesus, Gavin!" I later heard Stacy telling him in Spanish that what he did was dangerous and I couldn't make out the rest except she said something to the effect that he would get hurt and end up in the hospital and that he would cry and that she would cry and that other people (not sure who she said) would cry and that he wouldn't get to go to Greenfield Village because he'd be in the hospital.

But that's not the sad thing I was talking about. The sad thing was hearing Gavin say, "I have a shooting gun. I'm shooting you," while brandishing a plastic, child-size hanger. We have tried very hard to keep him shielded from images of violence. He hasn't even seen Cars 2 because they shoot rockets at each other. I remember over the summer at Lisa's house in California Gavin picked up Brenden's bubble gun (like a squirt gun, but it blows bubbles) and declared that it was a bubble machine and proceeded to hold it upside down while he played with it, having no concept of what a gun was nor how one might hold such a thing. Other toy guns he has encountered he's thought they were toy electric drills. And none of these toys were his. We have no toy weapons of any kind in our home. And yet, here Gavin is, shooting up our house with a hanger. I gave Stacy a worried look and she said something along the lines of "it's preschool," and while I wasn't sure what she meant by that, I could tell by her look that she wanted to discuss it later and not make a big deal out of it lest we accidentally encourage Gavin by giving him a reaction. Later, when I asked Stacy about the gun thing she said she had casually asked him about it. She assured me, "It's procedural at this point. He has no idea what the effect of the gun would be." When she asked him what a gun is for he said, "You hold it like this and you shoot it like this and then you put the bad guys in the jaula." The bad guys, he said, included the police. Oy. Look, it's not like I didn't think this day would come, but it feels really sad. It's a loss of innocence and this means he's one step closer to learning about the super fucked up things that happen and how horrible people can be to one another and to animals. The amount of cruelty in this world is astounding. I just hope that we can teach him to fight against that cruelty, not be part of it.

Thursday, October 4, 2012: Hands are not for hitting your moms

Hey, have you checked in with your peanut butter lately? Because your peanut butter may totally be trying to kill you. WTF, peanut butter? W.T.F.

Gavin is making new friends at school, mystery friends, even. There's a boy named Julian he talks about a lot. In fact, last week, apropos of nothing while eating dinner with Stacy (I was at work) Gavin said, while smiling, "Julian loves me." When Stacy asked him how he could tell Gavin said, "Because every day at school I sit by him and he plays with me." Thing is, I have never met or even seen Julian. I'm not calling my son a liar, mind you. I guess I'm just saying that I don't even know who he is anymore. 

Today we had lunch with Jack and Sammy, twins in his class, and Beth, their mom. She is very crafty and loves math. I am not crafty and do not love math but I do love writing and have a guilty affinity for 80's and 90's era hair metal. So between us we could do a pretty awesome job homeschooling. If it ever came to that. In any case, bagels were had and no one really cried so I call the event a success.

Gavin got his first bad report from daycare on Tuesday. I realize I just wrote "first" as if I expect it to be one of many. I hope not, of course, but also recognize that he's three and also that he's human (most days). Ms. Eugenia told me that he was very disrespectful, sticking his tongue out and refusing to listen. He had to sit in time out, though was apparently not cooperative with that, either. She said something like, "We do not allow this kind of behavior in our class," which kind of sounded like Gavin was in danger of being kicked out of school, but I'm sure that only crossed my mind because I was feeling embarrassed and sad. I thanked her for telling me. I may have said, "I'm sorry," though I don't remember. I certainly felt sorry, but recognize that it isn't really me who needs to apologize. It's Gavin. And a sincere apology from a three-year-old is hard to come by.  It's not like Gavin is headed for a special episode of My Toddler Is Out of Control with Maury Povich (or, wait, isn't there a Learning Channel show on that topic?), but it's still a major bummer to get a bad report about your kid.

Thankfully the rest of the week has been shaping out okay. And I was happy to hear that he's usually well behaved. So maybe Tuesday was just a rough day. It happens.

As for his behavior at home, well. You take the good, you take the bad... He still tries to hit us when we tell him it's time to stop doing whatever fun activity he's engaged in and go home or eat dinner or whatever totally less fun thing is coming next. And we definitely had some of that today after I let him play on the playground for 20 minutes. I gave him 10, 5, and 2 minute warnings, but to no avail. I ended up basically having to wrestle him into his car seat and let him cry all the way home. I should note that much of this crying was totally faking it, a new thing he's pretty fond of. (Note: I am not so fond of this.) I know that a large part of what is required of me is being firm yet patient and loving at the same time. The patience part can be hard. Because it's not easy to play it cool when a three year old is beating you up in your car.

I don't mean to make Gavin sound awful. He isn't. I mean, look at this kid. He's like the epitome of sunshine and all things beautiful. This was him this morning right before school, sticking his head out of the sunroof. While we were parked, of course. As I explained to Gavin, it would not be safe to do that when the car was in motion, to which he responded, "Unless you're in a parade."


Tonight while eating dinner Gavin jumped out of his seat and tore out of the kitchen saying something very urgent sounding as he sped by, but he was going so fast there was a major Doppler effect and it took me a second to figure out that he was saying, "I gotta go poop." No sooner had I deciphered this message when I heard a crash in the hallway, the sound of Gavin colliding with the laundry basket that he, himself, left there. I rushed to him and comforted him while, at the same time, I pulled down his pants and got him to sit on the toilet before I had a kid who was not only crying, but also had shit in his pants. Mama D for the win.