Discipline thru insufficient force

Bathtime… oh how I hate bathtime now-a-days. I’m quite anal and believe that everyday my children need to be washed of all the cooties they’ve gotten into thru out the day. So I persevere and make it happened. Here’s a short tally of what comes out of my mouth during each and every bath:

“No splashing!”
“You’re getting water on the floor”
“Maya sit down”
“Don’t push her”
“Don’t throw that!”
“Maya sit down!”
“You’re getting water on the floor!!”
“You’re getting water on the floor!!!!”
“Don’t push her!”
“Don’t throw that!!”
“Maya sit down!!!!!!”
“No splashing!”
“You’re getting water on the floor!!!”
“Maya sit down!!”
“Maya sit the [BEEP!] down!!!”
“You’re [BEEP!] [BEEP!] [BEEP!]the[BEEP!] [BEEP!] [BEEP!]floor!!!”

Last night after I rescued Maya from drowning (because she stood up and she fell onto her back again), this is almost a nightly occurrence, I yelled at Matthew to STOP SPLASHING again. This time I also said:

“Matthew, look at me! If you splash ONE MORE TIME, I will stand you up and spank your butt with this plastic hammer. Do you understand me?!”

He claimed he did. 90 seconds later back to splashing. I lost it! Grabbed the hammer, told him to stand up and turn around. He not having ever been spanked before was a little worried and his facial expression indicated as much. In my over blown anger at having had not been listened to or taken seriously about the splashing, again, I grabbed the little plastic hammer toy by the head and swung it at his butt (handle first) in what, at exact that moment, I deeded as “probably too hard”. It is at this point in the father son relationship where I handed over my balls to my 3 year old son (on a silver platter). I hit him so lightly that it didn’t even make a sound. Not a sound. He looked up at me, and didn’t say a word. Had I been telepathic, I probably would have heard “Ouch… that really hurt daddy, I’ve never do that again. HAHAHAHAHHA”. Looks like it’s back to the drawing board for me.

Xboxing

Being the techno nerd I am I have an original Xbox on every TV in the house. We don’t use it for games rather for the Media Center that allows me to access all my multimedia files on each computer. What does that mean? Well on any tv I have access to 80GB of mp3’s, 200GB of videos and movies and 40GB of photographs. So I downloaded the Futurama movie for me and my son to watch a few days ago. Last night I say “OK pal lets go watch Futurama movie”. He books it into the bed room, turns on the TV, turns on the Xbox, jumps onto my bed, grabs the remote, starts XBMC, Opens the Videos section, navigates to the correct network share, finds the correct “Feature Films” folder, correctly selects the correct movie from the list and presses play. Then announces “See daddy, I told you I could do it. See daddy? Did you see? I told you.” I was stunned. In total awe, I picked up the phone and called ALL my friends. Yes, roger was very impressed too (inside joke, I only have 1 friend, his name is Roger).

The new paparazzi

For Christmas we bought Matthew a digital camera. Because it was on sale and because we’re freaks. Hopefully he likes it and takes a ton of pictures with it. It should be really neat to see the world from a 4 year olds perspective. Will he grow up to be a paparazzi or a national geographic world explorer? Only time will tell. In the meantime I will start him a blog and post everything he shoots. Unless it’s inappropriate, like his sister streaking thru the house without a diaper, or me in bedroom doing inappropriate things to his mother.

P.S. – This is his Christmas present so don’t let him know.

Morons

Situation: Bath time. Me watching and the dynamic duo bathing.

ME: “Matthew we’re going to play a game. I will say a letter from the alphabet and you say the one after it. We’ll see how far we can get. So I say A, you bay B, I say C, you say D. Do you understand?”
MATTHEW: “Yes”
ME: “OK, here we go”
ME: “A”
MATTHEW: “6″

Lower my head in shame and yell out “Next!”

ME: “Maya yours is easier, I will say a letter and all you have to do is repeat it”
ME: ” Here we go. A”
MAYA: “A”
ME: “B”
MAYA: “A”
ME: “C”
MAYA: “A”
ME: “D”
MAYA: “A”

Lower my head in shame, mommy takes over bathtime.

:’(

ME: “We’ll go buy sherk after dinner”
HE: “Ok Daddy I eat my dinner”

1 hour later, I no longer wanted to go and Chrissy didn’t feel well so I decided to stay. However I also decided to lie to Matthew as to why we weren’t going

ME: “Hey buddy we’ll go get shrek tomorrow”
HE: “No we need to go now”
ME: “I’m sorry buddy daddy has no money until payday”
HE: “Daddy, I have some money”

He runs off to get his money…

HE: “Here you go daddy, but it’s not a lot”

Hands me 3 pennies

HE: “Now we can go get shrek?”

I was looking at his little hand holding 3 pennies, then into his little eye and almost broke out in tears. My heart nearly burst in half. I picked him up and hugged him like I just got back from war. By this point he forgot what we were talking about and ran off to play with his trains. Today, come hell or high water, I’m taking my son to buy Shrek the Third.

Near death experience (not really)

Near death experience (not really)

We were driving around in our automobile,
the phone rang and I took one hand off the wheel,
it was Roger calling to tell me the deal,
suddenly I cut off a car and made his tires squeal,
my wife ragged me out said I was a jerk,
I simply replied with a big dumb smirk.

Ya… We almost all died. Being dramatic, we almost suffered a huge delay in our schedule while we exchanged insurance information with the other driver (that’s worse then you may think, we were rushing home because Maya crapped her pants). Not actually realizing what I had done at the moment, I opted to yell back at my wife who was yelling at me for my “indecression”. The whole time Roger’s on the phone getting an earful. So we both calmed down and that’s when the anger melted away and laughter set in:

MATTHEW: Mommy what’s wrong
MOMMY: Nothing buddy, we’re OK.
MATTHEW: Daddy what did you do?
DADDY: Nothing buddy, we’re OK.
MATTHEW: Then why are you in trouble?
DADDY: I didn’t do anything buddy.
MATTHEW: You did something, that’s why you’re in trouble. Mommy, what did daddy do?
MOMMY: (Giggling at this point) It’s OK buddy, we’re OK.
MATTHEW: loud sigh

He’s only 3! Maybe Brian was right, we’re not training him, he’s training us.