Father Glorious Father

I'm joining Kim in writing on this blog, so here goes....

First, my oldest, Lucas, and I have been cast in a local production of the musical "Oliver". Lucas will be a workhouse kid (singing "Food Glorious Food" and "Oliver!") and I'll be in the adult chorus, doing, well, I guess singing. I was asked to try out for the ultra-villain Bill Sykes, but I had to pass because I have no time and energy to devote to it, and I don't want to go from my last stellar performance in the 2nd grade to making an ass of myself in front of a community I have to work and live with.

So much goes on around here, both in things we do and the way we grow. I read some of Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles : Winning for a Lifetime by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka (she wrote Raising Your Spirited Child), where she recounted a workshop she ran where folks listed traits of adults they knew as children who were inspiring and those that were downers. One of the traits of the downers was "punitive" and one of the inspirers was "flexible." So this morning my son Gaelan gets up. Now, I get off to work real early, since I work real early and have ditched our second car in exchange for a 1/2 hour bike ride to a bus stop and a 1/2 bus ride to my job. My amazing wife likes to sleep, especially after spending a long day of work on Wednesdays. She likes to sleep anyway, she's a sleep bunny (which is a good match with me cuz I sleep like a caffeinated rodent - I wake up, I'm up.) Anyway, Gaelan's up and would rather I quit my job and enter his employ as his personal reader. A great job, but the benefits are lacking. His brother, long ago having given up his quest to pry me from my job to become his personal reader is reading to himself and wants some quiet. Gaelan would like to settle for playing with him since I'm not available, and is willing to negotiate the deal by making noise to annoy him into stopping reading, or, plan b, waking up his mother. I want Lucas to read, I want my wife to sleep, I want to get to work, I want Gaelan to be quiet to facilitate all of this.

So everytime I come to Gaelan to get him to stop making so much noise, I start off from the Benito Mussolini school of parenting, but each time I do I hear in my head, as if whispered from a spirit "punitive" and then "flexible". So I must have been confusing to him, going from "since you didn't keep the volume on the agreed upon level there is no music!" to "how about using headphones?" But confussion beats the trains running on time every time. I remember adults when I was a child who were fun to be around and one reason was they were flexible. They could see that we kids were being kids and they had boundaries but they didn't need to punish us to get us to do what was right. Now if I can get it through my thick skull.... I'm going to keep reading and see where it leads me.

Got to get back to work.......