Ah – the joy of other people’s kids.  People who managed to make my son feel like he was punished because they are unable to give their son the tools he needs to deal with his anger productively.
These neighbors are relatively new – they’re in the house behind ours, and our backyards meet.  They moved in about a year ago, but we only made contact a few months ago.  They seemed nice enough, but like other experiences with mainstream families, the differences eventually come to light.
M is 6 months older …

This is my entry for the May 31st 2008 edition of the Thinking Parents Wiki.
The topic for this edition was: What Would You Be Doing Right Now If You Had No Kids?
It seems to me that one way to rephrase that question would be: What would you be like today if parenthood had not changed you?
I guess there are probably a few parents out there that were unchanged by parenthood. Although I think they are few and far between, and probably they are just resisting the change or …

It’s not the poop, vomit, early rising, late nights, lack of sleep, lack of time, inability to get stuff done, the inability to go wherever whenever or the reduced time for sex. You get acclimated to most of that, and some things preclude other things – consistent lack of sleep makes sleep much more desired than sex (at least for awhile). At least that changes as children grow older. I hope.
What doesn’t change is the daily threat that some horrible, insipid song will weave it’s way …

Judy Apicella is an idiot. She directed a documentary on childhood vaccinations, entitled, “Shoot ‘em Up, The Truth About Vaccines”. I saw her speak at a meeting last night, run by the local Holistic Mom’s Network, that aimed to give information on vaccination to parents. After sitting through 2 tortuous hours of the most unscientific information, I came to the conclusion that Judy Apicella should definitely not be a speaker for the anti-vaccine lobby. I’d imagine that if parents had attended who were sitting on …

Before we left for Costa Rica, we were playing Uno and Yahtzee pretty often at home. Sometimes M was really happy and complimentary when he lost and other times he was a REALLY sore loser. Unfortunately, losing happened more frequently, and he seemed to get really worked up about winning and would often change or attempt to change the rules to aid his cause. I sometimes lost on purpose and did my best to model good behavior. Games can be fun, they can exercise the …