The B-More Dad Blog

My kiddos never got around to sorting the mail at Storyville, because my stall tactics ran out and we sort of got the boot.

The day was all mapped out: with a friend’s two kids plus my own pair, we would drop my oldest at camp across town then pass the morning at Storyville, a clean and well-designed kids’ play area at a county library branch. When the attendant asked how old one of them was, I knew I was in busted.

“Ummm…. She’s a very well-behaved seven,” I said, grinning as I tried to flash my SuperDad wiles.

“Well no kids older than 5 are allowed in,” she said, as her face hardened. “It’s designed to help kids get ready for kindergarten. Older kids would get bored.”

“But there’s nobody else in there. What difference does it make? I promise she’ll be especially well behaved,” I said.

Really, I wanted the two neighbor kids and my daughter to go play and leave me alone. I had even brought a newspaper to read in anticipation of a millisecond’s peace. But Little Miss I-Have-One-Iota-Of-Power-In-This-World-And-I’m-Gonna-Use-It-On-You was trying to ruin my whole morning. I’ve been schlepping across town all week to take Eddie to “Design Your First Video Game” camp, and I already had done all the errands I could come up with. Now I was going to have three kids on my hands for three hours, out of the house and too far to go home and back, and with nothing to do.

“Are you sure there isn’t something we could do? If I had my 8-year-old, I wouldn’t even ask, because he would tear the place up. But this 7-year-old is better behaved than my own children…”

“Uhhh… the rule is the rule, but I guess we could ask my supervisor.”

I smelled blood in the water. I was going to win!

Boss-Lady Librarian game the same response, even after I spun my tale of woe and told her how much I had enjoyed Storyville in the past. (This is only partly true, as a group of at-home dads got busted a while back for excessive socializing.) It’s got a pretend store with plastic vegetables, a diggable garden with rubber dirt-mulch, houses with steps to climb up and down and fake logs to crawl through. And books all over the place.

“How about this?” she said. “I could take your friend here on a special tour of Storyville while you come in with your younger ones. Then maybe you’d like to see our regular children’s section and try our summer reading program craft.”

Once we went in, Carla and our 7-year-old friend’s 5-year-old little brother tore around the place like rabid hyenas. Up and down and up and down the steps and hooting and hollering, while I looked around and tried to remember what was so enchanting about the place. Sure, if your kid is 2 or 3, maybe they would go for all the puppets and blocks and stuffed animals of horseshoe crabs and starfish. But the two 5-year-olds ripped through everything in about two minutes before settling into the pretend grocery store, which creepily seemed designed to prepare them not for kindergarten but for a future in minimum-wage retail.

Boss-Lady Librarian brought our 7-year-old friend to the pretend store (momentary panic a few minutes earlier – my friend’s kid was out of view with a complete stranger who only said she was a librarian), and all three kids happily played store while I asked complicated questions to try to drag out the time.

What made the whole thing come together was that for once I was able to think on my feet and understand the value of the deal. Boss-Lady kept the older kid busy while I sat on my tush watching fewer kids than when I started. Win for me!

I no longer wanted to hit the librarian.

Guh... nnghhaaaahh? Wha? No more questions!

My little nephew is constantly asking why-why-why, but that’s because he’s 2. That’s what he does. You could give 27 different answers and it makes no difference to him. My 5-year-old daughter, however, asks questions that twist my brain into pretzels – usually while I’m driving and can’t pay full attention anyway.

Sometimes it’s all I can do not to holler, “Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Chr— I don’t know, Carla!”

The questions all flow out of things that happen in our world and bubble up later – such as the escalator we rode three days ago at Macy’s, the GPS stolen from our neighbor’s car in 2008 or when I broke my arm. In 1983.

I drove our dog Roxanne to a kennel before our family vacation last week – it took an hour and a half – and here’s a glimpse at Carla’s Quiz Show during the ride.

Daddy…

Why doesn’t the kennel open until 4 p.m.?

How many nights will we stay at the beach?

How do you break your arm?

Did a dog bite Roxanne before?

How do you make an escalator?

How can dogs die?

Can burglars get into our car? How?

How do you make sand?

Why was Eddie’s baseball coach’s truck so loud?

How can oil spill in water? Like in the Gulf of Mexico?

Can a chicken fly?

Why did you turn when that sign said no turn on red?

And now that school’s out, Eddie got in on the act today, asking, “Dad, has our country ever lost a war?”

In the "proposal," Eddie proposes to clean me out.

Eddie has been pestering us for months for money for important things like Wii games and Under Armour shirts. Under a freshly inked deal that nets him a hefty raise for house jobs, my Lovely Bride and I get an 8-year-old housekeeper – and a trip to the poorhouse.

It’s not fair, he’s said for months, that his 5-year-old sister gets 25 cents for unloading the silverware out of the dishwasher, while he gets 25 cents for unloading all the plates and cups. (Good point, but Mommy insists equal work merits equal pay. And Carla was too little to handle the breakables.) We’ve told him countless times that he needs to make a proposal. How much should we pay him and for which jobs? Lovely Bride can still remember her father making her write a budget, where she proposed spending on candy, church giving, and so on.

Well guess who learned excel at school this year? (Thanks, Mrs. Clark!)

And the child included hyperlinks to a text document. And a bar graph. And snazzy arrows that I don’t even know how to put in. So today, on the last day of second grade, we signed his proposal, aptly titled, “proposal,” which sets out a price list of 16 house jobs and a weekly pay schedule.

Eddie proposes spending his dough on important things, such as Wii games and Under Armour shirts. At least it's not for new wheels and cologne.

If he does all the jobs once in a week, he’ll get almost $10.

Hey, I want a raise, too.

I believe that some jobs a kid just has to do. In our house, you don’t get paid for setting the table or brushing your teeth. And if you don’t pick up your room, I’ll put your stuff in The Trash Bag.

I like a housekeeper who charges only 50 cents to vacuum a room, but the quality needs a little improvement.

When my dad told me to collect the trash, I had to collect the trash. I did get an allowance – maybe $5 a week in high school? – without having to do much of anything. I think I got paid for cutting the grass, but it took an hour on our huge riding mower. I just don’t recall wanting to buy much of anything, except tickets to the movie theater 20 miles away.

Eddie wanted two bucks for walking the dog around the block, and we rejected that. Maybe I’m spoiled with having him occasionally walk her for free – but almost always under duress, with loud grumbling. For mopping the kitchen floor, we actually upped the pay from 75 cents to a full dollar – this task requires training and some attention to detail. Maybe this will motivate him to help out more. But something tells me that he’ll eventually choose to ride his bike and not wash windows. Instead of vacuuming, he’ll read a book. And because the new pay-for-work list is optional, I worry that this gives him permission to stop contributing around the house.

And then there’s the question of quality control. After today’s half-day of school and celebratory ice cream, he chose to wash the windows instead of play for half an hour before going to visit Mommy at her office. I never do windows, so I can’t complain about Eddie’s doing 11 windows and seven rooms, even if they do end up a little smurchy.

I can easily suck the joy out of things, so this time I’ll try not to.

I'm blame YOU, Evil Wii!

I’m a blamer. A big Blame-itty Blamer. It’s just easier that way. It sure beats trying to (1) understand my child’s nuances, (2) anticipate conflict with a thoughtfully developed strategy and (3) calmly stick to the plan. So who to blame for the Great Wii Meltdown Of 2011?

How about the full moon?

I first felt a disturbance in The Force when 8-year-old Eddie invited his pal Caleb to come after school for snack. Apparently Caleb thought the deal included some Wii time. Wrong-o. (Rats! How much screen time did Eddie have in the morning?) Not wanting always to be Mr. Rigid, I hedged and said that if they played outside for an hour, they could play Wii from 5:15 to 5:30.

Out they went. Eddie even put on his watch so he could remember. Progress!

By 5:20, Eddie tells me he wants to play Wii instead with his buddy Harris, who lives two doors down from Caleb. This he tells me in view of both boys’ parents, who are outside chewing the fat and now watching for my response. I know Eddie’s not going to like my answer.

“Either invite both Harris and Caleb in to play Wii, or invite neither of them,” I tell him. “We can discuss this later – not in front of your friends. And their parents. Those are your only options.”

“But Daaaa-aaad. I wanna play Wii with Harris…” he whines.

I don’t budge. He tromps inside with both.

Ten minutes later, he’s back outside.

“Daaaa-aaaad… Caleb and Harris won’t let me play with the Wii. And where’s the Lego Star Wars disk, anyway?”

Uh-oh. I’m in trouble.

“Oh, I hid it.”

I’m sick and tired of this mindless, endless, incomprehensible video game. Rather than discuss with my Lovely Bride how we should deal with the zombie-like stare and loss of IQ points any time he plays Lego Star Wars – or try to explain to Eddie why games with no end make it so hard to, well, end – I unilaterally decided to hide the disk. Yup, I’m the grownup.

“You what? Dad, that’s MY game! It’s MINE!”

I start thinking, did he save up and buy it, or was it a present? Hmmm… I’m willing to let him play it some, but really, there are only five minutes left before it’s all over. And by the time the kids fire it up, then I’ll have to send Harris and Caleb home for supper, and I can already hear the whiny protests from all three. I tell Eddie that after they go home maybe he can play Lego Star Wars for a few minutes. I hand over the disk.

After the other boys go home, I hear the sounds of some Wii baseball game coming up the basement steps. Whaddya know – he doesn’t play Star Wars after all. I call downstairs with the 10-minute warning. When time is up, I follow with my standard warning: “You can turn it off, or I will.”

No response.

I march down the steps, and Eddie’s standing there, mouth agape, making no motion toward turning the thing off. I stomp over to the TV, eject the disk, and shut off the TV.

“Eddie, do you want to lose a day of Wii tomorrow?”

Begin Meltdown Level 1.

“Daaaa-aaadddd! I was play-iiiiingg! It’s only the first inn-iiiiiinngggg” he cries.

“Yes, but I told you it was time to stop. And what’s with all this mess down here? You need to clean this up.” There were flashcards everywhere, things pulled out of cabinets, and the place looked ransacked.

“We were looking everywhere for Lego Star Wars, and YOU HID IT!”

“Eddie, you don’t need to make a mess looking for things. Now clean this up.”

He shouldn’t have to clean up his friends’ messes, he says, and he can’t understand why I won’t let him call them to come back and help clean up. It’s too late and they’re probably eating supper now, I tell him. Plus he’s responsible for what his friends do in his house. If I had known the three of them made such a wreck, I really would have made them all clean it up. Had I actually thought to look, I could have headed this off at the pass and our story would end here.

“Why did you let them leave the basement like this?” I ask.

No answer.

To avoid certain disaster, should I let the ransacked basement go? Am I to blame for hiding the disk? Was there another way out where neither of us lost face? And I still felt like the in-control parent? If I the kind to think on my feet quickly, maybe we would know. But I like rules, deadlines and lines in the sand. Mix Eddie’s tendency to get lost in his play and my inclination to interpret such as disobedience, and it’s like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Commence Meltdown Level 2.

I force him to clean it up himself, and I threaten to get The Trash Bag for what he doesn’t pick up in 10 minutes. Combine that and a whole lotta lip from Eddie, and he ends up with no Wii for three days. At this point, he’s so angry he can hardly talk. He moans like a wounded animal, and tears roll down his cheeks, which look like they’re about to burst. I try to make him calm down by just sitting in our comfy chair in the living room, and he moans “this is boring.” I try repeating myself and talking through how he ought to be grateful that he even has a Wii and a bike to ride and nice friends to play with and a good house to live in with plenty to eat. And if I had known his friends made such a mess, I’d have made them clean up, too. The whole meltdown, calm down and cleanup goes on for an hour.

Sigh.

Through it all, somehow, I hold on as the Zen master and don’t mirror his meltdown. I try to remember a sermon I heard once about dealing with anger by remembering how thankful I should be that I even have two children. Cultivate an attitude of gratitude, I tell Eddie.

He scowls at me.

When my Lovely Bride gets home for supper, I tell her not to mention the whole thing at the table. Eddie rats me out, of course, and starts to melt down all over again. By the end of supper, however, I manage to get him laughing by making a funny fish face. He can’t quite copy it, but his attempt is even funnier than mine.

Sometimes I wonder why I provoke Eddie like this.

I’m trying to teach him that he’s responsible for what goes on in his house. That there are consequences when he talks back to his parents. That he has to follow directions. That he has to calm himself down. That there’s more to life than a video game.

So my execution is clunky.

Can you blame me for wanting this?

Just when I thought I was fully secure in my seven years of at-home-dadness, my pioneer spirit abandoned me. I’ve been the only at-home dad at playgroups and church groups and playgrounds and eventually found perfectly pleasant women who became close friends. But this time, I had to integrate yet another group: Pool Moms.

When I walked in to the pool we just joined, I asked the gate attendant where to go for swim class.

“Down there at the right side of the shallow end,” she said. “By all the moms.”

I followed her gaze and spotted a clump of 30-something mothers waiting with their little children. Then I looked around and saw groups of moms on the steps in the shallow end, under the umbrellas, by the kiddie pool. All in their little tankinis and stylish sunglasses, with ponytails under their golf visors. (I buy my sunglasses at the drugstore, never for more than 10 bucks. And my swimsuit is Old Navy circa 2008.) Except for the prepubescent lifeguards, not a man in sight.

This, I thought, is going to be worse than seventh grade.

I found a chair and slathered red-headed Carla with SPF 700 sunscreen and handed her over to Mr. Bruce, the buoyant swim teacher, and looked around some more. So what pool do the at-home dads go to in this town? When I finally spotted some 50-ish guy traipsing around, I figured he was some unemployed perv. (Jeesh, what a hypocrite. I know people make the same judgment about me all the time.)

We almost hadn’t made it to swim class at all. It was at 2:30, which still ought to be naptime, as far as I’m concerned. Plus, Carla didn’t want to go.

“Oh come on, it’s blazing hot out,” I told her during the car ride there. “The water will feel great! Why don’t you want to go? Because the water is cold? You don’t like the teacher? It’s hard to hear?” (Once when someone had to repeat instructions to Carla in a louder voice because it was a noisy indoor pool, she thought the person was yelling at her, so she broke down and cried. Ugh. Girl-drama.)

“No, Dad, because you have to go and go without stopping,” she finally said. Ohhhh… no breaks.

Bottom line was: we were going to the pool, and she was going to swim class. There’s no other time all summer that it really suits, and the instructor already cashed my check. I tried to find some patience and a calm voice and explain that you can’t have 15 minutes of swim class and then do something else for awhile before the last 15 minutes because the whole thing would take far too long and use up your whole day. Finally I found the short answer: yes, you do get breaks. When the other students take their turns, you get to rest.

That answer did the trick, and into the pool she went.

As for me, I dodged the Mommy-Scrums and opted for a chair where Mr. Bruce couldn’t see me spying on the class. (It was like skirting land mines, but I didn’t want to have to give a big fake smile and make small talk with people I’ll never see again, after I explain that no, I’m not unemployed and no, the nanny’s not sick today.) It turned out I knew one of the mommies from one of the first playgroups I integrated years ago. And then walks by the preschool director at our new church, who chats me up.

Before I even have time to sit down, swim class is over and Carla comes bounding up to me.

“Come on, Dad! Let’s go play in the pool!”

I avoided asking how swim class went, for fear she’d say it was terrible and she was never going back. At supper that night, my Lovely Bride asked instead.

“Great!” Carla said. “I’m gonna go tomorrow, too!”

Today was Carla’s last day of preschool, and I’m grieving for the loss of the place and people who, except for my Lovely Bride and my firstborn, have been a constant in my life longer than anything else in the seven years we’ve been in Baltimore.

This place has outlasted friendships, jobs, cars and even our previous church stint.

It’s hard to let go.

Less than a year after we moved here, I started thinking about preschool for Eddie. I checked with the school at the church we had joined, but I got the frosty response that most people apply for preschool a year in advance. (I later learned this was true all over town – they weren’t just being snobby.) The church preschool said they were all full up and would only have an opening if a kid – and all his younger siblings – dropped dead. I visited a handful of schools – not really sure what to look for – and finally chose one where some playgroup pals were headed, just over a mile away. As a bonus, it actually had a diverse community of kids, which is hard to come by in Baltimore County.

Aside from marrying the woman I love and not renting a car to drive in Jamaica for New Year’s 2011, choosing this school has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

The school’s not perfect. There was the badly-handled biter in 2007. And the school office looks like a “before” shot on one of those TV makeover shows, though they never lost one of my checks. And despite spates of teacher turnover, they school always finds great replacements.

The solar system according to my preschooler's artistic rendering. I'm still grieving for Pluto, little Pluto. It's the farthest planet (not any more) from the sun. (Sorry, Interplanet Janet.)

The 4s class was ideally suited for the 4-year-old boy. To learn body parts, they traced themselves on butcher paper and adorned their Flat Stanley bodies with plastic bags for lungs, straws for the esophagus (and got to learn how it was different from the trachea), long balloons for the “big intestine” and “little intestine” and blue play-dough for poop. Especially at the supper table, Eddie loved getting to talk about poop. They also learned about planets and bugs and the ocean. Not to mention how to sit still for more than 10 seconds and not hit each other. And thanks to Miss Candace, they are fully versed in 80s pop music, which they would listen to each day.

When Eddie headed off to kindergarten and Carla came along for the 2s class, she toddled in without looking back. I think it broke my wife’s heart. But she had been going to school since my wife’s maternity leave ended, and I hauled her there twice a day in her car seat. Then when she got to the 4s class, I realized bodies and bugs and space were perfect for girls, too.

I’ve driven to this school every week for six years, and I’ll miss the incredible flexibility it offered. When I had more freelance work, I just had to ask that morning if my kid could stay for lunch bunch. They didn’t even ask if I had paid yet; they always said yes.

I’ll miss the parents I sat with on the playground after school, shooting the breeze about the typical parent stuff: naptime, sibling rivalry, where to go to kindergarten but eventually working our way to infertility treatments and how to train grandparents. I love that I figured out that once they’re 4, they can bring home friends after school without the other kid’s parent. And typically, they would keep each other busy enough for me to balance the checkbook. I regret that I didn’t bring more of Carla’s friends home to play.

I think the teacher I’ll miss most of all is Miss Annette, a relentlessly happy part-time yoga instructor. I haven’t had a kid in her class in more than a year, but she’s the first voice you hear when you come to school. She answered the door buzzer most of the time, and whether I was on time (rarely) or late (more likely), her voice brightened my day.

Bzzzzt.

“Good morning, who is it?”

“It’s Will M. … a little late with Carla for school.”

“COME on in, Will M.!”

This is how sad my daughter felt after being exposed as a lying little imp. Note the real tears.

Yesterday morning, my Lovely Bride went to brush Carla’s hair and found some kind of strange goop in it. Then she looked and saw big smurchy handprints all over the floor-length mirror in our room. She asked what the slime was, and Carla said it was hair gel left over from ballet. Three days ago. Uh-huh.

“Carla, you’re not telling the truth. You’ve had two baths since then,” my wife said. (It’s been a dirty coupla days. The weather is warm, and the Mud Pit is open.)

“Maybe Tina told me to do it?” she said. But Tina, our 5-year-old neighbor isn’t even here, my Lovely Bride told her. It’s 7 a.m. Plus, Tina probably doesn’t care whether you put hair gel on your head or not.

Carla was cornered.

She burst into tears and sobbed ‘til I thought she’d run dry. Later, she drew a lovely picture to show how she felt.

“I’m a baaaaaad personnnnnnn!” she wailed. I tried not to roll my eyes (I have not yet acquired the skill of tolerating girl-drama), and my wife tried not to laugh.

“No, Carla, that’s your conscience,” she said. “It’s that little voice inside your head that tells you when you’re doing something wrong.”

My wife can still remember when she was in about third grade and was caught telling her friends she had gone to the circus that day, too, but had already washed off the face paint. Her father came storming in from the garage and came down on her like a ton of bricks for lying.

I realize that the line between fact and fiction is blurry at this age. And my daughter has a vivid imagination, as does her pal, Tina, who has a horse named Cookie living in her kitchen and sometimes locks people out. And my Lovely Bride figured out a year ago that Carla often describes things as she wishes they were, not how they really are.

But it seems to have escalated into outright lying these days. Later yesterday when she was making fairy food (neighborhood pals are welcome to pick all the chives, sage and mint they want from my tiny little garden), I saw some of my precious little crop of home-grown lettuce in the mix. Carla fingered her pal Sean, who said in fact Carla had picked it. (I just hate when I can’t tell who’s lying, and it’s not worth it to find out. Usually I punish both parties involved; this time I just said not to pick the lettuce, and ask if you’re not sure.)

Then last night, more than an hour after I put a very sleepy Carla to bed, I hear the pitter patter of little feet. (Is this what people are talking about when they use that phrase?) I catch Carla darting out of Eddie’s room and drag her back to her bed. For the second night in a row.

“Why were you out of bed?” I growl at her.

“I had to go to the bathroom?” she whines.

“No you didn’t. You just went before you went to bed.”

“I think I needed some water?”

“No you didn’t. Don’t you see this cup of water right here?” I had made sure to set out a bigger cup than usual, to eliminate wandering in search of refills. “Why were you in your brother’s room, after bedtime?”

“I was looking for the potty?”

Later, this seemed hilarious. But at the time, it was the height of lying and disobedience. As they say at Rants from Mommyland, I lost my schmidt and gave her a spank. I don’t spank often, but I wanted to get her attention. Then, of course, I felt terrible but kept my poker-face on and told her the next night she’ll have to go to bed half an hour early.

Oh, and did I mention I found chapstick on the cat’s head?

Yesterday afternoon when I picked Eddie up, he threw himself into my lap in the schoolyard and dissolved in tears, telling me that his buddy Harris had invited two other kids for a sleepover. Eddie was not invited.

If I were 8, and I played with these kids every single day like he does, I’d be in tears, too.

I had gotten wind of this that morning when I delivered Eddie to walk to school with neighbor-pal Caleb. Eddie was inviting Caleb to the now-famous (on our block, at least) Friday Wii Hour, where he gets to invite as many kids as he wants to play Wii after school. Eddie and his pals look forward to it all week.

But Caleb said he couldn’t come because he was going to a sleepover, at which point his mom said,” Caleb… Caleb! CALEB!!! We need to talk.”

Then at pickup time after school, Eddie ran up to me and asked if we could move the Friday Wii Hour to Wednesday or Thursday. It didn’t help that I reminded him Wii was cancelled all week after he stomped off Sunday afternoon when my Lovely Bride told him he couldn’t play Wii with Harris and Caleb – it was a gorgeous day, and rain is forecast all week. Then he disappeared without telling us he just wanted to be alone. (No problem with that – you just have to tell Mom and Dad where you’re going.)

 I suggested inviting another friend to come for Friday Wii Hour. Then came the waterworks. “Noooooo!!!!!” Eddie wailed as his face tightened and he threw his head back in despair. “He’s invited to the sleepover, too! And I’m not!”

Uh-oh.

I plopped down on the grass for Eddie to sit in my lap and talk this over. Not only was there a sleepover, they plan to go to a laser tag place that night, and Eddie wouldn’t get to go to that, either.

Ouch.

My first wrong move was to tell Eddie that even if he had been invited, my Lovely Bride and I wouldn’t have let him go. No sleep happens at sleepovers, and you get  a kid who’s cranky and on edge for two days. Plus, you’re obligated to reciprocate and endure your own lack of sleep.

“But it’s on a Friday!” he wailed, suggesting ample recovery time.

Finally, I realized that it wasn’t about the timing or the Cranky Kid Ripple Effect. It was about not being included. Boy do I remember that from when I was a kid.

It still hurts to remember being teased as a child for wearing glasses. (“Four-eyes! Four-eyes!” kids would shout.) Don’t even mention middle school. And in high school, I hoped and hoped and hoped to be invited to the cool kids’ parties. (When I finally heard about a graduation party, I didn’t even know what BYOB meant. And I thought rum and coke was Roman Coke, which I decided was beer and coke mixed together. This episode makes my wife ache, too. She moved five times before 8^th grade, so she was always the new kid.) I got contact lenses as a teenager and went to plenty of parties in college, but none of that mattered when I had an upset second-grader in my lap.

I decided to face the real problem.

“It really hurts that you weren’t invited, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah….” he sniffed.

I sat and listened and asked questions and listened some more. It seemed that the party kid had talked about the sleepover to Eddie in school.

“It was rude for him to talk about this in front of you, Eddie. And I’m sorry he hurt your feelings by doing that,” I said.

“I’m not going to invite Harris and Caleb to play Wii for a month!” he said.

I decided not to point out that his 8-year-old eye-for-an-eye sense of justice was going to leave him with no friends. Forgiveness is beyond him these days.

“Well, we’ll think of something,” I said.

Later that night, I asked if there was another friend he might like to invite to come over on Friday. And by this morning, Eddie had calmed down enough that we didn’t have to avoid the topic. And I’ve even managed to use the sting of not being included to help him consider how other kids might feel when he leaves them out.

My Lovely Bride came up with the best plan yet: she’s going to duck work early on Friday take Eddie straight to dinner and a movie. With just Mommy. Little Sister doesn’t get to go. Daddy doesn’t get to go. Other second-graders don’t get to go.

Just Eddie.

I wish my babies slept like this. But now they're 5 and almost 8. And who misses diapers and midnight feedings?

I realize it is completely preposterous both to think a five-year-old would still take an afternoon nap – and to mourn that she doesn’t. Yet I’m fully capable of holding all sorts of contradictory notions in my noggin simultaneously. Somewhere I once heard that that’s the definition of wisdom.

I figured out once upon a time that the length of my hair is inversely proportional to the level of stress in my life. When Eddie was born in 2003, my dark, curly hair was down past my shoulders. It was awesome. And a pain to take care of. But awesome. I was the long-haired guy I always wanted to be. I even owned a motorcycle.

But as the baby grew, the hair got shorter. When we moved from Brooklyn to Baltimore, I sold the motorcycle and became an at-home dad to a kid too young to talk or walk and who required a diaper, nap or food and cleanup every 37 minutes, I trimmed my hair shorter and shorter almost dispatched with it entirely. I used the clippers on their shortest setting and ended up with a head that felt like sandpaper.

It was liberating.

It hid the grey.

It was the new awesome.

It also made me look gaunt. Like I’d had mono, food poisoning and the flu all at once. I saw a picture of myself – egad! – and began growing it out immediately.

As I got my sea legs as an at-home dad, found a community, stopped listening to NPR constantly (the kid learned to talk), the hair grew longer – though it suffered a setback when Carla was born in 2006 and I had to figure out how to manage dueling nap schedules. Among other things.

Fast forward to the past year, when Carla was 4, and I was hanging on to her afternoon nap with all my might. I knew how it would end: no nap for the kiddo; no peace for Daddy. But I fought it nonetheless. I considered myself a seasoned nap-battle expert, after getting Eddie to nap until he turned 4, when all his contemporaries had shed the nap before they turned 2. (I told myself their parents just weren’t trying hard enough. Boy, am I judgmental sometimes – but then I think of how other people must judge me. Yikes.) Even then, I could give him a stack of books and tell him to stay on his bed for an hour. And he would. This gave me time to get Carla down for her nap, figure out what’s for supper and count the minutes until my Lovely Bride got home.

As Carla’s 5^th birthday approached in January, however, the wheels came off the bus. I had to work harder and harder at the nap – reading more and more stories to wind her down and then singing the long versions of four or five or six songs as I stroked her hair or rubbed her back for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, I’m so sleepy I’m slurring my words as a read to her.

It felt like betraying all the advice from books that tell you to have a clear and short naptime routine, such as two stories, two songs, lights out and leave the room. But it was so worth it. Any awake child in my house eats my brain, rendering me unable to gather a thought or compose a sentence. (Except for sending e-mails or posting Facebook updates.) A sleeping child is worth the effort. All through the fall I would have to forklift Sleeping Beauty out of her bed at 3:15 to go pick Eddie up from elementary school. Game on!

I’m not sure when exactly the nap finally died. Somewhere between Christmas traveling and family visits, followed by staying afternoons at preschool for “lunch bunch” when I had a freelance assignment. Now it’s all I can do to keep Carla from coming out of her room less than three minutes after I finish reading stories and leave the room.

“Dad-deeeee? May I be excused from my nap?” she sings down from the top of the stairs.

Nap? What nap?

My wife last night stroked the back of my recently shorn head. (I just bought new clipper guards and did it myself – a #4 attachment on the back and sides, leaving the curly part on top. It actually looks okay. It only makes the grey hairs more obvious, however.)

“So are we in a short hair kind of place right now?” she asks.

“Carla hasn’t napped in months,” I say.

Goodbye, dear friend.

Once upon a time, I invented a chart to make the morning routine easier. Really, how hard is it to get dressed, make your bed and hang up your pajamas? I tried saying Eddie has to feed the dog in the morning before I feed him. No food for the pooch? No food for you! But these things require me to actually remember

Is it really that hard to remember to get dressed in the morning? When you're almost 8?!

my little edicts. I can be passive-aggressive (my strong suit) or I can nag (my second-strongest suit). Either way, it’s annoying for everyone in the house and is guaranteed to make Mommy suddenly remember some early meeting for which she should have left 10 minutes ago.

Once upon a time, I opined on getting my kids to make their beds each day. People’s comments told me that like my children, they missed the point, too. It’s not about making the bed. It’s about doing what Daddy says so he doesn’t have to nag nag nag. And it continues to absolutely baffle me how to motivate my almost 8-year-old son to do almost anything, except play Wii, eat sausage or sass his sister.

Some folks told me they never had to make the bed, and that’s fine. Me, I’m a bed-maker. It makes the room look tidier and says that you’re ready for your day. Eddie tells me it’s a waste of time because he’ll just unmake it at the end of the day when he gets in it again. (Future career: lawyer.) But my mom is a bed-maker, so I’m a bed-maker. And the point is not whether you are or aren’t, but that Mom or Dad said to do it. So you did.

If my mom said to wash your hands and come for supper when I was a kid, you washed your hands and came to supper. If dad said to collect up the trash to take to the dump, you collected the trash. No confusion or backtalk. I’ve checked with my folks occasionally on this, and they said I was a pretty obedient kid. Although my mom still recalls my selective deafness. She would holler for me from all over the house, but I wouldn’t hear her because I was so engrossed in whatever I was doing. But sneak up behind me and whisper, “Will, would you like a cookie?” and I’d turn around so fast I ought to get whiplash.

Eddie is just like that.

Poor kid.

My Lovely Bride once revealed that in our early days, because of my missteps and screwups, she called me Captain Clueless. I admit, it was well deserved, especially after I forgot her birthday and bought some lame useless-tiny vase and a Vonda Shepard CD as a makeup present. (And she married me anyway!) I don’t want my son to grow into a similar doom.

I figure that because his personality is so like mine that I’d know how to deal with it. After all, it takes one to know one. But in fact, it’s the opposite. Our similarities only make it worse because it heightens my resolve to stamp my own negative traits out of him.

One week at my men’s Bible study, a verse seemed as if it were written exclusively for me: “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” (Ephesians 6:4). I know all I do every day is exasperate my son. I nag, I peck, I nag some more. If he wanted it to stop, wouldn’t he just do whatever I ask before I tell him for the 637^th time? His pediatrician once told me that after you say their name twice, kids don’t really hear you. But rather than stop fixing supper and go get Eddie’s attention first, I prefer to shout loud enough for people to hear me three counties away.

A woman at church who taught first through third grades asked if I had tried a rewards chart. Stickers lead to prizes and so on. We did that with potty training and later in other incarnations. But these things take more management and attention to detail than Daddy’s willing to put in, and they usually fall by the wayside.

The same church woman said sometimes we make our biggest parenting mistakes when we try to correct our own faults in our children (tell me about it), and we’ve got to figure out what works for the child, not for the parent. I took that not to mean to kowtow and mollycoddle, but to actually expend the brainpower to figure out what motivates your child.

When it comes to punishment, that’s a snap. I can find my kids’ Vulcan Death Grip spot in an instant. For Eddie, we take away the Wii. For 5-year-old Carla, takes more creativity. After she behaved badly for the babysitter one night, I took away a grocery bag’s worth of her dolls. Big deal – she has 400 others to play with. Then when she used marker on her rug (and made a really cute smiley face) and wrote on the toilet, we took away all markers, crayons and pens. She knew we meant business.

Actually motivating the kids is much harder. But I realized that Eddie loves dessert, again like me. (Don’t leave cookies alone with me and hope there will be any left when you come back.) I told him that each morning he gets his jobs done by 8 a.m., I will put dessert in his lunch. And if he does it five days in a row, we’ll go for ice cream after school. No nagging allowed. Victory was guaranteed.

But the first day was a scratch. He said he brushed his teeth, but the breath-sniff test was inconclusive. The second day he made it. The third day, after I admonished Lovely Bride for reminding him the day before, he flamed out and sobbed. Today, he got his things done once again.

My mother reminds me that this too shall pass. And that he’ll be able to do things on his own by the time he leaves for college.

Let’s hope.