Entries Tagged 'being a parent' ↓

Everyone knows that becoming a parent changes you, often in ways you never expect. First of all, whether you know it or not, whether you accept it or not, once you have a kid, you are no longer cool. It just doesn’t happen. You can try and hang onto it, try and tell yourself and others, “Hey, I’m still the same cool guy I was before,” but no, it’s gone. All of it. The only thing to do is to reinvent yourself as a different kind of cool. You know the kind of cool where you know all the lyrics to Laurie Berkner and High School Musical songs. “Nick Jr. cool.”

Still the thing that changes most once you become a parent, is your level of tolerance for gross things. You obviously have to get past a normal person’s gag reflex since you’ll be changing about nine thousand diapers per week. But it doesn’t stop there. What ends up happening is that grossness actually becomes a matter of convenience. That’s why you see mothers upending their infants, putting a nose to their diaper and sniffing. It’s just faster and easier to smell for poop than it is to undo a onesie, pull back the Huggies and check to see if there’s something inside. When you see a dad pick a booger out of his toddler’s nose, the ick factor is simply more convenient than searching the house for one of those little bulb suction thingies—which said toddler probably hid inside the VCR anyway. This elevated yuck threshold obviously goes hand-in-hand with the loss of coolness I mentioned, because you simply cannot be cool while sniffing a person’s butt on a daily basis. It just doesn’t happen. Ever seen George Clooney sniffing for poo? I rest my case.

But this grossness thing recently reached new levels of abominableness when my entire family became sick with the flu. On one of those fun-filled nights my one-year-old threw up on Lauren. But he didn’t just throw up on her. He threw up on her while he was nursing. You get that? He threw up… on her breast. This wasn’t just some relatively harmless baby spittle either. This was full on, chunky, stomach flu ralphage. And do you know what Lauren’s response was? After her initial, knee-jerk, “aw gross” reaction, she quickly composed herself and said, “Okay, well at least it didn’t get on the couch.”

The couch? She has vomit on her naked breast and yet she’s happy because it didn’t get on the couch? That’s how far we’ve come as parents—getting thrown up on has somehow become the preferable alternative to something else. When the heck does that happen anywhere else in life? Short of getting killed by an axe-wielding psychopath, how is getting thrown up on not the worst possible outcome of any social situation? I mean imagine you’re walking through the ethnic foods section of the supermarket and some guy just walks up and blows chunks all over you—lifting up your shirt and exposing your chest before doing so of course. Could you ever find a silver lining in that? Yet somehow, as a parent, having somebody puke all over your bare naked BOOBS is actually seen as a somewhat positive thing!

Man, I really hope my kids grow up to be rockstars because it would be a shame for them to siphon so much coolness out of me and Lauren and not put it to good use.

As a father, I am really really looking forward to the age where ant farms become appropriate toys. I loved my ant farm as a kid and I can’t wait for the excuse to have one again. For the uninitiated, a typical ant farm consisted of two-panes of glass (or plastic) spaced a couple of centimeters apart which you filled with soil from your yard. You’d go gather up about twenty or thirty ants and jimmy them one-by-one into the ant farm with some food (the instructions suggested sugar water curiously enough). After that, you’d just sit back and let them go to work for about a week, digging tunnels and settling into their new home. That’s when the real fun would begin.

You’d start by collecting another twenty ants from a different anthill. Your next move was really a matter of taste. You could drop all twenty of the rival ants into the ant farm at the same time and watch as both sides fought to the bitter violent death, leaving behind only one or two befuddled sentries. On the other hand, you could drop them in two or three at a time and watch as the colony ganged up and tore them to pieces. Occasionally, one of the intruders would put up a good fight and take down a couple of the ravenous mob (especially if you were lucky enough to find a colony of red ants), but in the end he was still inherently doomed.

This was the way I chose to put my rival ants to work. I’d gradually up the number of intruders over the course of an hour or so, giving my colony plenty of practice against increasingly difficult odds. Then, after I felt that all of my six-legged soldiers had been sufficiently trained up in the art of war, I’d go out and find a huge freakin’ SPIDER. Here’s where the action really got interesting. Unlike ant-on-ant battles, which pretty much always came down to whoever had the bigger army, you never knew how a spider would fare against an entire colony. A spider is obviously big enough and tough enough hold its own against four or five ants at once. And if he positions himself properly the narrowness of the tunnels can actually work to his favor, preventing the ants from swarming him in numbers he can’t handle. But ants are nothing if not coordinated. It all boils down to how fast they can rally a multi-pronged attack, sending flanking units to the surface and attacking him from behind. Once the ants can pin down the intruding monster on both sides, forcing him to split his attention, it’s only a matter of time before they get past his long legs and onto his back. After that, the outcome of the fight is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It’s just a question of how many ants the spider takes with him.

When people think of little boys and ants, they usually conjure up images of us incinerating them with a magnifying glass, or dousing them with gasoline. They really don’t give us enough credit. We came up with way way way more messed up ideas than that. Ant farms gave us a staging ground to recreate the Roman Coliseum! We made countless drones fight for their lives purely for our own amusement. We let swarms of opposing armies slaughter each other just to see who would reign victorious. We put trained fighters into the ring with the equivalent of Bengal tigers just to see how many would die before vanquishing the beast

Now I know what you’re thinking: serial killers in training. But trust me, no mass murderer has ever wasted his time executing insects. They killed cats and dogs and birds and things. Things with faces. Things with personalities. Things you can love, sympathize and identify with. But who ever identified with a freakin’ ant? And I mean a real ant, not that cute puppet thing from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Sure we were messed up. All boys are. But hey, at least we purged our homicidal curiosities on creatures that everyone kills on a daily basis. Is it really so messed up that we got additional entertainment value out of it? And is it really so messed up that I can’t wait to share that simple joy with my kids?

The Girl and I were just chilling out tonight, listening to the Happy Feet soundtrack while we cleaned up her room, when she suddenly says: “This is the one where they don’t beat baby girls.”

That made me stop for a second. I was trying to remember a place in the movie where the penguins beat up the baby penguins. I know there was a part where the dad was worried that he’d drop an egg. But I don’t remember him actually beating one of them.

“When do they beat the babies?” I ask.

“No they don’t beat the baby girls, I said.”

I crinkled up my forehead trying to think what the heck movie she could possibly be talking about when I realized which song was playing. It was Nicole Kidman singing the Prince song, “Kiss.” And that’s when I realized what the first line of the song might sound like to the unfamiliar brain of a three-year-old: “You don’t have to be rich to be my pearl,” becomes:

“You don’t have to beat the baby girls.”

Now my question is this: Is it weird that The Girl understood that as a completely innocuous line?

I saw a Humvee in the parking lot of Whole Foods today. Weird.

I realized today that I don’t really like most Christmas music and haven’t since I was a kid. Actually I realized that a few years ago, but I figured out WHY today. As a kid, Christmas music is fun mostly because you’re always the one singing it. But as you get older, you’re forced to listen to Bing Crosby sing it. And if you don’t particularly like Bing Crosby, well… it doesn’t do much for your like of the music in general.

My daughter came out with a very profound statement the other day: “I was two on the day I turned three.”

I used to buy milk two or more gallons at a time. Then I read some stuff that said milk wasn’t as good for you as everyone thought. These days I buy vinegar two or more gallons at a time. I’m not saying the one is a natural byproduct of the other, but there you are.

I never realized just how insanely fun it can be to throw one tiny cat onto the back of another.

I don’t think I will ever reach a point in my life where I am too mature to laugh at a really fat kid falling down.

For years I’ve told people the story of a childhood friend who peed on an electric fence as if it were something that happened to me personally. Somehow a story like that is just funnier in the first person.

I don’t care if she’s only fifteen; hot is hot and show me the law that says it’s illegal to leer.

I like to think I’m fairly open-minded when it comes to strange foods, but I still cannot wrap my mind around tofu.

Little kids’ bodies are so ridiculously disproportionate it’s almost a marvel they aren’t defective. Look at one of them when they raise their arms up high.  The fingers barely clear their scalp for crying out loud!

The thing I really miss about my Geo is playing “Merge Chicken” against people in Mercedes SUV’s.

I have no idea how I used to eat Ramen noodles in such large quantities.

I somehow can’t bring myself to feel sympathy for anyone who loses an hour and a half’s worth of work because they forgot to save.

I never realized that I hadn’t seen a single red hot dog since leaving Maine until about a year ago when I read on Wikipedia that red hot dogs are actually a Maine “thing.”

I likewise never realized that I hadn’t seen a single whoopie pie since leaving Maine until somebody told me that Maine is apparently the whoopie pie capital of the world.

Britney Spears is hot. Her music is catchy. And everyone just needs to lay off.

At any given hour on any given day I would bet a minor sum of money that I could find at least one Law & Order or CSI incarnation on TV.

I still don’t know, nor care, what the top news story of the day is.

I saw a Humvee in the parking lot of Whole Foods today. Still weird.

I am whooped. The fam and I just got back from a place in Pennsylvania called Peddler’s Village. It’s a very toursity place where people go to buy lots of crap that they don’t really need. Fortunately we didn’t go for that reason. You see they also have a mini-amusement park for kids called Giggleberry Fair which consists of a merry-go-round, a playroom full of dress up clothes, musical instruments, puppets, etc… But the coup de gras at this place is “Giggleberry Mountain” which is a gigantic contraption made of nets, ropes, tubes, slides, and anything else a kid might want to climb. It goes up six stories!

BUT, the best thing about this whole place, the thing that makes me want to go back again and again: on the bottom two levels of Giggleberry Mountain are a series of air canons for firing little NERF-like balls, of which there are literally thousands scattered here, there and everywhere. On the lower level there are canons that fire large volumes of balls up into the air, and on the second level there are swivel cannons that you use to fire at opponents on the other side of the well. Or you can do what I did and fire down into the well… into the crowd.

The best part is shooting at those kids who have just walked in and don’t quite realize what the room is all about just yet. Then out of nowhere a little ball suddenly plunks them in the head. They look up like, “What the heck was that?” When they shrug their shoulders and look away, you blast them again. Seriously, how awesome is that? Where else in America can you go where it’s actually okay, and even encouraged, for you to shoot little kids in the head? Nowhere, that’s where!

And I just want to say that I think I earned the title of “Funnest Grownup on the Freakin’ Planet” tonight. Most parents were only shooting at their own kids. Well, my kid was off with her mother climbing nets. So I just started unloading on anyone who was at least six-years-old and within range. At first they’d be like, “Holy crap, was that an adult who just shot me?” But after the second or third direct hit, they smartened up and started returning fire. By the time we finally moseyed on out of this place, I had a good twenty kids all ganging up to blast me with cannons or, when that failed, flinging them like baseballs and cheering like Mardi Gras whenever they pegged me in the face. No kidding, almost every single kid in that well was ignoring every other person at every other cannon and focusing every bit of firepower on me. It was like being on American Gladiators except I was the Gladiator.

It… was… AWESOME!

It’s amazing how ten minutes in kid world can become a microcosm for life in general and, if you look hard enough, a fast forward glimpse into what these little rugrats have in store for you. Lauren and I recently took the kids down to the pool for an afternoon and The Girl made fast friends with a little boy who was there with his mom. At three years old, The Girl has pretty much grown used to always being the youngest kid in a group, but this boy was only two and it was obvious from the first moment that he was in love and would follow her anywhere. She must have sensed this too, because within minutes she began testing his loyalties.

Standing on the side, the two of them would talk for a second, then The Girl would spontaneously announce, “I’m going over there,” and run to the other side of the pool. The little boy would have a moment’s hesitation where he looked at his mom in the water, then at my daughter beckoning him from twenty feet away. Then, making the hard decision, he would run, with many looks back, to The Girl. His mom and I would swim our way over to the two chatting kids just in time to hear The Girl announce that she was going back over there now, and run in the direction from whence we had all just arrived, forcing the little boy into another hard decision.

Personally, I didn’t mind shadowing my daughter all over the pool—that’s why we had come down here after all—but it was apparent that this boy’s mom was tired and really didn’t feel like swimming back and forth just to follow her son while he followed a girl. We learned earlier that she’d just had another baby six weeks earlier and this was one of the first times she’d been out of the house. But it was apparent her little boy was indeed prepared to follow our little girl no matter how many times she ran away from him. And the more The Girl scurried away, the less he looked to his mom for approval before pursuing. Sensing the mom’s lack of energy, I suggested to my daughter that we stay in one spot. Not to be deterred, she immediately changed tactics and began subtly taunting her newfound friend.

“How old are you?” she asked, knowing full well what the answer would be since she’d asked the same question a half dozen times already. It took the younger boy a few seconds to formulate his words and position his fingers into the correct number of digits. “I…two!” She immediately shot back, “Oh well I’m three!” After about the tenth round of this exchange with The Girl asserting her numeric superiority, the boy actually started lying to sound better. “I…tree!” he said. The Girl, knowing better (and knowing full well what she was doing I might add) mocked, “You’re not three! You’re two! I’m three!”

The mom, trying to keep her part in this whole thing as jovial and non-confrontational as possible, stuck up for her son with a lame, “Oh he’ll be three in a few months, won’t you buddy.” The Girl considered this for a moment, then looked at the boy and decided to taunt him another way. “That’s my daddy,” she said, pointing to me. “Your daddy’s not here.”

My stomach dropped. In five minutes time, she’d progressed from a coy little game of cat and mouse, to throwing veiled insults at the boy, to throwing veiled insults at his family. I was honestly rendered speechless. I couldn’t see scolding her over this. It was a perfectly normal three-year-old conversation topic after all, and she wasn’t blatantly mocking this kid by any stretch. But I knew better. We all did by this point. This wasn’t a casual observation on The Girl’s part. It was a well-calculated dig, hidden behind the mask of innocence. The boy’s mom once again spoke up in defense, “His daddy is at home watching his baby sister so mommy could go to the pool.” I jumped on this and rallied to the mom’s side, “Oh see, they have a baby just like us. His daddy is home with the baby.”

The Girl, already bored with this new line of dialogue, changed tactics again. “I wanna jump, Daddy!” She shooed the little boy away with a flip of her hand then leapt three feet off the edge of the pool into my waiting arms. She looked back at her newfound puppy dog with a look that said, “See what I just did.” Earlier, before she and this boy became fast friends, he too had been attempting this stunt… only he didn’t so much jump into his mom’s arms as lean out until he was in contact with her hands before falling the rest of the way. I’m fairly certain The Girl saw this and remembered it. Now, off the boy’s look of hesitation, she threw her arms around my neck, laid her head on my chest and said in a loud clear voice, “I love you, Daddy.”

That settled it. Even at two years old this kid knew that to impress a girl and steal her away from the man in her life, he couldn’t just match what she had done. He had to do it three times bigger and five times more dangerous. Just behind the ledge where The Girl had jumped was a slightly higher ledge. Just behind that was a brick wall about two feet high. The little boy, who not ten minutes earlier had been afraid to jump from the ledge two inches above the water, was gearing up for a stunt that was certain to impress the little redhead he was quickly falling in love with… if he didn’t split his head open in the process. Fortunately I, Lauren and the boy’s mom all had the good sense to stop him before he took a flying leap off Blind Man’s Bluff. One of us made up some lame but plausible excuse that would allow us to separate the kids before The Girl could convince him to elope with her.

Boy oh boy. She looks so harmless, but apparently my daughter has the potential to be that girl the other moms view as a “bad influence.” She speaks well. She’s sweet and courteous. She has a soft porcelain face that absolutely cries, “Innocence!” But let us not forget that fiery red hair and the temper that comes along with it. This kid is smart, shrewd, calculating. She’ll learn how to wrap people around her finger and use them to her liking. I only pray she uses them for good and not for evil. I don’t want to field phone calls from angry parents over why their son missed curfew and ended up in jail over a dare. I really don’t ever want to think of my daughter as being that proverbial “Madonna/Whore” package.

It does give me hope that when the boy and his mom finally left the pool, The Girl watched him go, forlornly waving goodbye, and spent the next two hours sadly asking, “Where the boy go? Where the boy go?” She really did love him. She just didn’t know how to express it. Maybe we’ll just keep her away from the pool for awhile.

I don’t generally find myself having the same hang-ups with my daughter’s playtime that a lot of parents tend to have. I don’t freak out when she crawls in dirt, runs through puddles or climbs on things she’ll most likely fall off of. I have been the recipient of multiple double takes at the park where other parents stop dead in their tracks, wondering if I really just said, “Sweetie why don’t you roll in this mud instead,” or “Honey if you’re going to throw rocks, throw them that way.” I’m equally lax when it comes to language. I don’t use the word “silly” to when I really mean “stupid” or “dumb.” I don’t shush The Girl when she starts talking about “poopie” or “pee-pee.” I don’t give her timeouts for saying, “butt” or “crap.” Off those same double takes, I usually respond, “Hey that’s why those words are there… so she doesn’t say ‘a**’ or ‘s***.’” But a few weeks ago, even I found myself putting the kibosh on what is normally a fun and innocent game we play—all because I was afraid of what other parents might think. Justifiably so I might add.

A little backstory on this game. The Girl is at that age where she’s really learning how to manipulate words and language. Rather than simply parroting stock phrases that she hears from us, she’s realizing she has the ability to rework sentence structure in order to elicit certain responses. It’s simple stuff really, mostly substituting one word for another for comedic effect: “Twinkle twinkle little TIGGER. How I wonder what you PIGLET!” A turn of phrase like that will generally set off a good five to ten minutes of she and I trying to top each other with zany substitutions. One popular version of this game is to alternate the names of various body parts into our base phrase of choice: “Oh no, I stepped on your… [foot, eye, elbow, chin].” Of course, because The Girl is at potty training age, and because she has a baby brother who gets his diaper changed about a thousand times a day, words describing the various male and female genitalia will inevitably come into play: “Oh no, I stepped on your… [butt, tushie, nipple, penis, balls].”

Like I said, I consider this to be a pretty innocent game, but a few weeks ago we were hanging out with my sister and her future in-laws when The Girl suddenly decided to play. Unfortunately, the base phrase that she decided to start with was, “I want to kiss your…” Now she started off by saying “hair,” but I knew where this path would eventually lead. All I could think was that these people had met me once. They didn’t know what kind of person I was. Where was their mind going to go when Allison inevitably said, “I want to kiss your… [well, ya know].” Because I know where my mind would go: “Holy f*** (because ‘poop’ would not be an adequate expletive in this situation), this guy is totally pedophiling his daughter.”

Now I didn’t want to create undue attention or perceived guilt by outright ordering my daughter to stop that now. So I tried laughing it off and saying, “No, you don’t want to do that.” But she persisted, thinking this was some new part of the game I’d just made up. “Daddy, I want to kiss your… beard!” Paralyzed and unable to think of any better diversion, I just laughed and said, “Naw!” hoping she would end it on her own. But no. “Daddy, I want to kiss your… neck!” At this point I asked her to come show me how she jumps off the kitchen table and we vacated the living room before the irreversible phrase could be uttered.

We’ve been getting The Girl ready for what it’s going to be like when her baby brother, arrives next month. Since we’re having a homebirth we’ve been telling her how mommy is going to be yelling and crying and making grunting noises, but that she’ll be okay because it just means she’s pushing the baby out of her belly. Beyond that, we’re preparing her for what it’s going to be like with a new baby in the house, mainly the idea that he’s going to cry a lot and mommy is going to be giving him milk to make him feel better.

The one last thing we’ve been preparing her for is how the baby is going to look different than she does, because he’s a boy and she’s a girl. So we tell her, “You have a tushy, but your baby brother is going to have a penis.” (I don’t know why we euphemized the girl parts and not the boy parts. “Penis” is just a cuter word than “vagina” I guess.) So she’s gotten really good at understanding the differences between boys and girls—since mommy is a girl, she has a tushy, but daddy and her brother have a penis.

Well it was bound to happen eventually. I was at the playground with The Girl a few days ago. She was on the swings when this older boy came over to give her a push. Pretty soon they were playing and talking and The Girl told her new friend that she had a baby brother coming. The boy brought Our Girl over to see his own baby sister who was sitting in a stroller. His mom was there and heard all about how Our Girl has a baby brother coming. The mom and I… I’m sorry, let me clarify… the very hot mom and I started talking about all the stupid random things parents talk about, laughing and joking and whatnot while The Girl and her son ran around playing together.

Well at one point they came back again to look at the baby when The Girl says, “That’s your brother.” I corrected her, telling her that that was the other boy’s sister. I then made the mistake of adding on, “But our baby is going to be your brother because he’s a boy.”

Do you already know where I’m going with this? The Girl, well coached by this point, looked up at the mom (don’t forget, she was quite hot) and told her, “My brother has a penis and daddy has a penis.”

The hot mom nodded her head and said the only thing a hot mom can say after receiving such information, “Um… oh… well… good…”

I think I handled myself rather well though. Rather than get embarrassed, or scold The Girl for something that we’ve been putting into her head for months, I looked the hot mom dead in the eye, and with no sense of irony whatsoever, said, “Yeah, you know, important information to have.”

Important information to have??? I’ve had several days to think over that response, and as dumb as it sounded I have not been able to think of a better one—one that wouldn’t make me come off as some kind of weird incestual pedophile. Deadpan acknowledgement (of the fact that we were passing along ‘important information’, not acknowledgement that I’m a weird incestual pedophile) was the best I could come up with. But you want to know what I’ve really been thinking about? Had I been a single dad (or a scumbag husband for that matter) and she had been a single mom (a single hot mom, let’s not forget), I think I could have used that embarrassing little exchange as an icebreaker to try and, as they say, hit that. I really think it would have worked. And if I ever find myself in a position where I’m actually using my kid to pick up chicks, I am going to make sure they mention tushies and penises in conversation. Mind you, I have always been a total dork when it comes to picking up women, so I’m not even sure what line could have even followed that tour de force “important information” opener. But hey, at least I’d have had a foothold.

Am I right ladies? Yeah you know it.

(deep SIGH)

First they took away dodgeball, saying it was too violent. Then a couple of kids fell off the see-saw and monkey bars, so away they went. Next the tall metal slides were replaced by short plastic corkscrews that don’t give you any speed. Before long somebody said that even swings were too dangerous for playground play. Now just when you thought parents and schools couldn’t get any more ridiculous and wussified than they already are, you know what some school board in Attleboro, Massachusetts decided this week? Apparently the game of Tag is no longer an appropriate game. Tag! I mean… TAG for crying out loud! Claiming “Recess is a time when accidents happen,” the Willette Elementary School has deemed one of the most basic, elemental and pure games of childhood as too rough and dangerous for kids to play. What’s even more amazing is that there’s nothing amazing about this decision. Schools all over the country have been taking similar measures for years. In 2002 a Santa Monica school banned the game saying that it “creates self esteem issues among slower and weaker children.”

I just don’t even know what to say about this decision that isn’t already self-evident to anyone who grew up in any previous generation, though I think George Carlin said it best: “Grownups are taking all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives. It’s pathetic.”

Every generation fears the one that comes after it. Our grandparents were horrified by the rock-n-roll our parents listened to. Our parents were horrified by the brain-numbing MTV programming we watched. It’s expected. You think your parents are prudes and you wish your kids would be into the “wholesome” things you liked. But now that my generation is stepping into the parental roles a new and disturbing trend is happening. We’re actually saying that all the things we loved about being a kid are no longer good and valid forms of entertainment. Instead, we claim they’re damaging to the body and psyche of our frail little children. But the more I think about it, the deeper I think it goes. Parents aren’t vilifying things that are dangerous. What they’re really trying to forbid is any activity that kids can do without their direct supervision.

I never made that leap of logic until I read that soccer is now the number one youth sport in America. And what immediately occurred to me was that the article left out one key word from the declaration: soccer is the number one organized youth sport in America. Whenever you see American kids playing soccer, it’s almost without exception a structured, organized event with official teams, coaches, referees, and booster moms selling refreshments and car magnets. You almost never see a group of four or ten unsupervised kids trying to kick a ball through a makeshift goal. That’s what kids all over the world do, but not in America. Here, the sport that kids engage in most, irrespective of adult supervision, is basketball. Kids don’t need an organized group of parents to play basketball. As long as they have a ball, a net and a hard surface they’ll shoot hoops for hours. But since there’s no way to poll every pickup game on every cracked asphalt court in the country, soccer is the sport that wins the most popular title.

And that suits the parents of my generation just fine for some reason. They can’t stand the idea that their kids could be having any kind of fun that they didn’t personally orchestrate and supervise. And that’s why things like playground equipment and unstructured games like tag and dodgeball are going away. “Safety” and “self-esteem” are just easy scapegoats for the real truth: today’s parents are scared that their kids (gasp) might not need them.

I don’t know where all this insecurity originated and why it seems to be unique to parents my age. Is it that we wish our own parents would have spent more time playing with us that we feel compelled to make sure our kids never spend a joyful minute outside our presence? Is it the reports of kids getting stolen out of their own yards that make us too scared to let them leave our watch for any reason whatsoever? What is it that makes games like soccer, where dozens of kids can be supervised all at once, more preferable to games like tag where kids can supervise themselves? Why on earth is our generation unique in vilifying ourselves by vilifying the things we used to love? And where will it end? How much of our children’s lives will we attempt to structuralize with no thought given to what we’re depriving them of?

I really do have a blast playing with my daughter. She’s right at that fun age where she can run around and do things, she has good manual dexterity that allows her to maneuver blocks and other objects with her hands, she’s happy and energetic and full of life and laughs a lot, squeals with delight and jumps up and down clapping her hands at some new game that we just made up. But I swear I must be setting her up for some kind of violent streak in her future.

It’s not intentional. It never is. But somehow all our games end up turning violent. I mean, you know, violent in a cute, piggy-tailed, two-year-old girl kind of way, but violent nonetheless. I think it started around the time she finally figured out how to walk and then soon after, run. We started playing this game that we simply called “DING” where basically I would chase her around the apartment tickling her and yelling (you guessed it), “Ding!” every time I poked her. Well that quickly got boring for me and so I added an extra element to the game: a beach ball. Now instead of just chasing her around, I also chuck a beach ball at the back of her head and body in an attempt to knock her over. The beach ball in question is incredibly light and bounces off her with practically zero force. You could probably throw it at somebody with all your might and they’d barely feel it. I, of course, know this because I’ve thrown it off of The Girl’s head with all my might and she only laughs harder. Really, the only time that thing knocks her over is if she happens to be rounding a corner and I catch her around the legs just right, causing her feet to get tangled in each other and down she goes.

We made up that game about a year ago and we still play it several times a week. And god forbid I should start chasing her empty handed. We’ll get about five seconds into it and she’ll stop, turn around and say, “Beach ball?”

When we play with blocks, we don’t try to build a tower as tall as we can so much as build a tower just tall enough so we can knock it over. Actually, now that I think about it, The Girl is the one who started that one. Though again, it was probably my fault. A couple times she accidentally bumped the tower knocking it over and I exclaimed a big “Whoa!” which made her laugh, and so now the object of the game became to knock the tower as far across the room as possible.

A couple months ago we inherited a box of Matchbox cars and a box of plastic animals. We set the animals up on the coffee table and had about three minutes worth of fun making them walk around, drink water, eat food, climb Couch Pillow Mountain, etc. But then I got bored and honestly I could tell she did too. So it wasn’t long before we pulled out the Matchbox cars and started a new game called (I swear I’m not making this up), “Hit the Pig.” Basically we arrayed all the animals on the table with the pig figurine at the very end. The goal was to run the cars down the gauntlet and knock the pig off the other side. Each run begins with the war cry (again, you guessed it), “Hit the Pig!” Then I… WE send the cars charging down the track with the appropriate VROOM sound effects, and end the run with a resounding PAAAUUUGGHH as the car flies over the cliff and bursts into flames. Whenever we actually accomplish the goal of the game and “Hit the Pig,” we celebrate with a sadistic, “RREEEEEeeee….” as the pig plummets to his death.

Well now we’ve got new toys in the house again. The Girl got a couple Little People playsets for her birthday last weekend. I think I may have lasted a good twenty minutes this time around. I made the mommy push the baby around in the stroller, made the daddy sit at the computer and check his e-mail, put the older sister on the potty and had the little brother open and close the refrigerator a couple dozen times. In the garage I had the mechanic drive the car around to the gas pump and pretend to fill’er up. We made the cars go up the elevator and down the spiral ramp and drive into the oil change area a few times. But it wasn’t long before I had the mommy and daddy jumping off the roof, had the dog getting hit by the tow truck coming through the car wash, and had the baby stroller rolling off the table cliff. We pulled out the infamous Matchbox cars and had them make death defying jumps onto the top level off the garage, careen around the corner with appropriate tire squealing sound effects and then pile up with lots of smashing sounds at the bottom of the ramp.

I know The Girl is entertained because she busts a big old gut every time we sit down (or run around) to play something. But man, am I setting her up for some sick fascination with violence where nothing is fun unless it involves mayhem and destruction? Honestly, I must admit I’m being more than a little melodramatic. While everything I have described is one hundred percent true without the least bit exaggeration, I truly don’t think I’m screwing her up in the least. If anything I think I’m giving her a harmless outlet for the violent impulses that, let’s face it, are present in every single one of us. I’ve always been a believer that kids need to play games that involve pretend killing people and breaking things. It allows obsolete evolutionary impulses to manifest themselves in a way where nobody actually gets hurt. As long as it’s tempered with a responsible adult making sure the kid understands the difference between make believe and real life then they should be just fine. My hope is that The Girl will get out her aggressions on fake plastic people (and pigs) and not turn psycho on the real ones.

Of course that’s all assuming she even makes it to three years old without getting knocked down the stairs during a particularly intense round of DING.