Category: life

Why it’s a bad idea to peek at your presents

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Thing 1 (the 10-year-old) was wrapping presents last night, and Thing 2 (the 4-year-old) kept trying to peek into the room to see what she’d gotten him.

“You better not do that,” I heard Thing 1 say. “Don’t you remember what happened to Uncle Joe?”

Clockwise from the back: Papaw, Mamaw, Joe and my dad.

Uncle Joe is Dad’s brother. Now, I don’t know whether Uncle Joe tells my cousins this story or whether he even remembers it (or remembers it the same way my dad does), but I grew up hearing about what happened to Uncle Joe, and I’ve told the story to my kids.

The story goes that when they were teenagers, Dad got Joe a watch for Christmas.

Dad will do anything he can to keep you from guessing what you’re getting for Christmas. He’ll take small presents and put them in big boxes — and throw something like a pencil in the box so it’ll rattle around and keep you guessing.

So, a couple days after Dad put Joe’s watch under the tree, he noticed that it been tampered with. Someone had obviously unwrapped it — and done a bad job of wrapping it back. Dad suspected Joe, so he decided to teach Joe a lesson.

Dad returned the watch, bought Joe some socks and underwear, put them in the watch box, wrapped it with the same paper and put it back under the tree.

When Joe unwrapped Dad’s present on Christmas morning, in front of their parents, Joe knew he’d been busted — and, as far as I know, he never got that watch.

One time, I asked Dad, “How do you know it was Joe who unwrapped the present?”

“I just do,” he said.

“Did he ever say anything to you about it?”

“No.”

“How do you know Mamaw or Papaw didn’t open it to make sure you weren’t spending too much or something?” I asked.

“Joe did it,” Dad said.

So there you go. “The Story of Uncle Joe and the Watch,” as we’ve come to call it, was a good lesson for me growing up, and it’s been a good lesson for Things 1 and 2.

They’ll shake their presents and press the paper against the box to see if they can see through it, but they know what could happen if they go so far as to peek — although, sometimes, we still need to remind them.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this

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A few years, Thing 1, our 10-year-old began asking me about Star Wars. She didn’t know much about it except what she’d heard at school, and what she heard at school was mostly about the prequels.

Sweetie and I … OK, Sweetie doesn’t really care.

I — pretty much by myself — have worked hard to make sure our children grow up in a Jar Jar-free home.

When our daughter just a baby, I decided that, when the time was right, I’d let her watch the original Star Wars, then The Empire Strikes Back and finally Return of the Jedi, and then, and only then, would I expose her to The Phantom Menace and the other prequels, because, no matter what George Lucas says, that’s the natural order of things.

I worried sometimes that I’d waited too late to talk to her about Star Wars, so I was relieved when we were watching Empire — this was a couple years ago — and Vader says, “Luke, I am your father,” Thing 1 sat bolt upright and said, “Whoa!”

Despite everything she’d heard on the playground, despite the scene in Toy Story 2 where Zurg tells Buzz Lightyear that he’s Buzz’s father, she didn’t know. The moment still surprised her.

I had done my job.

Our youngest, Thing 2, the 4-year-old, has begun asking questions about Star Wars.

I think he’s still too young to watch the movies,I think they might be too scary, but I don’t want him to hear about this stuff on the playground. I want him to hear it from me. I don’t want him to grow up thinking Jar Jar Binks is funny or that Greedo shot first. I want him to know the truth.

I think that’s why this new public service announcement hit so close to home:

 

Adventures in bad parenting: Giving a kid cash to stop whining

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I didn’t see this happen, and neither did Sweetie, but it concerns our youngest, the 4-year-old, Thing 2.

He was with his grandparents, and they don’t really want to talk about it, but here’s the story we’ve managed to piece together from the scraps of information we’ve been given:

Thing 2 is nearly 5, but he’s just now going through his terrible 2’s.

When he’s not happy, when he doesn’t get his way, he cries. If that doesn’t work, he wails. If that doesn’t work, he has what folks in the South call a conniption.

When we cave — and we usually do cave, especially in public — the crying stops, instantly, like you’re turning off a tap. Suddenly, he’s fine, and we feel like suckers, and rightly so.

We’re trying to break him of this habit, and I thought we were beginning to make progress.

So, Sweetie’s parents are in town, and they took Thing 2 to Kroger. He wanted something — I don’t know what, exactly — but they said no, and he started crying, and when that didn’t work, he started wailing, and when that didn’t work, he had a conniption.

Thing 2’s conniptions aren’t really angry, but they’re loud, and he sobs like you’ve just told him you’re taking his dog to live on a farm in the country. “Pleeeeease,” he’ll say between sobs. It can be heartbreaking, and it’s hard to say no, especially if you haven’t seen it a million times before.

When we’re with him and he does that, we take him outside and talk to him, or else one of us takes him to the car, but the grandparents were caught off guard, so I’m not blaming them for what happened next.

Thing 2 was causing such a disturbance in the checkout aisle that the cashier reached into her pocket and gave him a dollar bill. She gave him cash to make him stop crying.

And it worked. The crying stopped, instantly.

He used the money to buy a Hot Wheel, which he proudly showed me when I got home.

When I finally pieced together the story, I was speechless. How did it come to this?

I turned to Thing 2 and, trying hard to channel my inner Mr. Rogers, I said, “This is bad. Do you understand?”

He either didn’t understand or couldn’t have cared less. I changed my approach.

“I can’t believe a big boy like you were crying so much that the check-out lady gave you a dollar to stop crying. You’re almost 5. This is really bad. You know that, right?”

He smiled and nodded his head, like I’d said, “The sky’s blue. You know that, right?”

He said, “Oh, yeah,” and went back to playing with his new Hot Wheel, like he didn’t have a care in the world.

Sweetie and I have gotten used to reprogramming the kids after the grandparents visit. (I don’t know why, but grandparents cannot say “No.”)

But this? This episode established a dangerous new precedent.

This is going to take some work.