Shotgun Daddy

The Two Faces of Henry

Henry is the sweetest boy I know.
Henry is the most difficult boy I know.

Depending upon which way the wind is blowing, either of these statements can be true, and I have no idea why.

It used to be that Henry was nothing but sunshine, smiling brightly and laughing easily as he picked flowers for his mother and played gently with his sister. He never fell victim to the the terrible twos, but the day he turned three, something changed. He became the most difficult boy I know.

Once upon a time, he had started each day with a smile. Now his first word in the morning was often, "No!" Just like the greeting cards say, nothing says I love you like a one-word rebuke shouted at the top of your lungs. He would beg Alison to play with him, but then he would either argue incessantly with her or delight in badgering her until she retreated, often in tears.

He had one favorite game, though. If there was something he wanted, whether small like a napkin or big like a piece of candy, he would beg, kick, and scream until he got your attention. Here's how it would go:

Henry: Water!
Parent: I want water.
Henry: Water!!!
Parent: I want water.
Henry: I want water!!!
Parent: Good boy! Here's your water.
Henry: No!!!
Parent: Okay, no water.
Henry: Water!
(Lather, rinse, repeat.)

It was around this time that we arrived at a new protocol. Whenever I left the house on an errand, I would take Henry with me. It was mainly to save my dear wife from having to bang her head against the wall while alone with three children, but the secret benefit was that Henry became a completely different child when isolated from the rest of the family.

The sweetest boy I know.

When we go on our missions together to pick up a pizza or run to the hardware store, he's calm, attentive, polite -- and above all -- sweet. We've come to realize that at least 50% of this can be attributed to sibling rivalry. As much as he and Alison love playing together, they still spend an awful lot of time at each other's throat, and Henry's demeanor changes dramatically the moment his sister walks into the room, but there's something more going on.

As Leslie has mentioned several times, Henry and I seem to have some sort of power struggle going on. When we're out the door and on our own, everything's fine, but as we're getting ready, we tend to battle over the smallest of things. If he's trying to zip his jacket, for example, first he won't let me help him, and then when he comes to me thirty seconds later, I won't want to help him.

It's easier for Leslie to look at the big picture in situations like this, so she can usually smooth things over, but it always leaves me wondering. Even though Henry and I spend an awful lot of quality time together running errands, playing games, and reading bedtime stories, I worry that the small issues we have now could ripen into big ones in years to come.

Or maybe not.

We have a ritual, Henry and I. I'll ask him a simple question, "Who's my boy?" and he'll give me a simple answer: "Me." The other day when I asked him, though, I got a surprize.

"Who's my boy?"
"Nobody."

And then he laughed so hard he almost fell out of his chair. He's a funny boy. The sweetest boy I know.

What's Wrong With This Shirt?

I was getting Alison ready for school one day last week when I noticed that there was something wrong with the shirt I had grabbed from her closet. She has about a dozen white shirts that she wears to school, each more or less identical, but when I started ironing this one on this particular morning, I noticed that it didn't want to lie flat on the ironing board. There appeared to be some problems in the chest area. For some reason it had been made a bit blousier than usual, leaving room for... Holy mother of Christ, it hit me like a ton of sixteen-year-old boys. This shirt -- size 7, by the way -- had been sewn a bit blousier to leave room for breasts!

Somewhere there was a pattern-maker who felt it necessary to create a shirt that was loose enough to accomodate the burgeoning breasts of my six-year-old daughter. So here's what I have to look forward to. Every week or so, when this shirt is washed and ends up back in Alison's closet, I'll innocently pull it out, see the "extra space", and flash forward to a time when the boys who come knocking on my door won't be trying to sell candy bars or magazine subscriptions.

You'll have to excuse me, now. I have a moat to dig.

Springing Forward, Falling Down

When I was but a wee lad, there were three red-letter dates on my calendar: my birthday, Christmas, and the beginning of daylight savings time in the spring. Ah, daylight savings time... was there anything sweeter? Sure, birthdays and Christmas were nice, but daylight savings was the gift that kept on giving. As spring began to ripen into summer, the days grew longer and longer until the glorious evenings of June and July when dinner was no longer an end but merely an interruption of that afternoon's game of baseball or touch football. What could be better than daylight savings?

Now I know better. I suppose it's nice to be able to play basketball until after eight o'clock, but have you ever tried to convince a four-year-old that it's time for bed when it's not dark outside yet? And then tried to wake up that same child an hour early the next morning? Trust me when I say that it's no picnic.

Things here have gone relatively smoothly so far, but it's early yet. Alison and Henry haven't objected too much, and it even feels like they've been napping a bit more consistently. The unexpected monkey wrench, however, has been Kate.

Our usually sweet and easy Kate has been acting up a bit lately, and I'm not just talking about her tiresome habit of grabbing for your neck and squeezing a fistful of skin. No, this is much worse.

Diaper changes have become an adventure. Earlier this week I took Kate back to her room to change a diaper that smelled particularly foul. I set her down on her changing table, pulled off her pants, and slowly undid the velcro fasteners on the diaper. The second I opened her diaper, her hands darted down below her waist and into the sloppy mess. Seeing nothing but diaster ahead, I quickly grabbed both her hands, hoping to minimize the damage. I had used both of my hands to grab her arms, and she thought this was absolutely hilarious. So hilarious, in fact, that she started giggling maniacally, kicking her feet, and bucking like Little Yellow Jacket -- and each kick placed a heel squarely in the middle of the diaper I hadn't had time to close.

I was completely overmatched. If I let go of her hands, they would only get dirtier than they already were. If I didn't, her feet would eventually cover every square inch of the the changing table, the wall, and me with tiny fecal footprints. And so I let go of her hands and my dignity at the same time...

I somehow wrangled both of her ankles into one hand and grabbed a fistful of wipes in the other. My three seconds of indecision had been enough time to turn the changing table into a disaster area. She had stamped every surface, including my hands and jacket, and she had even managed to slide the diaper all the way under her back. And yet somehow, she was still smiling.

I wiped her off as much as I could, then picked her up and wrapped her in one of my arms, leaving the other hand free to gather up everything on the changing table -- mattress cover, socks, pants, shirt, and the previous night's pajamas. Bath time.

When we got to the bathroom I dropped the soiled clothes on the floor and stood her up next to the bathtub while I waited for the water to get warm enough for her. She was having a wonderful time standing between my knees as I sat on a stool in front of the tub. And then a strange thing happened. I realized that water from the tub was somehow leaking out onto my leg. This made no sense, though, because our tub does not leak, and it was only just beginning to fill. And then it made perfect sense. Kate had just peed on my leg.

And you know what was really weird? I didn't mind at all. It was merely the punchline to a joke that wouldn't seem funny for at least another fifteen or twenty minutes. I took off my poo-stained jacket, used it to wipe the urine off my leg, and then tossed it in the pile of debris next to the tub. All in a day's work.

The good news, though, was that I had an extra hour of daylight to look forward to, which was nice.