Tag: Growing up

Posted in Life With Kids

I Am Drowning In Childhood Keepsakes.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

I’m no stranger to playing the Tooth Fairy.  Granted, the costume would fit me a little weird, but as to the actual act of replacing a tooth with two dollars without waking the kid up, I’m a pro.  But there’s one finer point of playing the tooth Tooth Fairy that’s eluded me until now, and I finally want an answer:

What the hell am I supposed to be doing with all these teeth?

Currently, I have a baggie containing my 8-year-old’s upper right incisor stashed in a desk drawer.  I’m telling myself it’s only there temporarily, but that implies I have some grander design for the tooth.  I do not.  Sloan, likewise, has informed me that the corresponding tooth on the left side is also really loose.  By this time next week, I expect to have paid 4 dollars for used human body parts (maybe earlier if her school has another mandatory loose tooth extraction event, more commonly known as ‘Dodgeball’).

I really have no clue what is expected of me every time I come into possession of another one of her teeth.  I’ve thrown away a few and felt absurdly guilty about it.  “This is your little girl’s central incisor!” my inner monologue seems to shout at me, “Don’t you want to stash it away forever to remember this moment?!  Don’t you want to spend 275 dollars on a gold trimmed keepsake box like some kind of medieval reliquary displaying the toenail of St. James?”

Seriously: $275.  The same place also sells a 2 inch porcelain Noah’s Ark toy that costs as much as my first car.

But for all that guilt, do I really want to keep these things?  Will I ever get out the pouch of loose teeth that I’ve kept like some kind of rag-and-bone man to coo adoringly over them?  I can’t really see myself ever doing that.  Maybe if it were the little stuffed Clifford doll that she took everywhere as a toddler I could; that’s a relic of early childhood with a lot of emotional history attached.  I don’t feel that way about her second bicuspid.

Of course, the whole question of whether to keep the teeth is just one outgrowth of the fact that none of us parents seem to have any clue what we should or shouldn’t be keeping.  Forget just teeth; anything that spends more than 5 minutes in the kid’s presence feels like there’s some pressure to keep in perpetuity. 

Baby booties?  You’re supposed to keep those, apparently.  Baby blanket?  Store that thing forever.  Drawings and crafts?  

Dear god, where do you even begin with the drawings and crafts…? 

I have like 3 banker boxes worth of drawings sitting in my garage, plus smaller caches of rumpled, doodled-on paper scattered throughout the house.  None of these drawings will ever get looked at again, but for some reason it seems important that I keep them.  It might just be easier for me to pre-shred them and make mouse nests out of the remains myself. 

It’s not just vague guilt keeping me from tossing this felled-redwood worth of paper into the trash, either.  Kids also seem to have a sixth sense for the location of every doodle they’ve ever produced, and will guard this mountain of crumpled printer paper like some kind of dragon that just raided an Office Max.

At least the drawings can be stacked; it’s the crafts that I struggle most with.  The crafts take up 50 times as much space, break any time they’re touched, and shed a trail of beads and sequins like a bedazzled golden retriever.  Once the kid discovers those craft chests you might as well just accept that your entire house is going to look like a parade float just exploded and throwing away any spec of it will be met with resistance.

This kit contains roughly 2,000 pieces and is somehow capable of producing 3,000 things that you’ll be expected to store.

Now that my younger daughter is beginning to reach drawing age, I’m worried that it’s either time to make some major cuts to what I’m willing to store, or just accept that my new role in life is guardian of an ever growing stockpile of barely remembered keepsakes.  I’ll definitely need another fridge to hang all her best artwork on, and possibly a second garage for the rest.

…Anyway, my kid just walked past chewing gum, so I probably need to go hit an ATM before the end of the day.  All these teeth aren’t gonna pay for themselves.

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Posted in Life With Kids

Who Should Plan A Kid’s First Concert?

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

A few weeks back, my 8-year-old daughter Sloan finally got to experience one of the growing up “firsts” that I’ve been looking forward to for years:

I took her to her first rock concert.

I hadn’t planned to take Sloan to a concert, but scheduling conflicts with the couple my wife and I had planned to go on a double date with resulted in a spare ticket.  You’d think that modern concert tickets costing more than a human kidney would’ve ensured more diligent schedule checking, but the result was getting to take my kid to her first concert, so I’m calling it a win.

The concert in question?  Bruce Springsteen.

Now I’ve been to like 200 concerts in my life and have the hearing of a nineteenth century cannoneer to prove it.  From my experience, Springsteen is the gold standard of live acts, and I was really happy I got to share such a cool show with her.  My first concert was very special to me: Fiona Apple opening for the Counting Crows (forever giving me the right to scoff at kids who thought mall-punk was “Emo” ten years later).  I wanted Sloan to have a really memorable first show, too.

So we got our tickets together, picked out our coolest concert clothes, got her a set of ear protectors meant for target shooting (because my wife Sara mandated it, just to establish that she is both a responsible parent and a total square), and we went to see The Boss.

The show was a blast.  Bruce still has the energy of a singer half his age, the band brought a full horn line, which was fun and unusual, Sloan identified no less than 3 songs as the new Best Song Ever™, and her energy lasted almost to the end of the nearly 3-hour show.  Pretty good for an 8-year-old.  We even had the incredibly cool luck that a friend of mine was working as a stagehand for the venue, found one of the band’s discarded setlists, and gave it to Sloan as a memento from her first concert:

This is as hard as an excel spreadsheet can possibly rock.

So bearing all that awesomeness in mind, I still worry that making this her first concert might have been a mistake on my part.

I mentioned having a memorable first concert earlier.  The Counting Crows are great to see live (or at least they were in 1996) and I still have fond memories of how fun and unique that show was, with most of the songs straying far from the album versions I was familiar with. 

…But the fact that the first band I saw was any good live was entirely by chance.  They were a band I liked, my dad bought us tickets, and everything else was pure dumb luck.   I also liked the Gin Blossoms at the time (look, it was the mid 90’s; I’m not proud of these name drops), who I would eventually end up seeing at a festival years later.  They were…less fun.  The fact that I left my first show thinking “Concerts are amazing!” instead of “These songs are free on the radio, and the singer doesn’t sound drunk,” was entirely down to luck.

What I wonder about, though, is if I might’ve still had an amazing time no matter how bad the band was.  Maybe more important than it being a good show was the fact that I was seeing a band that I liked, not just a band that my dad enjoyed.  I loved those moaning, post-grunge, sad sacks and was ready to celebrate it. 

So what’s the most important part about a kid’s first concert: seeing a good show or establishing themself as a person with their own unique tastes in music?

Sloan wasn’t much of a Springsteen fan before going to see the show.  She knew a few of the more famous songs and is certainly a fan now, but that’s a result of going to see the concert and not how her tastes developed naturally.  I’m the fan.  As much as she wound up enjoying the show, if I’d asked her what she would’ve liked her first concert to be 2 months ago, Bruce would not have come up.

Maybe the ages we experienced our first concert at are enough to justify me taking the reins on this.  She’s still shy of 9, whereas I was 14.  A young teen wants to define themselves, but at her age, being into the same stuff as your dad is still cool.

…Cool to her, I mean. As a balding, pudgy 40-year-old, things that I like actively become less cool by association.  At this point if I bought a Maserati people would be calling them “Dad wagons” within 3 months.

Cargo shorts, socks with sandals, 630 horses of raw Italian power…dads, amiright?

So all that to say, maybe I need to prioritize taking her to see a band that she likes.  I’m not thrilled at the idea of sitting through 2 hours of the Imagine Dragons concert she would definitely ask to attend, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she’d look back on hearing that stupid robot voice going “thun-DDEERR?” with a lot of affection if it was something she picked.

I’m glad that we got to experience her first concert together, but I just want to make sure that I balance sharing the cool stuff that I enjoy with learning about the cool stuff that she enjoys.

…Also I need to stop letting Sloan come in and read over my shoulder while I’m writing, because she read the last couple paragraphs and immediately wanted to hear “Thunder.”  Guess I better work on learning the lyrics to this song; If that’s our next concert, I might as well make it special.

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Posted in Life With Kids

I Am Routinely Out-Negotiated By Children.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

The problem with trying to negotiate with kids is that they’re too good at it.

Try to get a kid to do anything they don’t want to and it becomes immediately clear that you’re in for a spirited debate.  Bedtime, in particular, quickly becomes a gauntlet of increasingly outlandish add-ons and upsells, like a used car salesmen trying to talk you into artisanal wiper fluid and galvanized floor mats.

They want just one more story.  Just a tuck in.  Just a goodnight hug.  Just a hug for their favorite stuffed animal.  Just a few minutes to use the toilet again.  Just another tuck in now that they’re back from the bathroom. Just a quick glass of water.  Just move the nightlight across the room because it’s too bright.  Just a moment to change into her green pajamas.  Just one more hug.  The extra hug would be sweet if it actually felt like the point was showing affection instead of setting back the bedtime clock another 8 seconds.

I’m beginning to think we’re sleeping on the idea of children as high-stakes negotiators.  If you gave a 6-year-old the stipulation that for every hostage they freed they could stay up an extra 10 minutes, then every police standoff would be over in under an hour, with the lead negotiator also securing 3 stories, 2 lullabies, and an episode of “Bluey.”

It extends past bedtime into everything they do.  Trips to the park?  They will try to haggle out extension after extension.  I’m not talking about “Dad can we stay just 10 more minutes?” either.  I’ve refused that and gotten progressively shorter requests all the way down to “JUST 15 MORE SECONDS?!”  Every negotiation ends with a new attempt to secure jjjuuussssttt a little more.

In fairness to her debate skill, she probably got several minutes of extra playtime while I ranted about how pointlessly trivial a 15 second extension was. Point to her.

I think kids are such hard negotiators is because they understand that they can try to manipulate every situation for their maximum gain long before they understand when they shouldn’t.  I seem to remember Jeff Goldbulm giving a speech about that attitude in “Jurassic Park.”

This isn’t the scene where he makes the speech, I just refuse to pass up any opportunity to use this photo.

When our toddler was a month old and my wife and I were subsisting on a series of short naps instead of real sleep, I remember saying that if our baby had a button that would keep the two of us from sleeping for 6 months, she’d press it twice. 

Not vindictively (though when you haven’t slept more than 45 minutes at a stretch for weeks, everything feels vindictive), babies just don’t understand that other people have needs. All she knows is that her life is easier when mom and dad are awake, so her tiny hands would happily hammer that magic insomnia button like this was a game of “Galaga.”

…And yeah: it’s obvious that a baby isn’t going to understand that other people are affected by them crying all night.  I get that.  No one expects a 2-month-old to be polite about their nighttime feeding schedule.  What I didn’t realize until after I had kids, though, is that every interaction with them for YEARS still contains some element of them not understanding that 3:38 AM is an impolite time to try and recreate the sounds of a soccer riot.

Case in point: at the moment my 8-year-old is going through some eating resistance and trying to argue down the amount of dinner she’s required to eat.  What she doesn’t seem to understand yet is that this is kind of insulting to the person who went to the trouble of cooking.  She seems genuinely confused that trying to debate her way out of eating a single unnecessary crumb of the stir-fry I just made might be a little hurtful.

Meanwhile, I’m confused at how a dish she described as being “better than a thousand Christmas mornings” last week suddenly tastes like cat litter with soy sauce on it today.

She isn’t trying to be a jerk about the food.  What she struggles with is the abstraction of people seeing their work as an extension of themselves, and insulting it is the same as insulting them.  If it were something more direct, like coming up to me and stating “Dad, you smell like if a fish died twice,” she’d recognize that would be hurtful. 

(She has actually come up to me and said that exact sentence, but I was too busy laughing at that line to ever follow up and find out if it was meant seriously.)

So every day we have the same argument: how much of this horrible food does she have to eat before she’s allowed to leave the table.  Amounts will be negotiated, counter offers will be made, food will be redistributed around the plate in an extremely bad-faith attempt to skirt under the required dinner threshold.  It feels like trying to get North Korea to eat its vegetables.

I talked about the idea of kids dealing with a lack of autonomy a couple of weeks ago and I suspect this may be a continuation of that.  So I think I understand why they fight tooth and nail over every issue, so now the big question is this:

How do I encourage it?

Yeah, you heard me: how do I encourage it?  Like many of you, I have gotten jerked around by people better at negotiating than I am all my life.  How much have I overpaid for cars?  How much have I been underpaid for labor?  If I can raise a kid willing to advocate for herself and drag every cent out of a boss who wants to short her salary in 20 years, I am FINE to put up with picky eating and hard bedtimes now.

Willful child?  No: future badass.

…just be a little more tactful about badmouthing my stir-fry, ok?

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.