Obligatory new baby comments.

When you meet someone with a newborn baby you must say how cute the baby is. You must compliment the baby's name.

You must tell the parents how quickly you were able to train your own newborn to sleep through the night. Or you must complain that it took you a long, long time to train your newborn through the night.

This is obligatory.

I now judge people based on their parental skills.

You know you're getting old when you start judging people on whether they're good parents.

We had some friends over for lunch last Sunday. We had never met the husband, but afterward we judged him as a cool person and friend-worthy because he was a "good dad."

Before kids, you judge people on their sense of humor or personality or generosity.

After kids, you judge them on what kind of parent they are.

Good parent means good person. Bad parent means bad person. It's a nice, easy way to simply, and it seems intuitively accurate.

If there's someone we don't like, but he or she seems like a good parent we have to qualify our judgement. "I don't like him - but he is a good Dad. So I'll give him that much."

An easy way to lose your job.

If you want to lose your job, just get your wife pregnant. Works every time.

For example, when Jake was born in 2007, a couple months after his birth, and the day before his heart surgery, my employer took me into a room and said they were laying me off.

Flash forward to the present. My employer just told me they were ending my contract early because they ran out of money. When? The same week that my next child is due.

This technique of losing our job by getting your wife pregnant works really well during a recession. It also works well in a tight-labour market.

It's great because at about the time in your life when you're most sleep-deprived, broke, overworked and exhausted you also get to look for a new job.

Single Mom's aren't that bad.

I never thought much about single Moms. When I did think about them, I felt sorry for them. It's hard to imagine how tough it must be raising children and working a full-time job - with no help from a partner.

Ann Coulter, however, has thought a lot about single mothers. The notorious right-wing columnist devotes an entire chapter to them in her book Guilty : liberal "victims" and their assault on America.

Basically she says that single moms are the parasites of society. Why? Because their children populate our jails and welfare rolls. The worst part of it is, single moms didn't have to be single moms. They irresponsibly had children. They should have put them up for adoption.

Coulter says that our society worships single mothers. The media says how tough things are for single mothers, various celebrities worship single mothers as their heroes, and they receive lots of assistance from taxes and not for profit organizations.

Instead, she says, they shouldn't get any help. That would discourage other women from becoming single mothers, and slowly turn society around (because fewer children grow up and be ruined in these homes).

While her reasoning seems sound, she's an obnoxious writer. She comes off as cold, callous and disrespectful. She needs a punch in the mouth.

I have a feeling that if I told her this she'd laugh and say, "Of course I'm disrespectful of single mothers. They're all slime."

***

Note: She doesn't blame widowers or potential single moms who put up their kids for adoptions.

Parenting with simplicity.

One of Cindy's co-workers says that he has an activity with his kid every single night. His kid is only eight or nine years old. When I was that age, my parents made sure I had activities, but they usually only happened once or twice a week.

Every single night? I'd have hated that.

I loved having free time. There was nothing quite like having a block of fire or six hours to do what ever you wanted, with absolutely no obligations. Unfortunately, for many kids free time seems to be a thing of the past.

I'm currently reading Simplicity parenting : using the extraordinary power of less to raise calmer, happier, and more secure kids by Kim John Payne.

The book argues that today's parents are overwhelming their children with activities, tasks, sports, toys and other over stimulating situations. The net result is that children are inheriting anxiety from their parents, and becoming stressed out.

The key is to simplify your children's life by reduction: reduce the number of activities, reduce the number of toys and reduce the overstimulation. This will make your children happy. Your children want to lead simple, calming lives.

Jake loves sweeping the floor.

I need to buy Jake a small broom so he can help me sweep. Otherwise, he scoots over and grabs the broom from my hand and starts sweeping randomly.

While he's doing this, he's sitting in the dust pile on the floor, getting his bum covered in dirt and dust, and then dragging it around with him as he sweeps.

He seems to understand that I'm gathering dirt, but doesn't understand the overall purpose of sweeping - to clean the floor.

So I gave up and just let him help me sweep for 15 minutes. I was waiting for him to get bored. He didn't get bored. He loved it. He was concentrating hard. Sometimes the broom handle would hit his head (because it's so long and he's not coordinated).

Finally I sent him upstairs for a bath.

Not just a cliche.

I used to think that when parents were asked about the gender of their unborn child, and they said they didn't care, as long as the baby was healthy - I used to think they were lying.

I thought, they must care. The "healthy" thing was just what you were "supposed" to say. It was what society expected you to say.

Having a child with a disability, I can now tell you categorically that I was wrong. Cindy and I don't care at all if the baby is a boy or a girl. In fact, we don't often talk about the gender. If we do talk about the gender we only say neutral, practical things like, "If it's a girl, we have to buy a few pink outfits to get past the first few months."

This time we're not going to ask for the gender ahead of time. It's not that important, and we don't really want to know. What is important is HEALTH. That's really everything. That's all we care about.

It's certainly our biggest worry this time around.

4 Jake stories.

1) Jake can stand on his tippy toes and can reach tables and counters now. This means if he sees a toy on a table or counter he will stand up and try to reach it. The problem is he can lose grip as he reaches and the toy can fall on his head. So we have to be careful. He also likes to close doors and drawers, but hasn't figured out that he can get his fingers caught.

2) Jake knows what a zipper is. He will touch his jacket zipper, but can't really pull it down or up. The jacket is too slack. He also understands when we ask him to take off his bib. He'll grab it from around his neck and try to pull it off. He doesn't realize you need to undo the velcro around the neck first. Finally, he tends to place his shoes and socks on top of his feet when you ask him to put them on. And he places the shoe and sock on top of the foot that's already in the shoe and sock. I say, "No Jake, you put it on the other foot."

3) Jake will now walk to where you ask him to go - if you're holding his hand (and apply gentle guiding when he gets distracted). For example, I can now say, "Jake let's go have dinner. Let's walk to your chair." I'll hold his hand and he'll stand up and walk over to his chair. Or I'll say, "Let's go see Mommy on the bed." Then I'll hold his hand as he walks down the hall to our bedroom. We have to keep the other doors closed, however, or he cold forget where he's going, get distracted and veer inside another room.

4) If you lie down on the floor on your back. Jake will crawl over, position himself behind your head, and then try to pull you up to a sitting position by your hair. He says "Up up up up!" over and over again as he does that, yanking on your hair. Apparently he doesn't like it when you lie down.

The best thing a father can do for his children...

The best thing a father can do for his children is love their mother. This is all you need to make your children happy.

If you can do this simple thing, than you will be a succesful father. If your children can see this, they will learn how to love in their own lives.

Their father's love for their mother is the measure of all future relationships. Their father's love for their mother is the strongest, purest, most important emotion they will learn from, and perhaps some day emulate.

Toys, movies, televsion, books - a child will gladly give these objects up to ensure growth in a loving family home.

Bribing your child.

In the two years that we've tried to encourage Jake to eat, we've never had one doctor, community support worker, occupational therapist, physiotherapist, speech therapist or specialist suggest bribing our child.


All the books and articles I've read about getting your child to eat say, "Don't force your child; it's up to them and they'll eat when they want to."


I was telling this to our behaviour therapist yesterday and she sort of winced and said that all books and workers believe in a "child-centric" approach, which doesn't work. Especially for kids like Jake.


She said that all the behavioural academic literature says the exact opposite - you should "bribe" your children to eat and then phase out the bribe. She did say, "We don't call it 'bribing'. We call it reinforcement."


So why is there such a difference between the people in the field and the people doing the research? No idea. I can only think that as parents we've been brainwashed to think that reinforcement is bad. For some reason, the community workers think the same thing - or agree with general cultural wisdom that says you shouldn't manipulate your kids.



The funny thing is they don't get results. Whenever we asked for help with Jake they said, "We'll get you in touch with other parents whose kids are on a gtube."



No! I don't want a support group. I want advice that works. I don't want to talk to parents with the same problem. I want to talk to parents who fixed the same problem.

How to praise your kids.

I'm reading Nurtureshock : new thinking about children by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman. The latest parenting research shows that there's a certain way you should praise your kids.

Basically, you should be sparing in your praise. Overpraising tends to be ineffective after awhile. Kids take it for granted.

You shouldn't praise them by saying how smart they are. That gives them a complex and makes them afraid to try new things because they might fail. Instead, you should praise their effort.

You should be specific in your praise. Instead of, "You're such a good boy" or "You played really well", you should be more constructive. "I liked how you listened to me!" and "Great running!" It gives kids an idea what they should improve.

You should praise your children intermittently, rather than all the time. It's more effective. (Like slot machines with random payouts at a casino.)

Doing the above sounds easy, but it actually pretty tough for parents. We equate praise with basically telling our kids we love them. So we do it too much, and all the time. It makes us feel better about our parenting skills. And generally we're taught that we should improve our kids' self-esteem. Praising is an easy way to do this.

How to be a good parent.

I'm listening to Parenthood by proxy by Laura Schlessinger, a virtuous, Christian radio talk show host. She laments the fact that traditional homes with traditional values are no longer considered necessary to raise good, well-adjusted children.


It's considered acceptable for kids to be raised by divorced parents, step-parents, double income parents, uncles etc. This isn't the best way to raise children, she says. It leads to turmoil in their lives.


According to her, parents owe their kids time (and attention), clothes, shelter and food. That's it. Playstations and trips to Disneyland are nice, but not obligatory. Attention and time are the big challenges for parents. In non-traditional families the kids don't get enough attention and time.


She says nowadays we are more selfish. We're told by the media to improve ourselves and do what makes us happy. We're taught that we're number one, we deserve the best, we can do anything we want. In other words we're self-indulgent.


It causes parents to do wrong-headed things like have divorces, travel the world and leave their kids at home, pursue a career and neglect their kids, etc. Instead we should encourage the values of self-sacrifice.


When you have kids you agree to make sacrifices for your children. Your happiness no longer comes first. Theirs does. And this is a good thing and should be embraced and promoted by our culture.


My own 2 cents: I agree about the selfishness. We're taught that we deserve to be happy and to put ourselves number one. This is a problem. I disagree about her idea as "daycare as a last resort". I think (and hope because Jake's in daycare!) you can still raise a well-adjusted child who attends daycare. The studies show this is true.



But we have been noticing lately that daycare may not be the best option for Jake. The workers claim they know sign language but when Jake signs and asks for something they wave and say, "Hi Jake!" So I think he doesn't get the best development.



Also he catches every illness that goes around, and all the other parents send their sick kids to daycare.

Jake only eats ice cream.

If your child ate only ice cream would you let your child eat ice cream? Or would you ban your child from eating ice cream and have the doctor install a gastric tube into his stomach so that you could pump formula into your child's stomach?

I've asked this question to people and don't get a straight answer. The question is just too hard. People don't want their child only eating ice cream and they don't want their child fed with a g-tube. So I get lots of advice about how to get Jake to eat, but not an answer to the question.

Jake's in an "ice cream only" phase. He'll sit down and take a few bites of food and then sign "ice cream". If we don't give him ice cream, he cries and stops eating and drinking. We need to g-tube feed him.

With an average kid we'd just say, "Oh well you don't get to eat today." But Jake is very underweight and needs as many calories as possible. Not pumping him with milk would mean no energy for his next meal. That would mean no eating or drinking, indefinitely.

In other words Jake can go on a hunger strike to get what he wants. And we pretty much have to give in because he could do real damage to himself and his body. We've tried twice to starve him. Both times we had to end the experiment because he went 2 to 3 days without eating or drinking.

He doesn't care if he's starving or dehydrated. He hasn't properly learned to eat and associate food with satiation. And the doctors we've seen just don't have the expertise in this area.

So we hired a behaviourist who has had some success getting kids with autism to eat. Let's see how she does with Jake and his parents.

I forgot to look at myself in the mirror yesterday.

The other day when I was picking up Jake from daycare, I realized that I hadn't looked at myself in a mirror yet.



It was roughly 4:50pm and I was talking to one of the workers. I quickly glanced down at my shirt to see if it was inside out (I've worn an inside out shirt before to daycare when dropping off Jake.) Then I worried about having some huge booger under my nose or mustard stain beside my mouth.



I was just too busy to bother looking at myself. In the morning, I was dealing with Jake and mostly watching him as we brushed our teeth in front of the mirror. My hair's short enough that I can get away with just sightlessly rubbing some gel through there. In the washroom at work I must have just looked at my hands.



When you have a kid, you often forget to do basic things like shower or fix your hair or change out of your grubby food-stained clothes. I don't have the time. Or inclination.



Plus I've seen my face a lot throughout my life and could easily go without seeing it for a day or two.



Speaking of our faces, do you know why we never look quite right in photographs? Because we see our faces non-reversed. It looks weird to our eyes. Normally we only see ourselves backwards (in mirrors), which isn't the way other people see us at all. That's a good analogy to life as well - we don't see ourselves truly as others see us.

Jake surprised us with 2 new signs.

I love it when he surprises us. The other day we were on the bed when the alarm clock went off. He tapped his ear - which means "noise" or "sound". I had been doing that sign for awhile, but I didn't think he ever saw me.

We tried it again the next morning. The alarm went off and this time he didn't sign it. I tapped my ear and said, "Can you hear that sound?" and he looked back at the alarm clock.

They've also taught him "milk" at daycare (which is like milking a cow with your hand). We only use "drink" with him, never milk. The other day when Cindy was offering him a drink, he signed milk.

A couple weeks ago we noticed Jake suddenly walk across the floor, without warning, hanging on to his train walker. He had just gotten up by himself and started pushing the thing across the floor. It was bizarre seeing him walk by, because we'd never seen him do that on his own. Suddenly, you see this kid walking past.

When he first started using the walker, you had to hang on because he'd push it faster than his feet could keep up. So he'd be in danger of landing on his face. Now he has more control of the train with his arms, but hasn't figured out how to turn. So he'll just go in a straight line until he bumps into a wall. The train makes a little "beep" sound when this happens and he laughs.

He brings it back and pushes it into the wall over and over again. Now he's started to sit down and turn it with his hands in another direction. Soon he'll be able to do this on the fly.