Teeny Manolo

Okay, not preschool. This kid is six years old. And was, evidently, a robotic scorpion in a previous life.

When my son has tee ball practice, I set up my little folding chair, and either chat with another parent or read a book.  Today was a reading day, and at one point I happened to look up at the team as they were lined up to run relays around the bases.

Much to my surprise, one of the boys simply walked up to another who was waiting patiently for his turn, grabbed him by the shoulders and literally threw him to the ground.  It wasn’t because the thrower was bigger or stronger than the throwee, it was just that the throwee wasn’t expecting someone to walk up and attack him for no good reason.  I can totally understand that, I wouldn’t have expected it either. 

Dad of thrower is standing near me, and says not a word to his thrower son.   And this is not the first or even the second time that thrower boy has done this to people.  The dude is a serial thrower.

Silent Dad, you get the Lazy Parenting Award^TM for your “boys will be boys” atttitude and not telling your aggressive son to knock it the heck off.

Boys, much like lion or tiger cubs, are absolutely into horsing around.  However, unless the horsing around is a mutually agreed upon activity, it shouldn’t happen.  Just the other day the Munchkin and a friend of his were in a bounce house and doing exactly the same Wrestlemania moves on each other.  However, they were landing on a soft surface, and by the dual set of giggles, you could tell it was all in good fun.   When they started to get a bit out of control, they were told to cool it.  And they did.

But, violence for the simple sake of violence is not to be excused as simply “boy” behavior.  I resent people like Silent Dad, because then I am forced to tell my son to be on his guard for cretins such as that and never let anyone throw him to the ground just because it seemed like a really good idea at the time.  These kids are five and six years old and already there is a fight for dominance in the pack.  Ridiculous.

It is people like Silent Dad who perpetuate the cycle of bullying, threats, and general dominant idiot behavior that can be so harmful to the psyches of children. 

And I have to say that even though I’m a pacifist at heart, a tiny part of me would rather like to throw Silent Dad on the ground one day and see just how he likes it. He’s kind of wimpy, and with the element of surprise on my side, I bet I could do it, too.

Bad Glinda. Bad, bad Glinda.

As I have mentioned before, the Munchkin is playing T-ball this year.  Nothing excites him more than being able to put on his uniform, which is a blue jersey with his name on the back and his sparkling white pants.

Wait, did I just say sparkling white pants?

Listen, obviously the T-ball league is run by a bunch of men, because no woman in their right mind would ever sentence another woman to the laundry hell that is a five year old in white pants.  Who plays on grass.  Which is sometimes muddy.  Which results in pants that wind up being not so sparkling white at the end of a game.

A fellow mom was sitting next to me as we watched practice last week, and she asked me what I used to get the Munchkin’s pants clean.  She told me that she didn’t want to use bleach, but had heard that Oxi-Clean worked well.

I had to fess up that I do use a bit of bleach, else the pants would already be gray-green from the knee down.

She told me that nothing she had used got the pants clean, so she just went ahead and bought a few other pairs.

It was at that point that I wanted to leap off my folding chair and cry, “We must stop the insanity! Who gives a crap if our sons’ pants are not pure white?  Does it make us bad mothers if they are not?”

The answer is, of course not.

But if only we lived in a world where dirty pants were worn with pride.  They would be the mark of a dedicated player and a mother who is too proud to get rid of her child’s badge of honor for sacrificing their body for that ground ball.

Maybe someday.

But until then, I’m sticking with the bleach.

Source 

The Munchkin has completed his first week of Little League, in the Tee-Ball division.  This division has got to be the cutest one in the world, never you mind that  many of them cannot catch the ball with their gloves.  Minor stuff, just minor.

Anyhoo, the team is made up of five and six year olds, all of whom have varying degrees of enthusiasm/experience/willingness to listen to the coach.  A few of the six year olds are in their second year, and the differences are quite obvious between them and the newbies.

I was perched in my trusty folding chair, watching the team practice, when I saw him. 

Trouble.

This is the dad who intensely instructs his six year old to “keep your head low and your eye on the ball, son” while he is practicing off the tee and hitting into the backstop.

This is the dad who, after his son threw a ball at his teammate especially hard, and said teammate complained, said sotto voce to his wife “He shoulda thrown it harder, that would have shown him how hard he can throw.”

This is the dad who expects perfection at every turn, even in practice.

This is the dad who arrives a half hour early with his son to practice even more than the hour he gets with the team.

In other words, the dreaded “Sports Dad.” This is the male counterpart to “Stage Mom.”

I watched him with dismay and wanted to shout at him, “Don’t you realize you are a walking cliche? Don’t you realize that you are pushing your son so hard that he is going to hate baseball by the time he is twelve?  Either that, or he will go around thinking he is the best player in the universe, only to be crushed when he finds out that there are hundreds of players better than him?”

Yes, I wanted to shout all that.

But I kept my mouth shut.  Because even though Glinda is opinionated, she will hold her tongue when it comes to how he deals with his own child. 

However, if he utters even a peep to someone else’s child about how they shouldn’t have dropped the ball, or ran the wrong way or whatever, Glinda might have a much harder time maintaining her silence.

Source

I’m glad someone finally just came out and said it. There are too many unspeakable taboos around the whole issue of parenting; now, thanks to Wilkinson, there is one less. The great Daddy/Baby rivalry is out of the shadows and squarely in the spotlight.

Play the game here: Fight for Kisses!

Get your training equipment here:

There’s nothing quite like your first time. The awkward baby steps, the nervous hesitations, the tender care and attention. The hockey rink staff watching with tears in their eyes.

Or is that just Canadians?

From the Kingston Whig-Standard:

Expecting a Saturday morning departure, [Captain Dave] Perry had booked the ice at the Gananoque Recreation Centre for yesterday afternoon so he and his four-year-old son, Mitchell, could spend an hour playing hockey [before he left for Afghanistan with the Canadian Armed Forces]. Told that he was leaving yesterday morning instead, he called the rink to cancel and explained why.

Sue Smith, who books ice time at the arena, told him not to worry. She moved existing bookings around on Thursday afternoon so father and son could have 90 minutes to themselves, shooting pucks at a couple of real nets. Smith only charged Perry a few dollars for the time.

“[The arena staff] were great,” Perry said yesterday as he and the other soldiers waited to board the bus that was taking them to Trenton.

“He’s never played hockey before but it was something that I really wanted to do with him before I left.”

Smith said she never gave a second’s thought to clearing the schedule when she heard that Perry was shipping out early for his nine-month tour.

“I thought it was important that he have that memory, and seeing the two of them out there was so cute,” she said.

“It was a special moment for them, and I’m glad we were able to help him out.”

Something for the care package? How about hockey puck gumballs?

Truly hath it been said that the days between Christmas and New Year’s are the sweetest of the calendar, and for one reason only: presents!

You get to play with the kids’s presents.

Or is that just me? No. No, loyal reader, it is not. And how do I know this? I know this because our faithful friends across the Pond have informed me that Hunky Prince William is having the very devil of a time getting his WII out of the hands of his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Or, as we may now call her, the QuWIIn.

From People.co.uk:

William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton bought him the £200 gift for Christmas - but he now has to share it with his grandma.

A Palace source told The People: “When she saw William playing a game after lunch at Sandringham she thought the Nintendo looked tremendous fun and begged to join in.

“She played a simple ten-pin bowling game and by all accounts was a natural.

“It was hilarious. William was in fits of laughter. He was enormously impressed at having such a cool gran.

Indeed, she’s not the only one who’d like to get her hands on William’s WII.

Well, you can’t be too careful. In the spirit of those safety-conscious few who don helmets before playing chess, let’s salute DaveTheKnave here for skateboarding in a supervised, well-lit, off-street area, and only after filling the bowl with 8000 balloons. His mother would be proud (and possibly relieved).

And don’t forget:

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