Sit Down or Stand Up?

Our nearly two year-old is ready to be potty trained. When he's home, he walks around in just his underwear, tells us when he needs to go, holds it until he can get near a toilet, has an accident now and then, and only wears diapers to bed. Great. In a day when I've seen 5 and 6 year olds still in pullups, our little guy is ahead of the curve.

The trouble is, he is still not quite two yet and isn't big enough to...stand up easily to pee. So in the many months we've been training him up to now, he's been sitting down on the kid's potty to go. He is a boy, and it's his right and privilege as a male to stand up to pee, which affords lots of advantages over the delicate female, who require a 'special place' to go. You have a portable bathroom pretty much anywhere if you have to bad enough. Plus, you can get in and get out of public restrooms in relative ease. In some countries in Europe you have toilets right out in the open for convenience. You try going in one of those, you uterus carriers.

I've tried to encourage him to go standing up in the potty, to some success, but in thinking about it I hesitate teaching him this skill because honestly most guys aren't very good at it. Which I don't understand. You just point it and let gravity take over. But having used public restrooms so many times it is baffling to me how many guys can't hit even the urinal, which is even more foolproof than the sit-down stall toilet. It's on the rim, the floor, the wall; in the sit-down some guys don't bother to lift the seat. You'd pass it off it were a few malcontents, but it is a feature of every public restroom.

So perhaps, for cleanliness sake, it might be better to keep my son sitting down. On the other hand, all those guys who can't hit the seat may have been taught by their mothers, clueless as to the logistics of how to pee standing up, since fathers often have the attitude that potty training and child rearing in general is women's work. I'm going to take the bull by the horns then and teach him mastery of the skill that the other gender could never perform. That other gender may be playing pro basketball (without dunking) or even playing high school football (only kickers, snicker), but they will never pee standing up! Huzzah!

As an aside, I want to share with all of the ladies out there the secrets of male genitalia/bathroom oddities that my wife had never discovered before having a boy at home.

1. Pushing it between our legs when we have to go number two. Unfortunately, the muscle that governs the pee reflex and the poo reflex is the same, and sometimes it's hard to control which comes out when. Women know this when they go, I'm sure, but they don't have to push their junk between their legs when going like a transvestite prostitute trying to convince an in the closet married guy that he's actually picking up a woman (wink, wink).

2. We can't control it once it starts. When my son has an accident, my wife doesn't understand why he suddenly can't stop it and then hold it until she can get him to the potty. You see, it's like closing the barn door while the cows are on their way out. Or it's like closing the dyke while the water is flowing out. Or it's like...I'll stop with the similes. You get the picture. It isn't happening. Especially when you get to be in your late thirties, you REALLY have no control. Once I was in the bathroom while my son was crying, and my wife wondered why I couldn't stop and go to check on him. "I just can't," was my response. She didn't understand.

3. Because it's there. The explanation as to why males from one year-old to ninety year-olds pull, adjust, scratch their junk. The only limitation is that if it hurts, we don't do it. Except if that turns you on.

What I Am reading to my kids, part 6

Mister Dog
by Margaret Wise Brown

My wife found a steal at Costco. A package of a dozen or so classic Golden Books bundled together for something like 20 bucks. My daughter has been having me read each one of them over the nights, and some are very entertaining, such as Richard Scarry's book Good Night, Little Bear, but one in particular has me scratching my head. It's like a Salvador Dali/Luis Bunuel movie.

Mister Dog was written by Margaret Wise Brown, of Goodnight Moon fame, and I am trying to figure out what she was trying to convey with the book. Many of the Golden Books come out with some dated storylines and references, and I admire them for their boldness in doing so and still being sold in an age when parents complain about the supposed "anti-Christian" message of the Harry Potter books, or the nearly salty language in the Junie B. Jones series. The Golden Books are by no means irreverent, rather, they represent a time when books had a peculiar imagination and weren't as concerned with marketing or whether the author could reach a mass audience. They're often whimsical and never didactic, which to me kills chidren's books.

The story concerns a dog named Crispin's Crispian, named so, the author explains, because he has no owner. Yes, he owns himself. He has droopy straw hat and a corn cob pipe, and looks like the protagonist of Uncle Tom's Cabin, or at least, Uncle Ben, but images from slavery and reconstruction nonetheless. Not quite sure what they're trying to imply, but that's neither here nor there, because then it gets weirder. First he acts like a poor person/slave who owns himself, standing on his hind legs and living in a house, and then he takes himself for a walk. Suddenly, he breaks character, goes down on four legs, and frolics with the other dogs, tongue wagging and slobbering. Yes, those slaves always reverting to their true selves in the end.

He goes on with his walks and comes across a little boy who also owns himself, in contrast to the dog's usual servitude. Crispian invites him back to his house, and they pick up a bunch of meat and have a feast at home. A picture shows the dog eating 'meat soup' and the boy cutting a steak bigger than his head. That's what makes the scene Bunuelesque - like the excessive feast of the capitalists in the Exterminating Angel. Brown even mentions their fat stomachs being filled. The most jarring part is the admonishing passage about Crispian being a conservative (italics hers) and how he likes everything just so, sunrises at sunrise, sunsets at sunset, and his house always in order. I chuckle because conservative is such a loaded term these days. I expected her to say the dog advocates free market economics and family values. After their Roman feast and over literate explanation of Crispian's character, he and the little go to bed. Seperate beds, because that would not be conservative. No, I don't mean to imply interspecies pederasty (Brown does call him a 'funny old dog'), rather, that cosleeping is such a pinko hippie thing to do.

What is most strange about the book is how the length of the story doesn't feature the conciseness of a children's book, but rather the story elements kind of crash together like a 10 car pileup on the highway. It's meandering. It isn't simple and the concept of a dog owning itself is way over the heads of kids these days. Kids this young don't get self-reflexiveness, because they have to get to know the standards of story and language before they can find something like that entertaining. When you say "that's my dog", or "that's their dog" its really a convenient way of expressing a concept like that. Kids love a pet, and feel attached enough to it to refer to it as 'their' pet, but really they think of pets as another person. Adults feel attached to their pets in a different way, but kids think of them as friends. The concept of ownership isn't even a consideration until they're older. The whole 'conservative' business is equally baffling. I half-expected a footnote at the bottom of that page referring to an Adam Smith essay. Why the author felt the need to illustrate this point to children is unsettling, like it was an apology in the 1950s for their parents being so square and that you needed to do what they say.

Then again, maybe that isn't a bad message. Who cares that the messenger is a surrealist.

What I am reading to my kids, part 5

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
by
Jon Scieszka
Illustrations by Lane Smith

My daughter has had me read this to her every night this week, even though I don't think she's old enough to understand it. I don't know if I really get it either, as its self-reflexive take on classic fairy tales and references to authorship are over the heads of most kids, and I kind of scratch my head at its appeal.

I don't how this book came into our collection, but my wife is a collector of childrens' books (I once bought her an early edition of Alice in Wonderland as a gift) so I am assuming this book is hers. It's a bit too sophisticated for a four year-old. She has other books as well that she's reluctant to let the kids read, especially since my one year old son ripped a page out of her signed copy of Ray Bradbury's Switch on the Night.

My daughter, I think, has a fascination with weirdness that is typical of school age children, and may be ahead of other kids her age in that respect, so that's the current appeal of Stinky Cheese Man. Case in point are the illustrations, which look like something that Ralph Steadman would dream up for a kids' book. Steadman is the guy who illustrated the cover of Pink Floyd's album The Wall, exacting a look somewhere between Monty Python caricature of British Society, Nazi propaganda posters and the paranoia of heroin addiction. Not that the illustrations for this are so grotesque, but they are meant to be caricaturish and whimsical a la Hieronymous Bosch and will elicit comments from my daughter like, "Why does Ducky Lucky have so many eyes?" (Answer, in my head: Because the illustrator is trying to show home crazily shaking his head) or "Why does the giant have a triangle nose?" (Answer: Because he's actually the scarecrow from Wizard of Oz).

The stories themselves are parodies of Chicken Licken, where the sky doesn't fall, but the book's table of contents does, of the Frog Prince, where he just wants to be kissed by the princess, and Jack and the Beanstalk, which doesn't technically get told. Instead the Giant complains that he always gets shafted by the fairly tale before it ever gets off the ground and the book depicts Jack's escape from his clutches by speaking in sentences that get smaller and smaller on the page until the Giant falls asleep.

The parody is a mixed bag. The Little Red Riding Hood parody is called "Little Red Running Shorts" and it tells how the quick running Riding Hood outruns the wolf to Granny's heading the main plot point of the original story off at the pass. So it trails off into absurdity. For kids its clever, but to me it's redundant. The only original story, the Stinky Cheese Man, just shows the aforementioned character as a prankster who tries to get people to chase him for some unspecified reason, but everyone avoids him and his smell until he dies in a river. That's it. Certainly no one can accuse it of plot complication.

I think the book isn't really meant for kids at all. Kids don't understand the concept of meta-narrators and archetypes that would be more appropriate to college class on semiology. What's more, it's cynical. Kids have enough time to be cynical in adolescence, and it's wink-wink, look how controversial sensibility, but it wears thin after the first read. The parody isn't sophisticated enough for me, as an adult, but kids might like being confused and seeing those Bosch-y drawings.

But despite my initial reaction, there is much to like about the book. It's very witty at points. I liked the Princess and the Bowling Ball story, a take on the princess and the pea. The prince in the story is a little peeved that his parents have put such exacting standards on his potential mates, and is frustrated because none fit the bill of being able to sense a pea under 100 mattresses. So he puts a bowling ball under the sleeping princess he really wants so that there is no way she can fail the test. The mashup of stories where Cinderella meets Rumplestilskin is also worth a chuckle.

I just wish I was kid sometimes, back to when weirdness was, you know, weird.

Remembering classic toys, I

The Viewmaster

The viewmaster was introduced in 1939. It's still around, though considering the advancements of media since then, it's a wonder kids would play with it. Essentially, it's a kids version of a peep show. You put those little disks of pictures in, press the lever and presto! Instant depth.

I probably had a lot of the viewmaster disks, but I only remember three; views of the Grand Canyon (which was apparently one of the original disks), Disneyland and scenes from the movie Old Yeller. I also have one eye that doesn't work all that well, and I could never take advantage of the illusion of 3-D that that the Viewmaster offered. You would see the same image with each eye, the brain put them together and make forced perspective. Actually, considering that most people's eyes don't work exactly the same and that one eye is generally dominant, it's wonder that it worked for anyone or that 3-D movies ever became popular.

Really, the value of a Viewmaster is that you could look at pictures and never worry about your parents sneaking up on you and wondering why you might be lingering on a photograph too long. The image on the Disneyland disk of the giant eye looking at your through a microscope on the old "Adventures in Inner Space" ride was a particular obsession of mine, both because it scared me when I was a kid and because I wanted to get over being scared by it through viewing repetition. It never worked, but I didn't want anyone to think I was weird. I could look at it through the privacy of the viewmaster. I'm surprised the adult film industry never figured out a way to make bootleg porn discs for the Viewmaster. Then you would see every business man on an airplane looking at viewmaster.

Some of the Disneyland photographs tried to show the inside of the dark rides like Peter Pan, but they had to take the pictures with some ancient 1950s flash camera that made it look like some tabloid photographs. Two bespectacled, poodle-skirted riders glaring at a flash camera: Headline: "Caught! Riders necking on Peter Pan! And smoking some Mary Jane!".

Old Yeller was a particular obsession of mine as kid, probably the cruelest movie ever produced by Disney. The Viewmaster illustrated the story: cute little pup, boy bonds with dog, dog saves boy's life, then dog gets rabies and euthanasia as payment. I remember a photograph of the father in the movie stalking the dog with a shotgun. Of course, we know what happened next. I don't know why I always watched the movie like a festering sore that I examined every minute in the mirror. It was always on TV and used to watch it endlessly, and then I would relive the movie in the Viewmaster. Come to think of it, I think I spent half my childhood crying and Old Yeller was the cause. I still can't look at the bags of Old Yeller dog food in the supermarket. Way to go, Disney.

The Grand Canyon images were unspectacular, but to me I imagined them to be like the lunar surface. I didn't get to see the Grand Canyon in the flesh until I was 23. I did have an opportunity to visit it when I was 10 because we were travelling through the area, but we had to make a choice between visiting it and the Dinosaur National Monument, due to time constraints and because my stepfather was an asshole. I was in the throes of the dinosaur curriculum in elementary school I chose the skeletons. I still had the Viewmaster version to fall back on.

Eat Some Mercury, It's Good for You

A couple of news stories - The first one about a TV show premiering tomorrow, where the main plot line is about a man suing a drug manufacturer because he thinks a vaccine they created caused his child to develop autism:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2008-01-28-eli-stone-side_N.htm?csp=34

The second is another article about a study done with information from the real world recently to show that mercury in vaccines is OK, countering research from a few years ago about said link:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080130/hl_nm/autism_mercury_dc_1

The main issue is with thimersol, a preservative used in vaccines which has a small amount of mercury in it, and has been used for decades in childhood immunizations. I understand the concern that the American Academy of Pediatrics has, namely, that what they think is hysteria on the part of parents has caused the immunization rates to fall, and thus expose all children to the threat of serious childhood diseases.

A lot of this comes from a recent, deep distrust most people have developed of the medical establishment and their expertise, and the AAP is thinking that a TV show is going to feed that distrust by spreading more hysteria. First, I don't think enough people are going to watch the show, called "Eli Stone", but now that they've raised a stink about it, everyone will, countering their intentions.

I'm not going to comment on the problems with medicine in the United States (for that I defer to Michael Moore's movie "Sicko"), but I'm going to raise the 'no, duh' question. Why do we have mercury anywhere near children?

I remember from my 10th grade chemistry class that mercury, even in small doses, is one of the most poisonous substances on the planet. Wouldn't it be prudent not to put any of it near a child's fragile physiology? Perhaps vaccines are necessary, but is mercury necessary to make it?

It begs a larger question of how we got to the point of accepting things in our food, air, water, households and medicine that really shouldn't be there. I remember as a kid reading a story about the FDA standards for the acceptable amounts of insect matter in boxes of raisins - one fly per box. There's also the acceptable amounts of lead and mercury in our water. That's OK. Wait a second, one of the historical reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire was that the great engineers of that society used lead piping to bring water to the cities, thereby causing widespread retardation, learning disabilities and reproductive sterilization. Back then, they didn't know that lead was poisonous, with the most advanced science in the Western World. Whose to say we have such foresight?

The debate over does it or doesn't it cause autism to me is moot. It is akin to the whole global warming debate. The fact that warming is or isn't occurring is debatable, though most science leans towards an affirmative, and thus can be discounted and we can continue to rationalize all those things that cause with a blind conscience. However, what is overlooked is this: pollution is not a good thing. Chemicals which are poisonous byproducts or manufacturing or combustion engines or what have you cannot be continually poured into us without some consequences.

So, can we get rid of the mercury now?

How to Deal with 'Dead'

Not a book review post, but this one is commons situation with all parents.

How do you broach taboo subjects with children? Those ideas and concepts that adults have more or less embraced as part real life, such as death. Actually, I wouldn't want to call them 'taboo' necessarily, they are a real and are not something that should provoke any anxiety. Nor is it like John Huston's character in "Chinatown", Hollis Mulwray, who covers over his granddaughter's eyes at the end, shielding her from the sight of her mother's brains being splattered over the car like some religious zealot, a granddaughter (spoiler if you haven't seen the movie) that he fathered with his daughter. I mean, not serious hypocrisy.

No, I mean explaining the concept of 'dead' to a toddler. A dead animal by the side of road. Explaining why my grandparents are no longer around. Explaining what happened to Cinderella's parents when you read the story or watch the Disney movie. In fact, pick any Disney movie. One or more of the parents of the main characters is often dead.

It is of a particular sticking point with my wife and I because we are both vegetarians and have raised our children to be, too. My daughter sees kids in her school eating, say, chicken nuggets, and doesn't seem to grasp that it is indeed a chicken that once had feathers, pooped and hopped around a coop. The day will come when we have to explain to her why we're vegetarians and the answer we give will invariably involve the words 'kill' or 'dead.' "We don't eat dead animals, honey," it will start, and she will likely then cry because she realizes that her friends are eating a cute little pig rather than sweet and sour pork.

My four year-old daughter doesn't grasp 'dead' because she doesn't understand the idea of permanence, or rather that something can change and be that way permanently. She does understand a basic dichotomy; for example, she can distinguish between what she calls 'regular' and 'toy', the stuff that's real and the stuff that's make-believe. You would think that she would then understand the distinction between 'living' and 'dead', since that follows the same logical distinction as real and make-believe, but she still doesn't understand 'dead' because she still thinks that something that goes away permamently will eventually come back, or be magically restored.

I've explained dead in the Cinderella story by saying that her parents went away and will never come back. In a child's mind, that still leaves the possibility that her parents will come back, since they exist out there, somewhere. If Cinderella's father came back, he would've looked at her stepmother and thought, "why did I marry such a horrible woman?" Then he would've left town, Cinderella never would've gone to the bal, and generations of young girls would've been left without the unrealistic wish fulfillment of marrying a prince, and men wouldn't have had to suffer the comparison.

Some parents will act like Hollis Mulwray and hypocritically shield their kids from ideas such as death, or worse, explanations of where babies come from. Some parents would rather be cruel when explaining death, saying that someone such as a child's pet bunny left and wasn't coming back by suggesting that it doesn't want to.

Me, I will treat the subject in the way I've always spoken to my kids. Using honesty. I will be honest and consistent with my explanation of where Cinderella's parents are until the day comes when the lightbulb comes on in my daughters head. That or I'll elaborate by saying that Cinderella's parents hate her so that's why they're not coming back. And top it off by explaining that the prince likes men.

What I am reading to my kids, part 4

The Missing Piece
by Shel Silverstein

I bought this book for my daughter for her 2nd birthday, and she is now 4, so this book has made a regular appearance at night time readings for two years now. It came a little late in my own childhood for my enjoyment. Silverstein's The Giving Tree was one of my favorite books as a child, but I am going to wait to unleash such a sad childrens' book until she is a little older. Anyway, as I have read this book over the two years my daughter has taken certain parts of it and always makes the same comment at whatever point that is. The comment she makes keeps changing, but the book seems to give her a lot to chew on. It's nice to think that in an age where every form of media is available for immediate consumption, whether it be movies, TV, and music; media that goes into sensual overdrive in order to get little eyes and ears to pay attention to it, that a book that is simple black and white line drawings suggests so much to a young mind.

The first line of the book, where a circle with a mouth cut out of it (sort of pre-pacman) is noted that it was "missing a piece. And it was not happy." suggests that this has been a condition for the circle for a long time. it didn't decide that it was missing a piece on day, as part of the plot. Also, interestingly for childrens' books, the circle is referred to as "it". Most books have a character with a specific gender with the stories geared toward that gender and the characters performing specific gender roles. The circle then sets out on his day, looking for a missing triangular piece that will fit in his mouth. The first one he comes upon rejects him. The next four don't complement him for some reason, begin too big, small, the wrong shape, etc. Finally he comes upon a triangle that fit and accepts him. The circle then realizes, however, that he can't be who he is with it, so he let's it down and goes back to singing about missing a piece.

The story really has 4 interpretations:

1. That one must have another person to complement the other, a companion or friend, rather than accepting that it's also fun to be alone. The addition of the piece makes the circle realize that he can't do the really fun things when he is 'complete.'

2. That someone must have something to possess to be complete. Perhaps Silverstein's comment on consumer society. I don't think kids would ever get that. Maybe that just a message for the adults.

3. That it addresses possible psychological anxiety about a missing sex organ, or presence of one, thus the lack of gender in the circle character. Silverstein may have done this subconsciously, don't you think?

4. This one is really for the adults - at the end of the story, after he gets rid of the piece that fit, he goes right back to being unhappy about missing a piece. This is an unconventional resolution in the world of happy endings. The Hollywood version would have the circle having a realization and saying, "Hey! I really would be happy without the piece," and going on to be Deepak Chopra. But no, he goes right back to anxiously feeling that he's missing a piece. In other words, some people would rather be unhappy than to deal with the compromises that having a companion might have, and further, that some people relish being miserable than to take the risk of being happy.

So my daughter always reacts in these parts. (I'll use letters for this list. Don't want you to think I'm writing for the American Film Institute and getting obsessed with numbered and ranked lists):

a. At the part where Silverstein outlines what the circle likes to do, he says it likes to "smell a flower," to which my daughter replies, "Just like me!"

b. When one of the pieces that doesn't fit breaks, my daughter gets distressed. When the circle goes on an adventure and gets an arrow in his mouth, she thinks that it's the broken piece, since that's the last one that doesn't fit in the story. She says, "It's fixed."

c. She always looks at me when I sing the circle's song about finding the missing piece with the piece in his mouth, because I imitate what that would sound like. It's a cross between Marlon Brando in the Godfather mumbling, and a thirteen year-old with a mouth full of too big braces.