The Sequel: Toddler or Sailor?

My younger son, The Sequel, is learning to talk. This results in many moments that will ultimately be used down the road to make fun of him in front of friends, family members and the general public.

Among these moments came the other day, when The Sequel looked upon one of his toy vehicles and called out for it, yelling "TRUCK! TRUCK! TRUCK! TRUCK!"

Except it didn't quite come out that way. Instead, replace the "TR" in each of those words and replace it with an "F."

Uh, no kid. "Truck" doesn't start with an "F."

And then, today, as I picked The Sequel up from day care, I was informed that he might say something "inappropriate" this evening. Apparently, they were reading a book about pumpkins. And The Sequel kept talking about the gourds over and over again.

Still, I had no idea how pumpkin could turn into something inappropriate.

So I asked him to say "pumpkin," and got my answer. Let's just say this: remove the "m" and the second "p" so he says "pukkin'!" You get the idea from here.

Now I have to instruct The Sequel on pronunciation. I just hope we don't see a truck full of pumpkins in a public area filled with nuns and teachers before he learns.

The Great Green Pepper Battle

The Sequel routinely thinks we're trying to starve him. When we get him home in the evening, he begins demanding food, loudly, and doesn't quit until he's satisfied with the provisions being set before him. Because I'm the household cook, the result is that I get screamed at until I'm finished preparing the meal. It's just like my days in high school working at a fast food restaurant.

But that's nothing compared with The Boy, who quite unlike his newer sibling believes not that we're trying to starve him, but that we're trying to poison him. He doesn't trust anything I make, and that goes triple if it's something I make from scratch, rather than something produced from a box.

Indeed, the better the food I make, the less my kid is likely to eat it. If it's nuked and bright green, he'll eat it as if he hasn't eaten in a month. If it's painstakingly made over the course of a week, it'll sit on his plate until it develops mold. One should never judge their cooking based upon the views of a child, your ego will scream and run away after about three meals.

(Incidentally, it's not like my youngest kid eats everything willingly, in fact, he's just as preferential something out of the box and nuked as the elder one; the difference is his major fussing period comes before the meal, whereas my eldest one's complaining comes afterward; in effect, it means every mealtime comes with a fussing prelude and a whining postlude.)

It was at one of these meals where The Boy recently decided that he wasn't going to consume green peppers.

We have a household rule: Nobody gets any sort of after-meal treat, save for a fruit or vegetable, unless an entire meal is consumed. As The Boy generally avoids eating at regular mealtimes, this saves us on treat costs, and it gets him to eat things like apples and grapes and carrots. But on this night, we were going to go to Wendy's for one of man's greatest inventions, the Frosty.

He really wanted that Frosty.

But he didn't want the green peppers. His desire for a Frosty was in direct conflict with his alleged hatred of green peppers.

The anti-green-pepper view won out, initially.

Now, he eats green peppers all the time. The Boy is a salsa FREAK. If he could get the chunks up through a straw, The Boy would drink it. Instead, he uses chips simply as a method of getting salsa from a bowl into his mouth. He eats it constantly. And so we pointed out that one of the top ingredients, after tomatoes (which he also refuses to eat), is -- you got it -- peppers. Jalapeno peppers, but peppers nevertheless.

Didn't phase him.

So we told him he'd get no Frosty.

"I don't want a Frosty."

Yes, you do. Don't lie to me.

"That's OK," he said. "I can get one tomorrow."

No, not tomorrow, we said. We're going tonight, anyway. You just won't get a Frosty.

This is the short version. In sum, the battle of wills took what seemed like hours, during which he finally, painfully, slowly, ate the peppers, bit by teeny, tiny bit. He hid some, we uncovered them. He coated them with cheese, put them atop chips, and still ate them like it was his last meal and its completion would culminate in a trip to the electric chair.

I'm afraid that The Boy gets this stubbornness from yours truly (Please try not to be shocked). I'm what my sisters politely call "pigheaded," as was my father before me, and his father before him. Indeed, there is a long line of pigheaded Maze men, and my eldest son is only carrying on the long, proud tradition. So I'm a pigheaded dad of a pigheaded son, meaning that periodic battles of wills will take place in my household. Pity my poor wife. Especially when The Boy hits his teenage years.

In the end, he finished his green peppers (WOOHOO! I WON!). We all went to Wendy's in a steady, cold rain and got our Frostys. We took them home and ate them. And nobody fussed one bit.

But the next day we had pizza. Because I can only handle so many mealtime battles.

The Meltowns, Will They Ever Stop?

I decided I wanted to do only a little cooking this evening -- not enough cooking for a full-fledged meal, but enough cooking that a restaurant would be too much. So we went to Papa Murphy's. I bought a pizza, took it home, and threw it in the oven. My youngest boy, The Sequel, was with me.

He was, as is all kids, eager for pizza. But he decided to lodge a protest upon my decision to put said pizza into the oven. "Father," he said. "I am absolutely famished and have not the patience to wait for our dinner to be finished."

Only it came out this way: "WAAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGGGGHHHHWAAAAAAAUAUAUAUUUUUUUUGGHH!"

And on it went, for the full 15 minutes, making it the single longest pizza in the history of mankind.

The Sequel is indeed fully into the dreaded Tantrum Phase, which is so dreaded that I've now written multiple posts on it over both of my child's young lives. In these phases, tantrums come often. They almost never come with any sort of warning. They are almost always absent any semblance of reason (such as this: "a pizza needs to go into the oven before it can be consumed.")

And meltdowns have a unique ability to slow time to an absolute crawl. Time never, ever moves slower than it does when your child is going through a tantrum, making it seem like the mental breakdown is going to last roughly until you begin collecting social security, assuming you haven't been on disability over your own mental breakdown in the meantime.

(There are only two other moments in life when time moves nearly as slow as it does during a tantrum: when you're sitting in traffic and have to use a restroom and when you're at the DMV; then again, I recall some times in school when those last few minutes before the afternoon bell rang seemed to drag on forever; likewise, minutes spent in detention were pretty long, too, or so I've heard from, uh, friends who spent their high-school years in detention ... nevertheless, none of them quite match up to tantrum minutes.)

I might be saying this because this evening's tantrum came with a 15-minute timer. But I've gone through plenty a tantrum in my life, and several in recent vintage. He had one at the playground the other day -- a playground that was packed with kids and their parents; the kids were gawking; the parents were trying to look away, mostly because the tantrum only brought back bad memories.

And the Great Pizza Tantrum of 2010 came with a preview earlier this evening. That was when The Sequel decided to have a modest-sized meltdown over--you guessed it--my decision to wear a sweatshirt. "NO JACKET!" he kept saying. "NO JACKET!"

No jacket? You're going nuts over my outerwear?

There are some strategies for dealing with the meltdown. You can hold your child and hope that calms him down, but usually if it's a major meltdown that will do nothing but cause him to try and do a bellyflop toward the floor. My kid does this and twists his spine into various complex shapes in the process. If I were to do anything remotely similar now in my 40-year-old body I'd end up in the hospital. Or dead.

If I'm lucky, I can distract him. Sometimes I toss him on the bed and give him zerberts and then he laughs and forgets that he's supposed to be really, really angry over something that very moment. At the playground I put him on the slide -- a good slide cures all ills with my adrenaline junkie of a youngest son.

But, if you're unlucky and the meltdown is measured in megatons, then the only thing you can do is just let him sit there and be crazy for a while. This tests the limits of a typical parent's sanity, often resulting in comments like, "Why didn't I become a celibate monk? WHY??!" Such questions are usually pacified later, when The Sequel whips out his immense power of cute by saying things like "awesome!" or humming the Star Wars theme.

Still, when he is going through such meltdowns I just look at his older brother. While this requires me to overlook many of The Boy's faults, at least he doesn't have public meltdowns or even many private ones. "This crap won't last forever."

The Dork And the Braces

I have crooked teeth. They're not British Farmer crooked, but they definitely look like they'd been placed into my mouth during an earthquake. The two front teeth are large and make me look like an overgrown pink rabbit with small ears.

I didn't get braces in my youth, because my family lacked something called "money" or "dental insurance." I was a stupid kid and was all too glad to avoid braces. I had no desire to wear a large metal device on my head and in my mouth. I feared the pain and the ridicule and the odd rubber bands and the fact that you couldn't eat fun stuff like taffy or caramel, never mind that I was a chocolate and nuts guy. I also worried that my mom and/or sisters would discover that my mouth got better reception than the television antenna and thus I would spend my freetime standing atop our big console TV.

And so as my classmates used various implements to straighten their teeth, mine remained happily naked and crooked.

As I entered adulthood, two other issues combined to keep my teeth in their existing format. First, I'm loathe to spend any money on anything that isn't operated on some form of electrical charge or powered by an internal combustion engine. Second, and this is most important, I still fear braces.

But as I grew older my fear morphed from simple fear of what braces did to fear of looking like a 12-year-old.

Nobody wants to be seen as a middle schooler. I remember those years, and none too fondly. I certainly didn't want to look like one again, not in my adulthood. This desire to avoid looking middle schoolish begins in middle school and never really goes away. And when you're an adult, the longer you go without getting braces, the harder it is to get them. Indeed, I'm 40 now. And I honestly thought a few times to myself, "I'm not going to have my teeth for long, anyway, why should I straighten them now?"

The truth is, I can't quite explain why adults don't want to be seen with braces, we just don't. And if you don't believe me, look at an adult's mouth after he or she first gets braces. It doesn't open very much.

So I avoided braces. And then my dentist told me that one day I'll lose a tooth because my teeth are so crowded that they're shoving that one out. And the only way I'll keep said tooth is by getting braces. Crap. He had me. I did not want to lose a tooth. You should only lose a tooth if you get punched, and that punch can only come when you're valiantly protecting your family or a group of puppies or baby bunnies from a gang of angry muggers (who would want to mug a litter of puppies is beyond me, though I'm sure they'd be the type of people who would gladly knock one of your teeth out).

So I decided to get the braces. Of course, it took me a couple of years of full-on procrastination before I actually went to visit an orthodontist. But I went, mostly because The Wife reminded me about every five minutes. She denied this, but I think she didn't want to be married to a guy with a missing tooth.

And the truth is, companies have come out with these forms of braces that make the braces almost completely unnoticeable, which is good because I wouldn't want anybody to know that I'm actually trying to fix my teeth. I decided to get invisible braces called Invisalign -- actually, they call them "aligners," not braces. This may be because they're not true braces because they are removed before meals and don't look like a medieval torture device. It could also be a name cooked up by marketing people who don't want to be associated with braces.

In any event, I decided to get them. But I still had to get over my Fear of Being the Oldest Guy in the Room.

The good news is that I wasn't the oldest guy in the room when I got to the orthodontist's office, but everybody who was older than me had children in the chairs I was to sit in. I didn't exactly expect piles of Teen Beat magazines and Justin Bieber tunes to be blasted overhead, but there were some definite signs that this was a kid-oriented business. For one thing, as an "incentive" to make appointments, you get wooden coins and a cup to collect them in, and when you're done with braces you can exchange said coins for gift cards.

Most obnoxiously is what happens when a patient gets the braces off. An assistant gets out an old boombox and plays a bad recording of "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang. Everybody then stops what they're doing and claps their hands ("Am I at an orthodontist's office or a TGI Friday's?). The patient's picture is taken and a balloon makes an appearance.

On the day I witnessed this, the girl patient looked as if she was about to be dragged to the electric chair. Check that -- she looked like she'd prefer to be dragged to the electric chair. Can't say I blame her -- I would have asked to have the braces put back in just to avoid being the subject of that scene.

I've had these for more than two months now, meaning I have 22 months to go before I demand not to be the subject of that "celebration." But I do expect a gift card for my wooden coins.