I find myself, as a new parent, regretting some of the decisions that I made during the first couple of years raising the boy. Oh, not the major ones, I got those down: Read to your child 15 minutes a day, don't spike the milk, change their diapers daily, you know - my regrets are rather minor I guess, on a more personal level. Maybe 'regret' is the wrong word, maybe it would be better to say 'knowing what I know now, I wouldn't. . .', yeah, that's it. . . Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't ever be:1) Trying to substitute 'malk' for 'milk' - or really any basement brand food for the real deal. Let's face it, Oaty-o's do not equal Cheerios, and everyone knows it - even the 18 month old - and the perfect time to not discover the emerging pallate of your child is while driving through the middle of the California desert with 72 oz of Oaty-o's strewn across the back seat, 90 minutes away from the next rest stop with something sounding roughly equivalent in pitch and volume to a fire engine's siren coming from your back seat. Buy the damn Cheerios and save yourself the headache. The only potential benefit of buying basement (and I am making a distiction here between so-called bargain brands and basement, btw. Bargain hotdogs, for instance, are just rubbery and kinda nasty. Basement hotdogs turn your tongue magenta.) brands is the amusement of watching the child's face as he or she naively tries the new brand in front of you. The best I got from our 2-yr old was an immediate grimmace, and an audible 'plah', following by a 'da's yucky, papa' - and this was for freezer-o-pops, by the way. Who would have thought that you could screw up frozen sugar-water?
2) Encouraging solid foods too early. I always looked down upon those parents who sat with and fussed over their child during the first several months of solid food - scraping the pureed peas off of their chin back onto the spoon and placing it back in their mouth only to have half of it come back out again along with gurgling, when clearly their must be a better, less time-consuming way. I'll call my method 'the fish-feeding' method. I reasoned that, since this little guy was capable of crawling around and attempting to shove anything in his little mouth that he could find - and I believe that he in fact considered it his job, then the most reasonable method of feeding him would be to go along with a box of Cheerios and shake some out all over the floor in front of him, and wait for him to a) discover and b) eat them. Seriously. My wife nixed this idea, but suggested that we could put some on a paper plate on the ground and wait to see what happened. She expressed some concern that he might get a Cheerio stuck in his mouth and gag, but was willing to give it a shot. I poured the Cheerios on to a paper plate and waited. The discovery phase of the operation went fine - no problem in fact, but as the first Cheerio entered his mouth there was a gagging and wheezing sound, followed shortly by a jar of semi-digested pureed peas errupting from out of nowhere, in a near-perfect arc, showering the floor in a sickly green ooze. My wife had been videotaping at the time, so we have this moment for posterity. I haven't been able to live this one down yet.
3) Trusting the diaper. There will come a time when you rely on the diaper, and it will let your ass down (and often in a spectacular fashion). My time was 2:30 am September 1st, 2005. The kid was awake, in the middle of the night, because he was hungry, or so I had guessed. So I zombie'd my ass out of bed, got the stupid milk bottle, and went to take care of business. We sat, he fussed, but ultimately agreed to the milk. About half way through he seemed to be done, and as I went to sit him up to burp there was a horrendous sound which originiated from his back-end that propelled him skyward, eviscerating the diaper in the process. When he came down, I caught him - and everything else that came along with him. If you had happened on the scene 5 minutes later you would have seen something that looked as if the entire baby food aisle at the grocery store decided to empty itself on some poor chaps floor, a set of footprints leading away from said emptying, and distantly, the sound of running water, a screaming baby, and a cacophony of cuss words which would cling to the bathroom walls like so much baby food for weeks to come - which reminds me, I also wouldn't be:
4) Swearing in front of them. Oh, it's cute when you hit your thumb with a hammer and say 'dammit', and then they look up at you, make a crude attempt at a thumbs up (mimicking you) and say 'dabbit', but sometimes they pick up more than you might think, and will then wait for the perfect time to spring it on you. Like this one:
Grandma: 'Oh, darn-it, I meant to grab some malk at the store.'
Kid (admonishing Grandma, with the gravest of seriousness he can muster, shaking his head): 'We don't say that word Grandma. . . We don't say that fucking word.'
And his pronunciation of 'fucking' was bloody perfect, which was bloody hard to explain!
Why my wife objects to him saying 'darn-it' I'll never know, but whatever. It's better than mispronouncing words sometimes I guess. Right now we're working really hard on 'finger', becuase it comes out 'neeeeger' instead of 'finger' - and since we all hold hands everywhere we go, and since his hand is too small to hold an entire adult-sized hand, he is often heard to ask (in his outside voice, of course): 'Where my [finger]??', 'Okay, got my [finger]!!' as we're crossing the street or whatever. . . We're just waiting for that one to drop at the wrong time . . .
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