To Always See the Squirrels Through the Trees

“When you were young and your heart was an open book
You used to say live and let live
(You know you did, you know you did, you know you did)
But if this ever-changing world in which we live in
Makes you give in and cry—
Say live and let die…”

—Paul McCartney

The world around us slowed to a near stop. Focused and fiery, we ignited the air between us.

"Do you want to go home?"

There we were: a battle of pure impulse and reactive wills. I held Bryce firmly by her shoulders after I had placed her in the shopping cart seat. Bryce held me fast with her eyes, defiant fury unleashed over and over again like rapid-fire solar flares. Shards of melting self-control rained down upon us.

"No, no, no!"

I started to lift her out of the cart and then...

Twenty minutes earlier I knew it would be a stretch with me in charge and taking both girls to Trader Joe's for our weekly shopping run. As soon as we got to the store both girls wanted the kiddie shopping cart to push around, but there was only one, which was how the fracas began. Since Thursday, the Mama has been in the classes to become a certified instructor for Kidpower, and I've been helping case for the children more than usual, especially this weekend.

For those keeping score at home, Kidpower Teenpower Fullpower International, known as Kidpower for short, is a global nonprofit leader in personal safety and violence prevention education.

I'm very proud of the Mama doing this, and I of course will support and help in any way I can. But any parent responsible for the lion's share of childrearing, or any portion of it, will tell you that it's hard enough taking one young child to the grocery store (or any store that's not a toy store).

But two young children, one of whom is the Brycinator? C'mon. Lovely squirrels they are, but still.

...and then I stopped myself to channel the Mama and principles of positive discipline. Beatrice looked at me as if saying, You can do it Daddy.

Get into your child's world.

"Bryce, I know you want to go home, but why don't you help me and Bea find the Tiki Guy so you can get a sucker and Daddy will shop super fast? Then we'll go to the duck park."

"Okay."

That's when Beatrice exclaimed: "I see the Tiki Guy, there in the surfboard!"

And we were off, suckers in hand. Super fast the shopping was, and when I couldn't find something on the Mama grocery list within 20 seconds, then I quickly asked one of the friendly Trader Joe's employees. Finding the cute little stuffed Tiki Guy hidden in plain sight throughout the store is always a fun distracting pastime for kid's at Trader Joe's, and it certainly helped me. Ultimately Bryce and I survived and Beatrice was happy to help me carry some of our goods in the little shopping cart.

Yep, the part when the Daddy's in charge of the girls and grocery shopping becomes a precarious balance of emotional intelligence and a deadly race against end of times.

Plus there's always a park to play in for the aftermath. Ah, to always see the squirrels through the trees. 

"What does it matter to you?

When you got a job to do

You got to do it well

You got to give the other fellow—"

Love.

Always Be the Titter to Our Totter

SPOILER ALERT: I'm giving away the Big Hero 6 climax, so read on at your own risk...

The part where Baymax sacrifices himself to save Hiro and the daughter of the misguided bad guy. That's the part that hit her so hard and fast that every fiber of her little being ached with sadness and burned with free-flowing tears.

So much so we had to stop the Big Hero 6 movie for a bit. Bryce cried and cried, struggling to breathe and regain the composure she had prior to that point. Over 15 minutes later we finally resumed and finished the movie.

Yes, we know it was a PG-rated movie and there was violence and death and dark action and loss and sadness and why in God's name were we letting our four-year-old watch this thing. But we've been melting our children's brains since we inadvertently let them watch The Incredibles two years ago thinking it was G, when it was actually PG, so there's that proud parenting milestone.

But hey, they're both Disney movies with heart-felt familial themes and the girls had been really wanting to see Big Hero 6, so we did, and they loved it.

When Bryce cried you could see the loss on in her wet, bleary red eyes and puffy ashen face. It was palatable, visceral and it glowed with the degenerative density of a white hot dwarf star. Her life experience may be very little to date, but mercy me does life move this little fireball. The Mama held her close and both Beatrice and me consoled her as well.

After the movie Bryce wanted us to make a Baymax for her to play with, but not the real one. She was very clear about it not being real, her emotional response still raw loss. I made one, although I'm not sure if it ended up more like a ghostly E.T. than a short-armed Baymax.

Anyway, Bryce is like me this way, the intense deep feeler who's up and down and up and down and all heart smeared all over her sleeves and every other inch of her, light years from impulse control. Even when I finally overcame the impulse drive, I still cry at almost anything laced with sentimentality, loss and redeeming hope. The Mama loves that about her man for those of you keeping score at home.

And conversely like me (something the Mama doesn't care for), Bryce can be a Daddy Goat Gruff when she's "all done" with whatever she's doing and not afraid to let you know that. The bark without a bite doesn't make it right, but dammit, when we're all done we're all done.

Up and down and up and down -- cry, snap, sniff.

Ah, my baby girl feeler -- unlike her sister and mother, both of whom respond with uncomfortable (but heartfelt) inappropriate tittering laughter when faced with sadness and tragedy. We love them, but c'mon. It's just weird.

Anyway, I hope in 40 years Bryce will feel just as deeply as she does today, that she'll cry at the sticky sweet and the sad -- and that Beatrice and the Mama will always be the titter to our totter.

The Trick Fuse of Firecracker Bryce

I watched as she scraped the fork back and forth along the side of the bookshelf. Then she poked it a couple of times.

"Amy, please don't let her do that," I pleaded with the Mama.

The Mama didn't respond.

"Bryce, stop it," I growled.

"Bryce, what's your idea?" the Mama asked.

There it was -- the positive discipline response. But Bryce kept on scraping.

"Amy, please don't ask how she's feeling right now. Stop her from gouging the shelf. Thank you."

"Sweetie, she's not gouging the shelf. C'mon."

Amy sighed. "Bryce, Daddy doesn't want you doing that. Please don't scratch the shelf."

As soon as the Mama took Bryce's fork away, Bryce cried out in protest and shook her head. That's when I saw the fuse: a small, white, frayed cord that protruded from the lower back of her sweet little toddler head. I imagined that it originated deep in her reptilian brain's core, completely detached from her developing frontal lobes.

And sometimes the fuse smelled of gasoline.

All it took then was a single spark to ignite it. 

Sizzle. Hiss. Boom.

More like -- Ka-Boom.

Such is the life with firecracker Bryce, and the closer she gets to turning four years old, the shorter the fuse seems to get. She's been exploding, hitting, yelling and crying at a exponential rate -- the classic temper tantrum. Sometimes the tantrums take what feels like an inordinate amount of time to extinguish, the fuse lighting over and over again like a trick candle.

It's especially difficult when we're in public, like just yesterday at the old fashioned 4th of July at Wilder Ranch State Park when Bryce fights, screams and thrashes while the rest of the world watches her cruel parents drag her away after calming her fails.

According to the Positive Discipline folks, it's not easy for most of us (children and adults included) to verbalize our feelings when they are upset, and there are those of us who can't verbalize their feelings at all at any time. Children (and unfortunately still too many adults) haven't learned how to articulate what they need and want. Scheduling time to have family meetings, talking through the problems, teaching the child to brainstorm for solutions -- all these things are supposed to help snuff out the fuse and calm the child. Temper tantrums often occur when children feel controlled.

I know that positive discipline doesn't mean being so completely permissive that there is no discipline at all, but it does mean we need to "both kind and firm in our actions. Kindness shows respect for the child. Firmness shows respect for the needs of the situation and for parents. Spanking and punitive time out are not kind."

Except when the child is gouging my bookshelf or smacking me across the face.

Sigh. Okay, even then, and even if it takes forever for the fuse to go out.

When experiencing hot things, my grandfather used to say, "Hot as a firecracker on the fourth of July!"

With Bryce, it's more like, "Hot as a Molotov cocktail on the eve of end times!"

She's our fearless little headstrong force to be reckoned with. Look out world. This kid means business.

Happy Independence Day indeed.

The Joy of Zenning Hard and Well

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." --Thoreau

So many things we want to pass on to them, to teach them, to arm them the ability to disarm under duress, without backing down and with minimal compromise when needed in their ongoing search for self and relative happiness.

Our children, genetic blend upon genetic blend, whether ours or others, hopefully will learn and development in a way that sets them up for success. Not success in the way that we initially think of it -- oodles of money, security and some monumental impact on the world -- but success in the way they live, in what they see, in how they react to every incremental circumstance good, bad or in between.

Success from the joy of Zen. (We may joke about the realities of finding oneself and achieving enlightenment, but I'll be damned if I don't have the last laugh.)

However, I hope, but can only imagine, that our girls' future is brighter and more opportune than the generation before them. According to Pew Research, "Millennials are also the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than their two immediate predecessor generations (Gen Xers and Boomers) had at the same stage of their life cycles."

And yet, according to the same recent research, they're the most optimistic about their economic prospects. But they're also quite distrustful of others compared to other generations. What a conundrum. I hope that's not the case with our girls' generation.

Again, we hope we're helping them "see" as clearly as possible, regardless of what they're "looking at," using positive discipline so as to encourage healthy emotional intelligence development. Easier said than done for me, since I'm such a grump jumper.

Meaning that, although I've come a long way with my own "Zenning hard" self (continuous non-reactive "balance" development takes a lot of energy), it's too easy for me to jump to being a grumpy Daddysaur in the face of, oh, things like a broken sewer line six feet down in our front yard costing us thousands of unplanned for dollars. 

Holy crap indeed. Yep, whatever stink life throws in front of us, grumping jumping ain't solving much of anything except making others, and yourself, feel like crap. (I'll end the sewage metaphors now.)

And did I tell you I dropped my iPhone face first onto frozen concrete? Did you hear that glass shatter? Sure that's pretty mild with all the other crappy (sorry) things and people that can happen to us in life, but most kids are grump jumpers by default, and impulse control is important to learn and no time like the pending mindful presence of toddlerville today. 

The Mama and I want our girls to be relentless in their search for self and relative happiness while celebrating those who both complement, and challenge, the journey. 

Zen hard, my girls. And Zen well.

We hold our protest signs on high

Gun control may or may not be one of the answers in the U.S. to curb violence and violent deaths, but globally, impulse control certainly is.

In fact, a big misconception is that we're so much more violent today than our ancestors were yesterday. Media exploitation aside, the data actually shows rates of violence and violent death have declined over the past few thousand years, and our ability to empathize, curb our violent impulses and value human life has never been higher. Steven Pinker does an amazing job of explaining this all in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The rates of violence today really are lower than they've ever been.

Even those experts who don't necessarily agree with all the violence-declining theories Pinker postulates in his book do agree that statistically speaking we've gotten less violent as a species, not more violent. And the increase of impulse control and how we value human life is a big part of that.

Until it's not and control is again lost in horrific examples where we regress quite rapidly, the latest in the news makes it seem like there's a crazy on every corner ready to kill us and our children.

But it was the news I saw posted from my friends at The Pixel Project about the gang-rape in New Delhi of a 23-year-old medical student, and her eventual death from her injuries, that really stopped me cold. Of course I immediately thought of my own two young daughters and the fact that they could be 23-year-old medical students someday and that even with the overall decline in violence, violence against women is still a worldwide scourge.

Many women's rights advocates say that rapes, sex crimes and violent deaths go unreported in many parts of the world, even in the U.S. And for those reported, nearly 1.3 million women and about 835,000 men are assaulted by their partner every year in the United States.

We're not talking random rape here like in the recent India example. According to a National Women’s Study that sampled a total of 4,008 women, 13 percent of all adult women become rape victims during their lifetime. About 9 percent of the female victims were raped by their husbands or ex-husbands, nearly 10 percent were raped by their boyfriends or ex-boyfriends. Additionally, 11 percent of the female victims were raped by their fathers or stepfathers, and 16 percent were raped by other relatives.

The outrage in India has sparked protests and a cry for justice, but it also needs to be a cry for self-control and an even greater value of human life, for those we know and those we don't.

The picture of protesting Indian schoolchildren holding up declarative signs moves me to write yet again about putting an end to violence against women and intimate partner violence for both women and men, to renew my investment in 2013 in generating empathy, increasing impulse control from the day we're born, and elevating a little higher, however incremental, our value of one another, our children and our children's children.

Do Not Touch Me, My Dress Is Not A Yes

Indeed it is not. The Mama and I and our girls concur and we hold our signs on high.