His name is Captain. I’ll bet he is the one responsible for your humidifier; after the refrigerator incident my husband threw him out of the house, so he’s probably bouncing all over the countryside turning things off with wild abandon and glee.
He eats brown sugar straight from the bag, too, so watch your pantry.
Yes, people with ordinary two year olds are too busy chasing them and saying “NO!”, “STOP!”, “DON"T TOUCH THAT!”, “I said ‘NO’!”, etc., to post very often.
Aren’t you a statistician? It sure sounds like you are mixing heritability with regression towards the mean.
THAT’S who ate the brown sugar out of the canister in our kitchen! :eek:
When I was putting the canisters back into the kitchen after Passover, I was surprised to see that the canister that I thought was nearly half full of brown sugar was in fact empty. The canister was closed and sealed, so the kitties were ruled out as the culprits. I couldn’t figure out what had happened to the sugar.
Some parents will compete about absolutely anything. In a few years you’ll get the sports parents, the band parents, the chorus parents, etc. They will go to ridiculous lengths to ensure that their child was the top candy seller, even buying up all of the remaining boxes so no other child can “sell” them, just to be the winner and get a prize that hey could have bought for less than the candy cost.
In my experience, the most competitive parents were the ones who weren’t happy with their own lives and who had no where else to compete.
I didn’t learn how to tie my laces until I was seven. And I was eight when I finally caught on to how to distinguish the left shoe from the right shoe. In my head, they looked exactly alike.
But here I am, a charter member of the SDMB. So don’t lose hope!
“Yeah? Well my little angel produced three GALLONS of meconium after delivery!”
Holy shit!
You know, I feel REALLY guilty about laughing at you and Cervaise when my friend’s son spent a week in the NICU after inhaling meconium through his lungs six months ago…
I still laughed, of course.
E.
I am so not googling “meconium” to find out what it is. That could only end badly.
think newborn poop…in a way.
I think that kids are more pressured now. We had parents up in arms a few years ago because the local church preschool didn’t have computers for the kids! Now, the preschool has caved and there is a computer lab. Don’t kids sit in front of screens enough? 
The Director said something that stuck with me re: the pushing of kids. She said while it was nice that Susie knows her colors etc at age 2 or 3–can Susie sit in a chair? Can Susie pay attention and follow directions? Can she get along with her peer group? These are the questions that parents should answer–not the academically oriented ones (at that age).
I didn’t learn to tell time until 4th grade. Yes, I learned it in 1st, but I couldn’t make head nor tail out of it (this is before digital clocks, of course!).
My 7 year old cannot tie his shoes. I also blame Velcro, but also me. I figure he’ll pick it up sooner or later. He also cannot ride a two wheeler–he is not interested. He is happy in his little KetCar, and asking for a skateboard. We’ll manage.
Sorry if I misunderstood the context… I’ve never been to a parent-message-board so I don’t know the culture, and evidently, the fact that it’s different enough from what I’ve known that my frame of refrence is off. I guess I’ve been royally whooshed. Still, not all the concerns seem invalid. If they’re really part of some bloodthirsty message board culture then, well, um… I’m glad we’re posting on the Dope instead? In any case, sorry if I caused any bother in the thread, I’ll escape back into the aether now.
Oh, and, treis? I’m glad you can speak with such authority. I’m sure your case study of growing up is accurate and repeatable, with no deviation, in every single school in the nation.
You didn’t cause any bother, and I understand what you’re saying - I did have a lot of the same experiences as a kid. I think you just misunderstood the point of my post. And to me, it’s something you try to deal with IF you know that the situation might arise. And if my kids end up in that position, I’ll do everything I can to make sure they don’t grow up as isolated and unhappy as I did at times. Hell, we always joke that we want the violinist and the chess player, but we’re going to end up with the cheerleader and the soccer player, but at times, I don’t think it would be that bad to have kids who are popular and surrounded by friends making decent grades instead of growing up shy and with their noses in a book making perfect grades.
My issue was with the competitive nature of the posts - not necessarily the content. And I do feel sorry for the kids who’ll have to live up to Mommy and Daddy’s expectations - when they may or may not have those talents that their parents’ perceive. That’s what really drives me nuts. There is an overblown mentality on parenting boards that I’ve noticed to absolutely put your child as high on a pedestal as you can, and then act surprised when they fall.
E.
Elza,
I call it the mother tiger thing. We all want our kids to be the best, the smartest, the fastest, the most athletic, the most talented, and the nicest into the deal. I fight it all the time. You probably will, too, to some extent. It’s fighting it that counts, because then you can recognize who your kids really are, and you can also recognize other kids for who and what they are, talented, athletic, etc.
Your kids will be wonderful, and you, too, will have moments like the one I had last week, when I watched my youngest being inducted into the NHS. And wondered if she was going to get booted out at the end of the semester.
I always get a kick out of parents who brag on their babies’ accomplishments, as if the babies had any control of them. Little ones do what they do, and you can’t change that. And they don’t go to college in diapers.
And what time was it then, about 12:30?
I do statistical process analysis (the software does the stats, I didn’t take a college math course until this year when I went back to school). And I’m NOT a geneticist. But I did learn that back when I took a genetics course, so I assume it does apply. I remember it well, because the geneticist who taught it used exactly that example - she and her husband (both holding doctorates) said they couldn’t expect their children to be “as smart” as they were.
(They did have smart kids).
But perhaps I am wrong - that course was a long time ago (1983!) and I could be misremembering/mischaracterizing it or have misunderstood it the first time.
This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, I have no clue where I found it though.
“Delusions are often functional. A mother’s opinions about her children’s beauty, intelligence, goodness etcetera, ad nauseam, keeps her from drowning them at birth.”
Me, I’m just content that my son is happy, healthy and pretty much an average 16 month old (and very cute of course 
). I try to stay away from parenting boards most of the time, I am a member of two but one is closing down and the other I stick to more light hearted topics. One-upmanship gets tiring.
Don’t trust parents who “aren’t” competitive about their kids. They’re probably the ones who have so mcuh influence that they don’t need (or want) to draw attention to their kids’ successes. It’s a bit like the old maturbation joke. 95% of people masturbate. The other 5% are liars.
My favourite ancedote comes from the linguist Halliday’s excellent book about the language development of his son Nigel, Learning How to Mean. Halliday was (and is) a big Czech/Hungarian music fan and obviously played these records a lot while Nigel was in his infancy.
Among the utterances recorded and glossed by Halliday are the following gems (from memory):
Doreen wrote :Some parents will compete about absolutely anything. In a few years you’ll get the sports parents, the band parents, the chorus parents, etc. They will go to ridiculous lengths to ensure that their child was the top candy seller, even buying up all of the remaining boxes so no other child can “sell” them, just to be the winner and get a prize that hey could have bought for less than the candy cost."
My group called it the “Mommy Olympics”.
I agree that some parents actually get worse about it as the kids get older. I have been very surprised at the lengths some moms (mostly moms in my experience) will go to in order to ensure thier child is “first”, “best”, etc.
It’s very sad to see all the pressure–both what the kids go through and what the parents feel. The competitiveness is somewhat natural–I fight it too–but I think it’s greatly exacerbated by our culture.
But I do see a lot more of it in the media and on boards than I do in real life. In my real life, my mommy friends talk about their worries for their kids too, and we tell funny stories about our horrible nights or the bizarro things our kids have done. And we compliment each others’ kids a lot–on boards you can’t see the other kid and say “Wow, he’s so interested in that and look how he arranged all his stuff” and so on. And it’s easy to see how wildly different all the kids are, how obvious it is that they’ll even out in the end. In a lot of ways, there’s more real support for each other. But maybe I’m just lucky, I don’t know.