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I might just have a spoonful or two of peanut butter.

Submitted entry: Well I had meant to do some grocery shopping right now andam actually in town parked across from the health food store but Paul’sasleep in the back and there’s no way I’m going to wake him up. He’s gota bit of a cold and had a sort of restless night as even being propped uphe was stuffy until a little after midnight. Now he’s sitting up in thecar seat which works great for his sinuses.

I am a bit hungry though and silly me I didn’t bringfood. Fortunately drive-throughs are made for this sort of thing. Andthough you might not have expected it from what you read here, despite mybeing 30 minutes from the nearest town, that town at a population of about3,000 or so has a host of drive-throughs to choose from - McDonalds, TacoBell and Sonic. Only one, Taco Bell has any vegetarian options andadmittedly I’ve been a terrible vegetarian lately (due in part to therestaurant offerings - after all we don’t ever buy meat we’ll just eat itat a restaurant. So depending on how I feel I may stop this entry for afood break (alternately I might keep going and just have a spoonful or twoof peanut butter - we have a jar in the back from our last kid outing -and eat with Paul when he wakes up if he’s hungry.

With Paul’s entering toddlerhood big time and with many of theusual “problems” we’ve been really having to define our positionon discipline very clearly to ourselves. We both are, as you know,completely against spanking as in our opinions it is a barbaric practicethat only encourages violence in children later (or even sooner thesedays) in life. It tells kids that “When all else fails in getting mypoint across, beat the point home.” and we just don’t believethat in our own lives. After all, many of our friends have done or saidstupid things and we don’t go smacking them when they don’t do what wesay.

And I’ll go even a step further in this one that may end upgetting me some nasty emails: We don’t believe in punishment at all -especially in toddlers. That’s not to say we don’t believe thatthere should be boundaries and consequences for crossing them but that wefeel that we need to be honest and logical in how we define bothboundaries and consequences. Punishment, I belive, are just a poorabstraction of consequences and we all know how well even someadults handle abstraction.

No, we believe that boundaries are necessary - for example,hitting is forbidden, throwing things in the yurt is forbidden, beating onthe computer is forbidden, writing on books (other than coloring books isforbidden. But here’s the difference. When he hits Sage, for example (herarely hits me), he doesn’t get a timeout, he doesn’t get aspanking (violence for violence? I think not). He gets a consequence thatis logical and understandible. Sage stays away from him saying that shedoesn’t want to be hit again and he is asked to apologize. Usually heasks for a nurse before apologizing and we tell him that Sage is worriedhe’ll hit again and that until he apologizes nursing won’t happen. Seethe connection? Logical consequences that also make him see why it’s abad idea not to do something.

It’s that abstraction that made me, as a child, just work not toget caught. I’ll use my story about lying to my parents and goingto Boston the first time when I hit (and ran) someone’s Porsche in aparking lot. When my dad found out he had a fit of anger but nothing moreand all we did was go have a fun family day in Boston while we all wentdown to fill out the accident reports together and then went out tolunch. That was an example of minimal consequences - okay, I made my dadmad, but so what, that never resulted in anything more than a raised voicewhen I was over 10 (and okay, when I criticized my mom for drinking hethreatened to hit me even at 20!). Anyway, there were so manyopportunities for real consequences. Grounding alone wouldn’t have beeneffective. However, revocation of car privileges for six-twelve months,writing a letter of apology to the owner of the Porsche, etc. would havebeen real life consequences.

So that’s where we’re at with Paul and I think it has workedreally well so far - he stops bad behaviour almost always now when we tellhim to rather than having to even administer consequences. Hey, we wereout of propane (again) last week for a day and when we were cooking on thefire he was trying to throw things in the fire as it was really anexciting thing for him. First we tried to work with him with the fire andlet him put sticks on some but he was too excited about it. So I told himthat if he threw anything in the fire again we’d have to go inside and letSage handle the rest. Instead of a big scene he just said “Goinside.” and we went in and had a great time playing and reading. Heobviously either knew the limits of his impulse control or figured thatthe fire would be no fun on our terms and so we went in. That happened acouple times last time we ran out of propane too.

The check finally came in on Wednesday and we went to Springfieldto get some more library books and do some shopping. When we were therewe stopped at Barnes and Noble and I picked up The Discipline Book as we only had aborrowed copy for a little while. While I was in the parenting section Iwas encouraged to see how few of the books even said that spanking was auseful parenting tool. Nearly all the ones I looked at said that it wouldcause only more trouble. One said that 10% of parents spank and thinkit’s a good thing, 20% of parents do not ever spank and 70% of parentsspank but don’t like doing it and just can’t find a better solution. Ifind that encouraging. Of course my impression is that that would bedifferent for Christian parenting books (except for those byDr. Sears) would be quite different and more often than not simply talkabout spanking with love not anger (what a stupid self deceivingconcept that is). I definitely notice that here meeting people. Most ofthe people I met working in the computer repair business for a while weredevout Christians and every one of them somehow changed the subject fromasking about if I had kids (yes, one) to telling stories of what theirkids did to deserve their worst beatings and how it helped them turn outbetter and how parents who don’t spank are making a big mistake that iscausing all of the chaos in this country today.

Yes, this is definitely a Christian area. In town on Saturday theowner of a tire shop where we were getting a flat repaired (8th sinceAugust - our road is full of little shards of flint) and he walked in andsaid no greeting but instead said “I think we’re a nation coming backto God, don’t you think?” It was so bizarre. Most of the businessesI ever went to back east would never have dreamed of possiblyalienating a customer by saying that but here it’s just taken for grantedthat we’re all Christian - and probably even all Protestant. I just saidsome non-committal sort of answer. I know, not very genuine or sincere ofme in the interest of being truly myself. I guess I just wasn’t up forthe long discussion and background it would take for me to explain myposition when all he was doing was making Godly small-talk.

In the midst of all our being broke and nearly out of everythingthe computer also started to go south. Yes, the new one. It was beingunable to boot saying that it had a keyboard error. Pretty scary as werely pretty heavily on it as you can imagine. Anyway, I tried toreconnect the keyboard (no luck), upgraded the bios (no luck) and then forthe heck of it I tried the keyboard from the old laptop. That was anearly fatal mistake. I turned it on and it said “Ready to updatebios - put disk in drive and press any key” That’s what the othercomputer said before it died and I found out when I upgraded the bios thatthat’s because if you hold down F12 when it boots it will try to upgradethe bios. Well with the first computer I had no disk and so I didn’tupdate I just turned it off and apparently that just erased the biosturning that computer into a paperweight. Well, here I was at thatcritical juncture again. Fortunately I hustled over to the bookshelf andpicked up the disk drive and bios disk and plugged it all in (I don’t knowif it was advised to plug it in with the power on but…) and connectedthe original keyboard to the computer. It upgraded the bios (again) andit was fine. Then I threw away the other keyboard as that was just toodangerous to have around. Turns out later that at the same time, Windowswas falling apart. For the heck of it I reinstalled Windows (it wasn’trunning anyway after a while) and voila - not only did Windows work, thebios error was gone. So needless to say we’re pretty pleased with thatnews.

Winter’s finally here too I think. Well, probably not permanentlybut still, we had SNOW on Thursday if you can believe it - no accumulationto speak of but beautiful nonetheless. SO now the temps are in the 40’sduring the day and in the mid 20’s at night. Which, of course makes woodgathering a necessity again, especially as not only is it getting colder,it looks like the drought is ending and so we’re getting rain quite often- at least once or twice a week as opposed to going months without morethan a sprinkle. We appreciate the rain, though and it’s nice to have acreek again on the land. Between having the creek back and being able tosee the mountain through the trees the whole dynamic of living here hasbeen changed.

Any readers here from the pacific northwest? We’ve been givingsome thought to spending the summer in that area - possibly Vancouver. Ofcourse we’re particularly interested in parents of toddlers in the areabut it’d be cool to meet others up there. We’d be likely to be drivingthere too so depending on what route we took we might visit folks alongthe way. Neither of us have been in that area and it sounds wonderful,not just the right weather for us but also fairly progressive. We’ll justhave to find a place to sublet or short-term rent for the summer. We’releaning towards Canada for reasons that are probably obvious. If we livein a city we want somewhere safer than what we’d expect from say Boston,NY or LA. Not only that, I hear the rents are relatively inexpensive,especially when you factor in the exchange rate.

Okay - Paul’s awake now so once he’s coherent (he’s a zombienow) we’re going to get going.

Hmm. I can’t say I’ve tried this before…

The silence is deafening.