War and Peace

"Daigoro, no more trains," I say firmly, turning off the computer, where I have been showing Daigoro short amateur videos of model train sets.

"No. Please?" he says pleadingly.

"No more, Daigoro. All gone," I assert, trying to sound as benignly authoritative as I can.

His face crumples and his lip quivers.

"Trains? Dada? Dada? Trains?" his tone is more demanding now, with an edge of desperation.

I stand up. He's been sitting on my lap watching YouTube videos of cars, trains, firetrucks and other fossil-fuel guzzling metal behemoths for about 10 minutes. We're trying to limit his combined television and computer intake to less than an hour or two a day; less if possible. I cradle him in the crook of my arm as I step away from the computer.

The waterworks begin.

"No no no nononono," he cries. He cracks an eye open briefly to see if I'm paying attention. I set my mouth in the now-standard "I'm sticking to my guns" expression.

"You've had enough trains. Time to go brush teeth," I say hopefully. This never ends well.

"No! Nooooo," he wails, then he starts up with the open-palmed smacks on the sides of my face. I'm secretly glad he hasn't learned to ball up his little mitts into fists. On the other hand, those little baby fingernails are surprisingly sharp. It's a good thing he doesn't know how to scratch yet either, but occasionally he gets an accidental swipe.

As an aside, both my wife and I are believers in the "firm but fair" model of parental authority. State what you're going to do, then follow through. If you make a rule or a schedule, you stick to it. No buckling, no appeal to the other parent. We intend to put up a solid front of parental authority.

That's the plan, anyway.

I grasp his hands firmly. To his credit, he's gotten a lot better with the hitting - I raised my voice on one occasion enough to make him think twice about smacking me since.

"No hitting," I say simply.

He promptly tries to head-butt me. I'll hand it to him, he's both a master of improvisation and knows how to take advantage of legal loopholes. Fortunately, he's tried this trick before and I know to dodge the first attempt. The first few times... well, I've seen stars.

I transfer my right hand from his hands to stop his head from impacting forcefully into my left eye.

"No headbutting either," I warn. "Headbutting" as a word-concept is probably aiming a little high, but no harm in naming names.

Thwarted, he sobs a few times, tries arcing his back somewhat half-heartedly, then resigns himself to being carried into the bathroom. I've won this battle. The war goes on.

It's strange to deal with the immediacy of toddler violence. With adults, you don't just wind up and smack someone when you can't get what you want. Well, not without landing in any number of psychiatric institutions or prisons, anyway. It's primal, direct and, in a way, quite understandable. How else do you communicate your extreme displeasure to a giant twice to three times your size and seven or eight times your weight who also happens to be ignoring your limited efforts at communication?

Bringing up children can sometimes seem like a series of skirmishes or running battles. Especially when it involves actual physical tantrums like this one. Fortunately for babies and toddlers (and the humanity of parents in general), we don't retaliate with force ourselves.

It's hard to reconcile a 13-kilogram ball of angry toddler with the very image of peace and tranquility that Daigoro radiated in his first few days with us. A little swaddled reddish-pink creature, weighing 3.85 kilograms and looking like a cross between a wizened chimpanzee and a giant mutant pink slug (yes, newborn babies are beautiful, but it's a different kind of beautiful), he nonetheless was quiet... and largely immobile. Among the many things I am looking forward to with our second child is the lovely prospect of having a newborn baby remain in the same place after you put it somewhere; toddlers having an uncanny ability to remain anywhere but where you last saw them.

I've heard many parents comment that in the first day or two, a newborn is very quiet (or at least, by comparison to a week or so later) - a few squawks and coos, but mostly very peaceful. My wife reliably informs me that this is largely due to the fact that the baby is more or less exhausted from the ordeal of being born (and let's face it, if you were squeezed through an opening not much larger than your head, you'd take a few days to recuperate too). Tired or not, it also makes for a very convenient survival trait. If the already grumpy and tired parents had a preview of what kind of noise that little "bundle of joy" would make in the months and years to come, they might just reconsider their sacred role.

The peace of the newborn - enjoy it while you can, new parents... it's the calm before the storm.