Love, Logic and Lost Vegas

"If I pull my socks up, can I have a treat?"

Kitty's away on a "business trip" to Vegas this week - or as our wise-beyond-his-four-years son refers to it, "Lost Vegas" - which leaves me in the questionable job of food-provider.  This is an unenviable position, as it's a nonstop terrorist negotiation with a kid who has no interest in dinner beyond it being a springboard to dessert.

With his four-year checkup, he's somehow managed to shoot back up into the 99th percentile for height, which is amazing when you consider that he eats nothing more than half a taco shell on any given night.  And this is only grudgingly as we repeatedly point out that someone that's hungry for "treats" should also be hungry for the other half to the taco shell, to say nothing of the meat and cheese that he's dumped out of it.

One of the parenting gurus that we still receive email from maintains the philosophy of "Love and Logic" in these situations - explaining to the child that the amount of time that you spend reminding him of the fact that you need dinner before dessert tires you out, and that before he can get any treats or special treatment, he needs to replace the energy that he's spent.

What a joke.

This may work in some fantasy land where it's actually possible for a parent to control their emotional response to the request for a cookie repeated every 3 seconds for two hours, but in the real world, that sort of currency doesn't exactly play with a kid that thinks the best way to "earn" money for his piggy bank is to take it directly out of your wallet.

Long story short, I'm not fighting the good fight this week.  We're going to restaurants and we're eating pizza and hot dogs.  And ice cream.  Of course, we're not eating them like father and son, we're eating them like an elderly married couple, with neither one of us talking - me watching the baseball game and him playing Angry Birds on my phone.  Like it should be.

Actually, we did have one conversation tonight.  I asked him if he knew what all the sports were on the TV's at the Wingdome, which then turned into a conversation about his favorite sports.  He replied that he liked them all and listed off a bunch.  He neglected to mention car racing, so I asked him if he liked that too.  He informed me that car racing was not a sport and that sports "only have guys with balls."  Sorry NASCAR fans, you heard the man.

Of course, this is also the athlete that insisted that we hold hands while jogging home, so feel free to take that comment with a pound of salt.

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Ed. note:  For what it's worth, I did clarify with Finn that sports are actually played by both guys and girls, and that we know lots of girls with balls.