Child’s Ordeal Shows Risks of Psychosis Drugs for Young

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/business/02kids.html?_r=2&hp

Digging Up Dead Friends

As we drove past a cemetery my Kindergartner said, "There are a lot of dead people." Then he asked about if they can come back, I can't remember what we answered, if we said something about heaven or not, but then he said, "I want to dig up my friend 'Jack' because I want to talk to him because he was nice."
We told him he could talk to him in his head. When he did not seem convinced we then said he could pray and have God let Jack hear his message to him.

Eight Minutes, Do Less Better

If one tries to accomplish more than one CAN accomplish, one accomplishes very little.

If we have a never ending list of things we need to do, where every one accomplishment or task completed is normally replaced by two new deeds to be done, then we are never finished, and never at peace. Somethings have to be done on a regular basis, somethings can be put off, and others have to be completed right now.

What absolutely needs to be done is to eliminate things that we only perceive we need to do, and that we really do not gain anything positive from participating in. Things that just are distractions, mindless activities or things to build up our ego.

Prioritize, plan on completing a reasonable number of tasks, again not what one wishes they could accomplish in the allotted time, or what one's more efficient sibling or friend from college could accomplish, but what you can, by using your past history as a basis, and plan accordingly.

View from the Neighbor's Deck

I am trying to get back into meditation, increasing the length by one minute each day, today I did eight minutes in the back section of my side yard, which is next to and behind my detached garage, cornered by a tall wood fence on two sides, with a row of some sort of tall thin pine trees that block it off from the rest of the side yard and make it virtually "un-visable" from the street. I am letting some very young trees grow along the fence to block the view of my neighbors.

Unfortunately a section of the fence collapsed in some extremely windy weather we've had this week, so I have a clear view of my back neighbor's deck and glass sliding doors, so I could not stand directly in middle of this basically outside room where I wanted to meditate unless I wanted people looking up from their cereal and pondering why this freak is standing motionless looking into our house. So I moved a few steps to the left to be out of their view. I would be alone with the sound of the wind, squirrels, cats, leaf blowers, tree trimmers, cars, birds and my thoughts so long as my next door neighbor wasn't hanging out on their back deck, which at this hour seemed unlikely. Six and a half minutes into my eight minute standing meditation I hear the sounds of someone on the deck, going back and forth a few times. Fuck it I am not stopping early to make some one who does not give a damn and me and my piece of mind feel more comfortable about the sanity of their next door neighbor. Ah, well, maybe they are familiar with standing meditation or wall gazing, or maybe they are not.

The point of this is that to keep my self on track I am going to blog the length of my meditation and the main concept that my mind decided to decode on ponder.

Good Taste

The other day I was playing the newest Fall album in the car and at some point my eight year-old son said, "Dad," which is usually how he starts off when he is going to complain about my music, "This music is awesome." It is cool bonding over music with my kids, though my big guy some times complains that no kids in his school really know music like he does so he does not have anyone to talk to about it but me. I tell him his classmates will eventually catch up to him a bit by middle school.

SCHOOL PICTURES, THE REMIX

My kids school pictures did not come out too great. I felt like, life is not perfect and this is a representation of it, my 8 year-old is entering that awkward stage and sometimes does not look like the perfect little boy he use to, and he is growing his hair long again and it is now in an in-between stage, that's life. My little guy had a weird smile in his picture.

I had talked to the boys about their pictures how they were not perfect, but that it did not matter, and I pointed out some of the positive things about the pictures. They eventually came around and no longer

My wife was really unhappy with the pictures, so when we received an email about retakes she wanted to have them redone. I did not really care about it, but worried that it would send a mixed message to the kids because I had recently spent time getting them to be okay with the imperfect pictures.

Fast forward to this morning, picture retake day, basically the boys were neurotic basket cases worrying about their smiles for their pictures, and spent all morning trying on various smile faces, sometimes laughing at themselves and each other, sometime confused as to why this particular smile made them look more insane than happy (I never couched it this way though, I would say, that's not the best I've seen you make, less/more teeth depending on the smile).

So we wind up being late for school, I get home turn on the computer to blog this entry, then I get a phone call from school, my oldest son forgot to put the envelope with the money for the retake in his back pack. I find the envelope and adding to the confusion realized that my kindergartner had the 3rd grader's envelope, which was my fault. So I had to drive back to the school and straighten this all out. Which was actually pretty easy to do, just annoying.

Fear the Mind Wanderer

Letting your mind wander is a major cause of unhappiness

On Papers

My current paper writing style hearkens back to my more inefficient pre-computer underclassmen years in college. Then for a five page paper I would write about eight or nine pages on whatever moved me about the topic then make an outlines and literally cut and tape the pertinent parts of the draft into the outline and stay up all night retyping the final draft from the collage looking original.

Currently I am taking my source information, interviews and observations I had done, and writing a paper from that, basically treating all of the data as important, then going back and looking at what the professor wanted, what theories we have covered in class that seem to match up with what I have already written, once I am able to cram in an acceptable amount of applicable quotes and references, then I begin to slough off the unnecessary parts.

Hopefully by next semester I can regain the ability to make a well thought out outline in advance and then more efficiently just fill in the needed info into each slot, and writing the final draft will be more of a gentile smoothing out than an amputation of half of what I have written.

San Fran bans toys in some fast-food kids meals

Drug experts say alcohol worse than crack or heroin

America really needs to reexamine it's views on alcohol as being the "okay way to get intoxicated" while criminalizing healthier ways, resulting in millions of people being sent to jail, thousands of people being killed in the illegal drug trade, and billions of dollars being wasted on the war on drugs and incarceration.

More Man Than You & Other Tales of Secondary Sexual Characteristics

My son who is in third grade is kind of hairy, which makes sense because I am very hairy. The other day a male classmate of his saw his arm hair and said, "Eeeuw, you are pretty hairy!" My son looked that the boy, who he said actually had a decent amount of body hair himself, and said, "It just means that I am more of a man than you are," and the kid dejectedly let out a sorrowful, "Oh," and slunk off.

I have been trying to teach my son the art of the witty comeback as a non violent defense mechanism, and I am glad he is developing that ability. It is cute to see the difference between him and my 5 year-old who is afraid of getting in trouble for telling mean kids to "shut up," but thinks an okay response to a verbal insult is to "punch him in the penis!"

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I am currently reading about adolescent development and writing a paper on it in which I had to interview a teenager. One point is that as a girl's body mass increases during puberty and they often develop a negative body image because of it (Steinberg & Morris, 2001). Reasons for this are developing earlier than their peers and the media portrayal of a thinner pre-pubescent body type as beginning the standard for beauty.

I am sure this is not new news to anyone reading this, but I find it sickening that girls in our society are lead to believe that there pre-pubescent bodies which are really their pre-sexual bodies are more attractive, beautiful or sexually appealing than their post-pubescent bodies, which by definition should be more attractive because they are now physically ready for intercourse (not mentally ready in our society of course) and childbearing. It is totally ill, a completely unhealthy view that our society perpetuates.

It seems that tween girls long to grow up to be "mature" teenagers and once they do some long to not have physically mature bodies. It is like society is set up to make us not be satisfied with who we naturally are.

My New Friend Tee Just Pee'ed on Me

I was at my older son's soccer scrimmages yesterday. I bring my 5 yr-old son sometimes because there is a playground at the field and he has some friends that are sometimes there.

Yesterday he ran up to some kids he didn't know and started playing with them right away.
About an hour later he comes up to me and I notice his pants are wet, I asked, "What happened buddy did you have an accident?" He answered, "No, me and my new friend Tee had to go peepee so we went back there (behind the jungle gym) and he got peepee on my pants."
Me, "Are you sure you didn't have an accident, it's okay, I know you don't know where a bathroom is around here."
Him, "No, Tee is little (looked to be 3 or 4) so he wasn't so good at it."
Me, "Okay well next time come to me if you have to go to the bathroom, and don't pull your pants down around strangers even if they are other little kids, and especially don't pee standing next to another kid who is peeing okay?"

Too Often of Two Minds

Something I have realised lately is that I am too often of two minds and that is why I am less efficient than I would like to be. A prime example is with my current grad school class, I love the mental stimulation aspect of it, but the time it takes away from my life I hate. Other cases are when I am say doing laundry, but can not stop thinking about other chores that I have to do, and so I only put away half of clothes because I feel pressure to move on to the next thing and accomplish more, which winds up with me actually completing less tasks and results in the dreaded loose ends all over the place.
I go into my garage and think I should ride my bike some more before it gets too cold, but oh yeah, two weeks ago my kick stand came loose and made the bike un-rideable, and I never looked to see if I had the correct tool to fix it when it happened so now it is sitting unusable because I did not follow through when the initial incident occurred.

Slow Down and Let Them Learn

I need to slow down and leave enough time to let the kids make mistakes. Just as people I know let there kids act up and then cave into them because they, "Don't get to see them much, so they don't want their time together to be spent in conflict, with the kids unhappy and crying," which I see as either a lack of will on the parents part, laziness on the the parents part, or at least the wrong way with dealing with the time crunch that all seem to unnecessarily have in our post-modern lives. Me not making my kids learn how to properly tie their shoes or having them use cups with lids because I don't have time to clean up spills in the morning or afternoon or at dinner, expresses more about me than there ability to complete those tasks.

Both of my children are perfectionists and part of that may be genetic, but I know my wife has a tendency to couch things about school in a way that would lead to kids not feeling comfortable with possibility of failing, but I have to recognize that some of my actions in trying to make life run smoothly also does not allow them to go through the process of attempting / failing / learning / and eventual mastery of a task, which teaches them it's better not to try, or let Dad to it for me because I must not be able to do it.

Nothing builds confidence like overcoming an obstacle or mastering a task.

AGE DIFFERENCE

There is a 2 year and 8 months difference in age between my two sons, aged five and eight.

So they are almost in the same age group, at least close enough that the younger one feels he can do what ever the older one can.

I noticed during the summer that they we having more problems getting along, as if my older son had grown into a new stage of development, basically he's not a little guy any more and his brother is. This is both physically and mentally, he has little tolerance for his little brother's stories, or his inability to keep up in Lego Star Wars for PlayStation 2, and pretty much dominates him in all forms of competition. This results in a lot of crying by the five year-old, because he never wins at chess, or any games that take strategy, and not only loses at sports but often gets hurt while playing those sports. This takes place even when his older brother is NOT trying to hurt him due to the older son's strength.

The frustration of the Kindergartner often leads to him starting conflict (arguing and whining as well as hitting and kicking) with his older brother, which had been resulting in physical retaliation from the 3rd grader. After a number of punishments my oldest son realized that he was getting into trouble on a regular basis even though he was usually only 25% to blame for the conflicts and it has finally dawned on him that telling on his brother is a much more effective way of dealing with the little guy's anger and frustration than hitting him.

This has not only resulted in them trying to get each other in trouble* all the time, but the younger son being punished much more often than he is use to. The five year-old is usually very confident, happy and positive, and does not get into trouble very often, so he sometimes seems incapable of dealing with being in the wrong. He was use to being the "good one" and when he was not he could goad his brother into getting in trouble with him or in his stead by tricking his parents with his wails of pain.

When he was an infant/young toddler he would bang his head when he was upset, which I "cured" by using the doggy training method of locking him outside in a shed, only kidding, I would smack a rolled up newspaper next to him as I saw him getting ready to bag his head and it would startle him. He would get made because he would be half way through his wind up to bang his head, get startled and look at me confused and try again, "whack" newspaper next to him again, and repeat until he gave up on the self harming action. Well now he has taken to criticizing himself, using terms that neither his mother or I use, "I am stupid/bad, I hate myself, etc." I have talked to my therapist about this, and even though they are now diagnosing very young children with depression since he does not show any other signs of being depressed this is most likely an attempt to get a parent to soothe him and tell him his is good etc. Which of course the first five or so times I did, so he learned that the way to get out of trouble is to be verbally critical of himself. Subsequently I just tell him that I have never said he was (whatever negative thing he just said) that his family loves him, but that does not change the fact that he smacked his brother in the face after loosing at FIFA soccer on PlayStation. That he is upset and or angry and that is okay but hitting is not allowed, he can go be alone scream or lay down, or punch a pillow but hitting is not an appropriate way to deal with being upset.

He is one of the happiest, pleasant to be around people I have ever known in my whole life, but the 5 to 10% of the time he is upset, man his anger is violent and something I will have to keep an eye on.

Not that I am interested in skipping any stages of their development, I have enjoyed all of them, but I look forward to when they are seven and nine and back in the same age group. Of course until the bigger one turns ten and becomes a tween!