Running it twice

Child rearing is a rollercoaster of emotion.  Sometimes, like in my last blog post, you have to watch your kid go through wretched stuff that you wish you could defend them from.  Pinkie Pie had an adult man approach her and try to rope her into a 'relationship' on the street.  Many people messaged me or commented hoping that the police would get involved and do something, but the reality is that when I called them I got redirected to a nuisance line and left on hold.  After a long time listening to 'hit X for graffiti, hit Y for parking issues' I finally gave up.  The police do not have the time or inclination to do anything about this, in large part because no actual laws were broken.

It is tough to tell your kid that an evil predator is out there and that the people charged with protecting us from such predators will do nothing.  I don't blame the police in this case though - I wouldn't want to try to give the police enough money to be able to put tons of hours into every case of some asshole being awful to someone else, and I don't want them to have the power to smash into people's lives when they don't have any reason to think a law was broken. 

Sometimes you just have to tell your kids that bad stuff happens, and that you will do what you can to protect them... and sometimes what you can do is little to nothing.

But there are good times.  For example, today I realized that Pinkie Pie had never heard the Boot To The Head skit by the Frantics.  If I said Boot To The Head, she wouldn't understand what I was talking about!  This cannot stand, obviously, so I found it on youtube and got her to listen to the clip.

Apparently the original Boot To The Head contains an anti-gay slur by Ed Gruberman, the jackass in the sketch. Thankfully the version I found does not have that phrase, as it has been changed. I don't know if the version I first heard many years ago was the original or the new version, but I hope it was the new one. I certainly wouldn't share it with her in the same way without that alteration.

There are many hilarious things that have a wonderful first time experience.  You can't get that again, but sometimes the process of watching somebody else have that first time experience can be almost as good.  Watching Pinkie Pie giggle and twitch with joy at Boot To The Head was so good for me, and now we have another shared bit of culture we can enjoy.

I have her trained to say "Party on Garth" after I say "Party on Wayne".  She has never seen the movie in question, and indeed I can barely remember it.  Still, those little bits of shared memory are a source of happy feelings, and I like that she is happy to be a part of nostalgia she doesn't quite understand.

Parenting a teenager is not the easiest thing, but I gotta say, it is *so* much better than parenting a toddler for me.  There are still struggles, but the good parent moments are superior when the little person can actually grasp what I am talking about.