Teachable Moments

"Turn me around. The game is on."

One of the things I have looked forward to most about being a parent is the opportunity to share my wisdom and warped perspective on the world with my young, impressionable progeny.  As evidenced by previous posts, I have probably spent more time than is strictly healthy envisioning ways to turn my child (or should we be so blessed, children) into a veritable nightmare for the poor teachers she will one day be assigned to learn from. You poor, poor souls....

Even though my daughter is not yet old enough to retain any of my wise instruction, I am trying to get in the habit early of finding and utilizing “teachable moments.” The phrase “teachable moment” is a popular buzzword (buzzphrase?), which I can really only tolerate using with a healthy dose of irony and/or sarcasm. Since virtually all of my instruction to my daughter is laced with irony and/or sarcasm, I think I’m safe.

Over this Labor Day weekend, we encountered a few teachable moments. During the first quarter of the USC v. ECU game, I was able to instruct Olivia on the definition of a “piss-poor effort.” Spike TV’s Star Wars marathon allowed us to observe an “overly simplistic paradigm of good and evil.” On Sunday, we were fortunate to have a few people over to play cards, and we learned all about inside straight draws, bluffing, and throwing good money after bad. Not that there was any actual money involved. Ahem.

And my obligatory Labor Day weekend yard work and grilling allowed us to expose her to early olfactory associations: sweat, fresh cut grass, charcoal smoke, grilling meat = daddy.

The weekend was also full of teachable moments for her parents. The things I learned:
1. Nothing starts your day quite like a triple helping of spit-up in your boxer clad lap.
2. Four hours of uninterrupted sleep is a blessing beyond dreams of avarice when you have a three-week old infant.
3. There is a nexus of cuteness at which some adults will voluntarily cease all higher brain function in favor of making “squee!” noises. Mostly this effects the female of the species (not to be sexist, but it does), but there were a few males who lost all reasoning, too. In case you are wondering, the equation for this appears to be 2 human infants + 1 kitten weighing less than one pound crawling on said infants = 1 cretinous mass of adults.  
4. Until daddy grows mammary glands or the baby is bottle-trained, he is nearly always the wrong person to hold her, even when she’s not actually hungry. Conversely, if she is not actually hungry, nearly anyone with boobs seems to have the ability to keep her happy.
5. Our baby’s bladder control is inversely proportional to the newness of the clean diaper. To put a finer point on it, there is a 50% chance that any given new diaper will be soaked through before we pick her up off the changing table. That’s talent.

All in all, a very instructive weekend. Hope yours was just as good.