It is a constant nag from my father. Whenever Salvador wants something and we give it to him, whether it be water, to be held, a toy he’s just thrown down on the ground, corn on the cob, the paper wrapper to a straw, or just attention, my father will say “He’s really trained you.”
It is annoying to me in several ways:
My father knows it is annoying and keeps doing it. But I do stuff like that too, so I can’t fault him completely, except for that fact that if I didn’t pick the habit up from him, I’d probably have more friends, so maybe I can fault him for that.
We’ve asked him to stop and he doesn’t. But we ask a lot of him. Actually, this same joke seems to please him quite a bit – more than it annoys us now (probably not at the beginning, but we’ve habituated to it) and so since he enjoys it more, it’s probably a net gain in global “happiness” points.
We just don’t agree on that methodology of raising Salvador. We haven’t gone through the trouble of trying to teach him sign language just so we can ignore the signs he makes.
I don’t really take my father’s advice very seriously anymore. I used to. And there was a nice little chain email I saw maybe a month ago, that talked about how we go from listening to our parents, to not listening, to going back and listening again. Which got me back to wondering if I’m late for that last stage.
But to take parenting advice from him now seems odd. Granted, he’s learned a lot more about raising others since he’s owned dogs. But right there, how he started to care about raising others when he got the dogs – well, that says something, don’t it?
Though his heart is in the right place. When Salvador gets in his arms, he melts away and makes silly faces and babbles with Sal and will make up games to play with Sal and will get whatever Sal’s pointing at (wait till he sees Sal’s aggressive “please” sign!) and he’s just as “trained” as the rest of us for those moments when he’s in Salvador’s reality distortion field. And he’s happy doing it. And Salvador’s happy right back. Which in our book right now, is all that really matters.
Reading Baby Minds, which we just got today brought all this back – as it goes through attachment parenting and how there’s really no use in withholding anything at such a young age because the babies simply don’t make the connection. (Wait till you turn 18 months old Salvador – there’s a rude awakening waiting for you!) And again when they went on about how one of the authors was going to treat their granddaughter without any female biases. Then went on to call her a little princess within minutes after she was born. Their point was – you might feel you know all these things, but when it comes down to it, what you really feel comes through. Just can’t fight it.
But still, in a 5 minute conversation on the phone with him today, as he asked me how Sal’s doing, he couldn’t help himself and wanted to throw in a little “Look how he’s got you trained!” but the wording got mixed up and he actually said “Look how you got him trained!” which then lead to an awkward silence and the question – “Did I say that wrong?”
Well, the answer to that question is where we disagree.
He said he’ll come up next weekend or so – let’s see how well we’ve got him trained.
I bet we can get him to tell us we’ve let Salvador train us…