I’ve referenced it recently, but Joshua got sick not too long ago. As I was carrying him around, he was resting his head on my shoulder and began to throw up all over the place. I like to think I’m a pretty good Dad, but I’m not sure I ever went Full Dad until that moment.

I’m the kind of person that cannot see/hear/smell/knowabout someone else vomiting. I very quickly start to trigger a gag reflex and need to either extract myself from the situation or get ready to join the party. Not one of my strong suits.

But when Joshua let fly, it didn’t even occur to me to be disgusted. I immediately dumped my phone (at the moment of expulsion I was texting Janelle to let her know we were heading home) on a nearby fence, tore off the diaper bag (whose strap was a casualty), took off my now-useless shirt and picked up Joshua to hold him over a nearby trashcan so he could finish up.

Then we promptly waddled our way over to a nearby bathroom so I could get his clothes off and replace them with clean spares and get the two of us cleaned as much as possible. Makeshift paper towel safety bags were made for all the contaminated items and within 10 minutes we were on our way back to the car, a couple of shirtless bros, joking and laughing about how if he had thrown up on the little ore cart train we had been in line to ride moments before then the tracks would have gotten all gross and the train would have slipped all over the place.

I’m not sure I could repeat this performance with, say, your kid because when your kid throws up it is way gross. I see a lot of new parents commenting and asking online about how ready they will be to take care of their children. You’ll be ready. When the time comes, you’ll learn there are things that you can deal with that you never thought you could. I don’t just mean that you’ll be able to wrench the door off a car to free your baby from a car wreck. Many of your little fears or squeamish items will just fall to the wayside because there’s a deep part in you that knows that when it comes to children, sometimes you just need to get the job done and you don’t have time to think too hard about it.

Joshua loves to ask the same question over and over again. Dozens of times. Over many days. I’m not sure why it is. He has an excellent memory and will regularly bring up small details about events that happened as far back as a year ago. I can only assume he either enjoys having us do what he’s asking of us or it’s like mini story time.

Recently at a friend’s house he saw the end of Shark Tale. In the movie, a shark that doesn’t really want to be known as a rampaging predator befriends a fish. There’s a lot more to it, but suffice to say that at the end of the movie the shark’s father starts chasing the fish around, trying to eat him, because he thinks the fish is responsible for the change in his son.

Joshua had many questions about why the Daddy shark was chasing the fish. So I explained it to him at dinner — the Daddy shark wanted the fish to leave his son alone so he chased him away, etc . etc. Couple minutes later, the same question. “Why was that shark chasing the fish?” – “I already told you that, kiddo. What did I say before?” – “I don’t know. Tell me again.” And this will persist until you actually answer him. But then, a few minutes later… the question.

About 45 minutes later we were upstairs and Joshua was using the potty and he started to ask Janelle the same question.

The best way to break a kid out of this cycle is to be wrong. Kids LOOOOOOOOOOOOVE to correct you. Love it love it love it. So when you get asked a question you get asked all the time that you know the child knows the answer to, just be wrong.

“Why was the shark chasing that fish?”

“Because he was trying to give him candy.”

“Nooooooooo. He wasn’t doing that!”

“Oh? What was he doing then?”

“He wanted the fish to go away!”

Boom goes the dynamite.

He didn’t ask again.

So Joshua is a generally well-behaved kid. He’s prone to have either full-blown or miniature tantrums on a sort of regular basis, but that’s almost always either because he needs more sleep or is having something he expected changed on him (probably more on that in another post). But, he had a spate where we would hear he was having “rough” days at school. Essentially, he was having trouble keeping his hands to himself. We never got the impression that it was something malicious from the teachers, but just that he was being handsy. Maybe he’d give hugs that were not wanted, or he’d try to start a wrestle play session with someone that didn’t want to, or he would think that someone wasn’t listening to the teacher and go over to play enforcer and clean a toy up or something. They were things that may have had a noble beginning more than slapping fools in the face because “Where my chicken nuggets?”

We tried just talking to Joshua about it, but that didn’t work. Academically, he got it. We’d ask him what kind of hands he should be using at school and he’d say “Keep them to myself” or “Nice hands”. And if he had a rough day, he wouldn’t try and hide it. We’d ask how his day went and he’d tell us “I didn’t listen today”. But talking about it and working through why it may not be appreciated and reminding him and all that didn’t seem to help anything at all. We’d get the same reports the next day and the same responses from him. He understood, but either couldn’t help himself or wasn’t sufficiently motivated to overcome whatever little impulses crossed his mind.

You’ll hear from a lot of people who think that individuals who refer to their pets as their “kids” are super obnoxious because kids are totally different and blah blah blah. I maintain, and I say this to people all the time, that if you can raise a dog well, you can raise a child well. I don’t think the analogy is as far off as some people seem to think. For example, it is a tenet of training a dog that negative feedback isn’t the way to go. If you yell at a dog for pooping on your carpet, that dog is just more likely to try and hide their pooping somewhere even worse because you yelled and that’s scary and they don’t want you to yell so if you can’t find their poop then it will be cool because you won’t yell because you didn’t find the poop. But if you praise the dog for pooping outside and give him treats and belly rubs and free airline miles or whatever else it is that dogs want then he is more likely to want to poop on the lawn because who doesn’t love free miles?

Janelle and I made the decision that we need to be less stingy about rewards. Joshua has a metric shit-ton of toys. We basically never buy him toys, but he gets a TON from family and friends at birthdays and Christmas. (In fact, going places like Target is super easy for us and makes for a great time-waster outing because Joshua has yet to connect the idea that the toys in the store are things he could ask us to buy for him right then and there. We just straight up almost never buy him things that aren’t tied to some life event like a birthday or Christmas.) We also like to try and keep him away from too much electronic entertainment because despite my turning out just fine thankyouverymuch there is just a deluge of reports that too much exposure can be harmful to your child. And these are the logical rewards to give because they are what he wants. I can’t really entice him with “Congratulations, you have built character today”.

We went with a tried and true positive reinforcement option: the sticker chart. Joshua has the chance to earn two stickers each day, for a good morning and a good afternoon. This is determined by his teacher. If he gets 10 stickers, he gets a surprise. And we have not advertised this openly to him, but we’ll do a small reward like getting some ice cream or some other treat at 5 stickers. We made the charts with him (Janelle made a Mickey Mouse Club House, a pirate ship and Joshua made a crazy toddler drawing) so that he would feel involved and we talk to him all the time about how he needs to remember to work hard on being good so he can get his stickers.

Two stickers is full kudos. We go over the top towards him about it. One sticker is okay, he was still good and we give him his standard “fun things” at home – like watching an episode of some show he likes. No stickers is no TV and a discussion about what happened.

We’ve been doing this for awhile now. Joshua has 3 fully completed sticker charts proudly displayed at home. But… it’s actually pretty hard to tell if they’re working. I don’t think we’ve had more than one or two no-sticker days since we started, and that’s pretty good – but I’m not sure we would have had very many prior to this either. We have a fair amount of one-sticker days, but that also seems to be pretty par for the course. All of his little friends seem to have rough times and he is certainly not one of the troublemakers (I’m not just putting on blinders, I know which kids are the troublemakers. They are adorable, but you can spot them from 50 yards out). But I think we are planting the seed that work and practice have their benefits and that we are ready and willing to reward him for good behavior. Just tonight we went out to Chuck E. Cheese for his 3rd reward and he was pretty into it (he likes to announce, “Mommy, I’m jumping up and down because I’m excited”). I figure the more excited he is about the rewards he gets, the easier it is to stoke that fire each day by saying “Remember how much fun the last reward was? Let’s try super hard today to get more stickers!”

But either way, it’s also helping to train Mommy and Daddy a bit. Another important part of raising a kid/dog (that’s a slash for kid or dog, not a mutant kid-dog) is consistency and that’s something that I think we were failing at. Before this, a good day sometimes got Joshua what he wanted, and sometimes it didn’t. We tried to really limit TV to a maybe 2-3 times a week thing for about 15 minutes a pop. But that meant that some days when Good Boy Joshua asked to watch something when we were at home we’d say yes and sometimes we would say “Not today, kiddo”. I imagine that got a little confusing for him. So now we are more consistent and less concerned about withholding rewards. If he asks to watch and has a good day, we plop on the couch together and watch a show and then he’s happy to help us turn off the TV and go do other things when the show is done. We’re not hoarding the things he wants, but now rather we are using them as means to an end, which has the added benefit of making it easier on us to keep him entertained.

We had a strange afternoon with Joshua the other day. He had a great morning — good listening, good mood, all that stuff. He had a great day at school — got a sticker for both his morning and afternoon good behavior (another post on that). But when we got him home, it was like someone replaced our decaf child with a new blend to see if we could tell the difference.

At the slightest provocation or even hint of disappointment, he would collapse on the floor, kicking and crying and telling us he didn’t want us to talk to him or that he wanted to be left alone or whatever. Everything became an ordeal. We were a little baffled. Then it became dinnertime. Joshua sat and ate and we got to watch a magnificent transformation. About halfway through the meal, he became a sparkling model citizen. Smiles, jokes, giggling and just pounding down his dinner. The rest of the night went off without a hitch (well, he got ornery when it was time to turn off the light for bed, but that’s a new thing and a topic for yet another post).

It wasn’t until he had finally gotten to sleep that we had time to think about what had happened and realized the very simple solution staring us right in the face: he was hungry. He was hungry and it made him super grumpy. That was it. Plain and simple. We are so wired these days to either expect this kind of combative behavior from toddlers as a fact of life or to look for some deeper meaning (perhaps it’s a case of ennui resulting from a disappoint with the state of his Legos or a 1/50-life crisis) that it can be easy to miss the classics.

Little kid back from a busy day at school running around and being excited for about 10 straight hours? Maybe he just wants some food. The thought didn’t even occur to us. If you had put me in an interrogation chair and asked me why my son was grumpy I would not have come up with “Maybe he wanted food”.

So if you have a grumpy kid, don’t forget the basics: tired, hungry, sick, needs to poop. Once you’ve eliminated those then you can start to wonder if your toddler is really satisfied with the state of their wooden puzzle portfolio.