Smith Family Weblog

Despite the tendency to pitch a fit every now and then, Ava remains incredibly sweet.

When I picked her up from preschool yesterday, she exclaimed, “There’s something in my pants!” She dropped her drawers, and there in her underwear was a dandelion, a stick and a relatively impressive number of rocks to add to her growing collection.

I said, “Ava, why are those things in your underpants?!”

Her very reasonable response?

“I didn’t have pockets.”

On Sunday morning, Bryan and I, along with his brother and sister-in-law, took the kids to the Kansas City Zoo. I’ve heard that it’s a “walking zoo,” but I think in the 30 minutes it took to get to the first real exhibit, we passed more snack shacks than animals. It’s probably a rarity for a zoo to have such an incredibly large footprint in a city like this, so I’m not complaining. (Yet.)

Here’s a shot of the stroller brigade and all the preparations needed to take two (well, four) kids to the zoo for a couple of hours.

All was well–the animals, the kids–great. We were going to have a wonderful time.

And then, “What’s that screaming?”

That is the sound of a toddler throwing a massive tantrum approximately two and half miles from the car. We’d already decided that it was about time to head out (we have a sixth sense for these kind of things), but we drug a screaming kid out of “Africa” and past 85 snack shacks filled with parents who just stared–and not with the “Oh, I’ve been there, this too shall past” sympathy stare that I would have given another parent in that position. Oh no. It was cold, hard judgment.

In my three years of parenting, I’d say this was the most embarrasing moment to date. And, I may have mentioned that out loud on the trek back to the parking lot, because last night Ava said to Bryan as he scolded her for not listening to him, “Daddy, stop, you’re embarrasing me.”

As you’ve probably noticed in the last few posts, or experienced firsthand quite recently, Ava’s hit a bit of a rough patch. Most everything is a battle, and she’s figured out all to well that she can play Bryan and I off one another to get exactly what she wants. We’ve tried a number of different approaches, but the bottom line is that we’re not seeing eye to eye on how to parent. In fact, our parenting philosophies are becoming more divergent. And really, whether it’s Spock or Sears or Rimm or Frost, no strategy is going to work if you don’t implement it consistently.

So, we’re at an impasse. In the meantime, if you hear screaming, try not to judge.