The Wisdom of Brotherly Beatings

The comic Titus often said that while mothers try to teach their children wisdom, fathers make them earn it. I totally see this in the different parenting approaches Rowdy and I take. For example, while I might discourage the boys from getting near a flame to avoid being burned, Rowdy keeps his lips sealed, insisting that one round with fire will leave a lasting reminder that fire, well, it fucking hurts.
My sons have a rather passionate relationship with each other. Most of the time it is the kind of passion that prompts one sibling to undergo life-threatening surgery to donate a kidney to a brother or sister fighting off death. They protect each other, they get angry at Rowdy and me when we are disciplining the other, they are best friends and playmates. For the most part, the bond Ridge and Rolan share is as strong as a forest of oak trees.
But then there are other times, the times that they are hooked up like two rottweilers tearing each other by the flesh for a scrap of meat. When my boys decide to throw hands, neither one hold back. This is no holds barred combat, a fight to the death, or at least until someone gets hurt bad enough to give in and cry to Momma. And, normally, when I pull the two of them apart, some rinky dink cheap toy is stuck there between them.
So, when they opened a matching pair of toy bulldozers at my mom's this Christmas, I was like a freakin' psychic, foreseeing many a'thumping unleash over these two contraptions.
Naturally, as the person who birthed both of them, I try to discourage these bloody reenactments of Lord of the Flies. Now, I'm not saying that I think Rowdy actually wants them to claw one another's eyes out, but he certainly seems to create situations that he, as a thinking adult, should see will lead to only that. He is constantly encouraging them to wrestle each other or tackle other or some other activity that 100% of the time leads to out-and-out warfare. Fucking constantly.
However, all this time I believed he just didn't think the end game out, that is, until he showed the boys how to have bulldozer fights. That's right, freakin' bulldozer fights.
A few nights ago, I walked into the living room to see Rowdy, the lone grown-up, showing our darling sons how to ram these disastrous toys against each other until one of them was pushed off the table, making one brother the winner and the other a very pissed off loser. Immediately, I snipped something like, "Have you lost your ever lovin' mind, Rowdy?"
Of course, he insisted that this was rather harmless, that they were just being boys. And he stuck by that defense right up until complete and utter lawlessness broke out.
And as I comforted my battered, beaten and bloody boys, I reminded Rowdy once again that they are, as he had just explained, boys. Their instinct simply is to smack each other with big toys until one of them is bleeding and both of them are bawling.
Then he said, "Yeah, but I bet they remember that it hurt."

I Screwed Up And Let Both My Kids Become Obsessed with Thomas

As I sat down to write this post, the wise words of the big hair band of the 80s, Great White, are humming through my mind, "My, my, my, You're Once Bitten, Twice Shy, Babe."
I wish they would have been a few months ago when I rather ignorantly introduced my youngest son Rolan to Thomas the Train. Now, as I'm sure you already know, my oldest boy Ridge has taken his fascination with Thomas into obsession. I'm sure if he was old enough to have his own means of transportation and actually realized that The Day Out with Thomas that comes annually to Oklahoma City's Railway Museum traveled from city to city, he'd drop out of Rainbow Lane and follow it around like some stoned Dead Head. He knows each little train by heart, even the ones that are the exact same color and look virtually identical to one another except for their length of funnels or some such shit. The Thomas bug bit Ridge when he was about 2 and that cheeky train has been ruining my life ever since.
Because of that, you would think I would have had the fucking foresight not to introduce this Jedi mind-controlling hogwash to the little one. Clearly, I'm like kid who repeatedly sticks her hand in fire or poor dog who runs smack dab into the glass door over and over and over. I just never learn.
So now, just when Ridge's junkie addiction to Thomas finally appeared on the verge of being overcome, Rolan is waking up each morning, demanding Thomas be turned on through the magical genius of the DVR, thus giving Ridge a daily fucking reminder of just how much he still really, really loves Thomas. Instead of one boy making forceful requests as though I'm some hostage negotiator and he's got 10 kidnapped bystanders who can only be saved if the ransom of a Thomas showing is met, I have two.
For a while, I thought I had solved the Thomas crisis through the miraculous hands of YouTube. With Ridge old enough to run a mean mouse pad, I would put the boys in front of the computer, pull up YouTube, type in Thomas the Train and let them go to town. With the similar videos listed on the bottom right of the screen, Ridge just click away, buying me much needed house cleaning time while they watched an endless sea of Thomas videos. But then one day the title of one caught my eye as I walked by, picking up toys that were no doubt Thomas related. It was, "Gordon Kills Thomas," or something along those line. Yeah, apparently some asshole has made a whole collection of videos based on the series with a twist of The Shining or some other sadistic nightmare that 4-year-olds and 2-year-olds don't need to be watching, unless of course you are just wanting them to never sleep again, in which case, bombs away. I wanted to write this dude a nasty note along the lines of, "Thanks for screwing up my sweet thing, you sick bastard," but then I remembered that he's some nut job who apparently thinks turning beloved childhood icons into serial killers is hilarious. In an attempt to not end up as some sickos skin dress or cooked in their fat lady stew, I decided to withhold from the letter and just bitch about him here for the whole Internet to read. I think that's a much safer plan, don't you?
So, after the YouTube solution turned out not to be a solution after all, I had to let the boys start watching Thomas the old-fashioned way again, on the television. And as if my plight of Thomas mania wasn't bad enough, those assholes behind the PBS series have introduced a whole new handful of trains in this season's episodes. That means each time Ridge sees one of these new pricks during his daily Thomas fix, he immediately starts chanting, "Walmart! Walmart!" at the top of his lungs. He's not going to rest until we have each and every member of the Thomas fleet, which not only includes about a million rather similar trains, but also a bus, a traction engine (that's a tractor to us Americans), a helicopter and now a freakin' jet plane named Jeremy. Ridge's new partner in his bloody rebel coup, the formerly darling Rolan, is right beside him, pounding his tiny fists to the table, as he follows his brother's call to arms.
So, I just wish I would have heard The Great White song two months ago. Perhaps it would have sparked my one remaining brain cell into having a thought, which might have then lead to preventing this catastrophe. We already go through $20 a month in batteries just keeping the Thomas and Friends buzzing around the tracks scattered through our house. Will it be $40 this time next year? Perhaps $80? Who knows. Just heed my warnings, Readers, do NOT let your children watch this devilish nightmare or you, too, will be fighting this losing battle .