Minky & Me

Spent the past week in Bar Harbor, Maine. It was lovely and cool. We bought a Kelty backpack for Minky to ride around in and went on a few hikes. Nothing crazy strenuous. Our first hike, which was more of a walk, was around Jordan Pond. Next we tackled Flying Mountain and Valley Cove trails which led us down to a small deserted beach. A family we had met earlier arrived after us. I got Layr to go over and ask if they knew the way back. They checked their guidebook which listed the hike as an out and back. Off they went. A dozen minutes later when we were leaving we walked up to the trail a bit differently than we came down. There we saw a marker pointing the way back to the parking lot along a gravel road, a much shorter route. Yippee. We’d gone father than we’d intended and it was lunchtime. God forbid you’re on a deserted beach with a toddler, with the car more than an hour away, and not a cheerio in site.

There was the obligatory trail snake siting. God, do I hate snakes. It was small and black. My reaction to it was visceral. The shape, the slithering, registered somewhere in my brain and I turned and stalked, shivering, right back up the trail, passing my husband and baby by, all the while saying, “eh, eh, eeehhhhh.” A couple feet away I was able to survey the area. Layr assured me it had gone into a hole. We proceeded onward.

Saturday we went to Sand beach, the only visit to the beach we made. The water was abominably cold. My feet lost feeling after only seconds in the water. Minky was undaunted, though. She kept wading in, Layr following closely behind.

An email Layr received last night about the car we looked at:
Hi, I got a offer for the car but the person wants to give me a check for the amount I really don’t want to take the check so if you can get cash I will sell it to you as is or I will do oil change and brake job let me know asap thanks

Layr’s response:
I’m afraid I’m bowing out of this one. Best of luck.

Seller’s reply:
YOUR LOSS MAN YOU Don’t KNOW A GOOD CAR WHEN YOU SEE ONE

After a significant amount of legwork done by Layr on craigslist this weekend, we went tonight to check out a car for sale in a nearby town. Regretfully we’ve been feeling the strain lately of having only one car.

From the way the ad was worded – “don’t want to sell but recently had a baby” – we expected someone close to our age. Instead we got a pimply young guy who was nervous and looked away as Larry introduced me. Not a good sign.

This guy starts right in telling us about all work he’s had done on the car. He opens the hood and lets us get inside. He explains that he’s selling because his wife wants something larger now that they’ve had a baby. Though he loves the car, and doesn’t want to part with it, it doesn’t have enough room for all the baby gear you need, like, for instance, a stroller.

He was not, for the record, wearing a wedding ring.

When he gets around to opening the trunk, Larry looks over at me and says, “can our stroller fit in there?” “Oh, yeah,” he pipes up, “you can fit a stroller in there.“ Not one hint of recognition that he’d just finished telling us the opposite.

The fact that the car had no plates on it and the guy all but refused to let us drive it even when we said we’d put on our plates made me even more wary. His refusal was worded in a way that I’m sure he thought was cunning. He told a sad story about how, awhile back, he’d driven a car with the wrong plates and was pulled over by the cops and given a hefty fine. “It’s a Massachusetts thing,” he said.

In order to assure us that not we wouldn’t be total idiots for buying an undriven used car, he told us again about all the work he had done. It was about this time that he mentioned the car had 60,000 miles on it when he got it. His ad had said he was the original owner.

When we again expressed our uneasiness at not being able to drive it he said, “you have a baby, right? I have a baby, too. I wouldn’t sell you a car and then walk away. If you came back to me and said it needs a thousand dollars of work, I’ll work with you.” Huh?

After we got home I did a little looking on craigslist. I found that this guy is selling a slew of cars. Some are listed in the town we went to, others in different towns. He also had several posts looking to hire someone to fix things like brakes for really low prices. I found all this out by doing a seach on his phone number.

My mother now thinks I should become a police detective. Would the Hip Hammock child carrier fit over my gun holster?

I just checked out a book from the library called Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood: Practical Parenting from Birth to Six Years.

It got great reviews at Amazon. It’s a quick read and very amusing. The basic idea is that children need to learn how to make wise decisions in order to be prepared for adulthood. They believe that if children are given a lot of choices when they are small and the consequences of their actions are relatively insignificant (i.e. toys being taken away for a day when they aren’t put away) they will learn to make wise decisions as teenagers and adults.

Love and Logic parenting is all about developing a child’s self-concept. In order to do that you take yelling or threats out of the equation and give lots of choices followed up by consequences for inappropriate behavior. For example: would you like juice or milk with your lunch?” or “would you like to go to bed now or in fifteen minutes?” Giving up control over things that don’t matter much to you allows your child to make decisions and build self-esteem. Control, the book suggests, is what children are after when after years of being restricted they go out and do something rash, like getting pregnant or quitting school.

There is more to it than what I’ve described but that is the basic premise. I really believe that this style of parenting can work. My only reservation is the bit about never getting angry. I think that it’s good for children to see a range of emotions.

One of the examples I found really funny was about a man who has an accident on the highway. To illustrate the point about preparing children for the adulthood, the author writes that a cop would never arrive at the scene of an accident and say, “how many times have you been told to keep your eyes on the road?”