Superman Spankings: A no-spanking alternative for tantrums and stuff

We’ve hit the stage of this covid business where all of the cupboards and closets I carefully reorganized and Spring cleaned at the beginning of the quarantine now resemble a family minivan after a road trip (those of us with respectable vehicles of course never strew food wrappers, toys and mismatching shoes all over them...cough cough). 

A friend in a FB group asked what to do about young kids who are struggling with life right now and having tantrums. I meant to reply, but then I stepped in an abandoned peanut butter and jelly sandwich, got called to fish a small pebble out of a young child’s nostril and found that one of the year’s important school books mysteriously disappeared. 

We do superman spankings around here. (which is really confusing to people because there is no spanking involved, but I call them that because they accomplish the same purpose and the name makes my kids laugh). I discovered a long time ago that non-verbal boys don’t respond well to long talks about feelings and emotions. In fact, for some kids and personalities it may be more selfish than just giving them a spanking and being done with it. I went down a rabbit hole of child development research about why spanking works and how it developed. I came to the very intellectual and high-brow opinion that it’s proprioceptive and vestibular input that helps certain types of kids respond well to traditional discipline methods. (Did I word that ok?) That’s when I came up with “Superman Spankings”.  All of the proprioceptive, physical input needed to help reset and calm the brain, without the current social stigmas and trappings that I would love to really mull over and discuss with someone someday without triggering strong dichotomous opinions.  

Anyway, here’s a tutorial for “Superman Spankings”.

Step one: See child is having a meltdown. 

Step two: Ask said child if they would prefer to sit down and reason like diplomats or fly about the room with a superman spanking. (note: length of conversation and choices vary from child to child.)

Step three: If the answer is the latter, firmly grasp the child's forearms and swing in a circle until you a) risk losing the child to centrifugal force. b) risk falling over or getting motion sick.  (note: does not work on children who are almost as big or bigger than you.)

It doesn’t always work, but it’s a well loved tool. Sometimes it even works on an irrationally angry child (note: the stock picture above is deceptively peaceful looking… and also missing the beach nazi who would stop and tell you to keep walking).

Now if anyone can tell me the best way to remove objects stuffed up nostrils, I’ll be forever obliged.

Cranky children, French intensive gardening in the dark, and the moon

When I imagined having children, I was (am) naturally pessimistic enough to skip over the standard issue dreams of straight A students, star athletes and whatever else one hopes for when you see two lines on a pregnancy test. I did maintain a few visions perhaps of chubby, rosy cheeked toddlers with striped shirts, overalls and blonde curls (which coincidentally I got), but for the most part I’m hard to surprise.

So I wouldn’t say I was surprised by any of my children’s behavior today, but it did remind me that even though I may have passed the diapers and sleepless nights stage of parenting, there are plenty of new stages. Every time someone stops me at the grocery store and tells me to savor these moments because they go quickly, I want to stop and hug them for being one of the few people left who haven’t read the articles on Facebook and aren’t afraid to tell mothers that. I’ve considered passing out thank you notes to anyone who tells me I’ve got my hands full, or that I’m blessed…or cursed…. or that my child just ran over their foot with a cart, because I’m glad they’re not scared to say it (even though I’m somewhat scared of strangers). I like to live in a world where people notice children…. sometimes.

• One of my children ripped a reading book and evoked the berserker death glare that I’m sure is the fault of some Scandinavian grandfather nine generations back.

• One of my children didn’t earn his gummy bear in math, and proceeded to sneak the whole bag into the car where he was caught and burst into guilty tears and prostrations of penitence.

• One of my children is at camp this week and I miss him. He’s currently my only perfect child.

• All of my remaining children wouldn’t wake up today which made me think they might all have the Corona virus since early risings have been a lifetime achievement for all of them. They were so grumpy. I meant to check if the moon is waxing or waning although I’m not sure which one causes crazy behavior.

Speaking of the moon… I wasn’t into the whole moon thing until I couldn’t get a hospital room when the 3rd child was born and the nurses calmly explained it was because of the full moon. Now I blame almost everything on the moon. Your keys were found in the knife drawer? Can’t remember what a passive subjunctive verb is? A new pack of socks is mysteriously missing? All definitely caused by the moon. I’m only half joking, I read this study a few years ago that just solidified for me that all things can be blamed on the moon (or maybe just sleep patterns, I dunno).

We found that around full moon, electroencephalogram (EEG) delta activity during NREM sleep, an indicator of deep sleep, decreased by 30%, time to fall asleep increased by 5 min, and EEG-assessed total sleep duration was reduced by 20 min. These changes were associated with a decrease in subjective sleep quality and diminished endogenous melatonin levels. This is the first reliable evidence that a lunar rhythm can modulate sleep structure in humans when measured under the highly controlled conditions of a circadian laboratory study protocol without time cues.

One of my other New Year’s goals was to spend more time doing physical things and not abstract things, so when I got home I promptly went out to the backyard and worked on digging my garden (after I nearly put everyone in a worse mood with my own bad mood). I don’t think I’m cut out for gardening, but I like it so I’m going to stick to it even if it takes me months to dig up a 10’x10’ square of dirt. I hate jumping on the shovel and then hitting something so solid I either need to see a chiropractor or it is the chiropractor. I think there may be some leftover cement underground in my backyard… or maybe an old septic tank… or maybe a coffin. Who knows, but it’s square, and large and cement, and like I said, there’s nothing wrong with my imagination. I blame the moon.

How To Read More Books When You Have A Million Kids

...or just four kids.  

If there is one thing I think all moms universally long for (besides babies who sleep through the night and a cyberoptic forehead readout that tells you the optimal way to raise your particular child) it’s that we all wish we had more time to read.

My mom used to find me hiding under a giant pile of laundry or stuffed between the beds feverishly trying to consume a book on the down low. After oh so gently fussing at me, she would say something along the lines of, “Just wait until you have your own kids…”.     Well... Cough Cough.  She seriously underestimated my ability to get sucked into a new book.  And since necessity is the mother of invention, consider this a trade secret swap because you can never have too many ways to sneak books into your life.  Here are a few tried and true strategies.  

Read in the car

Buckle everyone in and then read 5 min before you pull out of the driveway, and another 5...er...10 min in the grocery store parking lot.  

Make Tacos for dinner

Or something else that can be mindlessly done on auto pilot. I have found flipping tortillas is the most mutually beneficial dinner strategy.  You can easily do that and brown ground beef while also flipping pages.  

Get an Audible account

This one is boring, but effective.   Everyone has mental “muscles” with some working better than others.  For the sake of evenness I try to exercise the auditory ones because they don’t work as well as my visual processing ones, but it’s difficult.  Still, laundry becomes so much more interesting when you’re listening to Diana Gabaldon's reader say “Sassenach”.  

Lay on the floor

Debut as a human jungle gym.  Kids usually just want to be around you, they don’t always need you to follow them around describing things like an interactive preschool app “Yes, ball...roll ball….good roll ball”  (although let's be real, we all sound like therapists these days thanks to Daniel Tiger).  Sometimes the most serviceable solution to buy yourself a chapter is to lay on the floor and let your spine become a deck and your feet a rudder as you’re tossed to and fro on a sea of fishy crackers.  While the wee pirates sail on grand adventures, you can consume a few precious pages.   

Spontaneously declare a 15 min “Super Secret Book Club”.  

Solemnly inform your kids they need to clean their rooms, empty the trash and wash the dishes.  Then freeze, cock your head like you’re listening to some invisible messenger and say “I’m getting an incoming order from the Interplanetary Secret Reading Order and they need us to drop everything right now and read for fifteen minutes….hmmm...can we? should we?  Perhaps we have no choice but to put off chores and attend this very important super secret club meeting.”  Reluctantly set the timer for another fifteen minutes afterwards when everyone clamors they’re not quite ready to go clean yet.  

Of course all of that assumes you haven’t been banned from your local library and have a healthy relationship with Amazon.   Ahem.  But what say you?  What are you reading and how/where do you read it?