Dylan has a lingering cold with a hacking sort of cough that keeps triggering a Mighty Gag Reflex Barf and his sleep—which I owe you a follow-up on after all that talk about sleep training but suffice to say after a bumpy beginning of cutting out the wee-hour bottles and trying different comforting techniques and eventually just letting him cry his fool head off for a couple nights, the last two weeks or so have been a wondrous series of twelve hour stretches with no wakeup calls and he’s been much, MUCH happier in the mornings and it has been the best thing ever—has gone to hell because whenever he lies down the post-nasal drip gets him coughing all over again. It is a most tragic bummer and I’ve tried every trick in the book including steamy baths, slathering Vicks on the soles of his feet, and gently blowing a steady exhalation of marijuana smoke up his nostrils, but nothing much helps. I feel sorry for him, and I also feel sorry for myself, since I had to clean barfed-up hotdog pieces which emerged fully unscathed, still in the small coin-shaped slices he had eaten more than two hours earlier, and by the way, that’s kind of fucked up, right? My god, what kind of preservatives can so thoroughly resist the digestive processes? Hotdogs: you are on notice.

In much happier news, we finally—FINALLY!—got some actual springlike weather and I cannot tell you how wonderful it has been to feel the warm sunshine and spend some time outdoors as a family. High points of our weekend:

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And, of course:

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I forgot to mention one of the nicest things about Riley’s age right now: he can be threatened. Perhaps you’re not into threatening small children, and to that I say, HAVE YOU TRIED IT? Because it is surprisingly satisfying! Go ahead, indulge your inner bully and take advantage of one of the few times in life you can completely control another human being’s happiness. DANCE FOR ME MONKEY-CHILD MOO HOO HA HA HAAAA.

In all seriousness I have no qualms resorting to the Dire Threat when necessary because the boy does not LISTEN. I can say “I need you to pick up your toys” six hundred and fifty times in a row and it’s like my voice has morphed into the Peanuts trumpet—mwaa waaa mwa wa wa mwaaaaaa—but tack on a “. . . or you don’t get to watch Curious George tonight” and hot damn, suddenly we’ve got some forward momentum.

Once we were at a playdate and Riley had been behaving like a particularly sub-standard citizen for nearly an hour straight, one meltdown after another, and I had run through my entire bag of parenting-book-advice tricks and was at a loss for what to do other than start combing his hair looking for the 666 tattooed on his scalp. Finally I hunkered down, grasped his shoulders, pulled him close, and hissed in his ear that if he didn’t start acting better I was going to take his beloved blankie and throw it out the window of the car on our way home. Call it cruel, but he shaped right up after that.

The 1-2-3 method is surprisingly useful, too, when he’s doing something obnoxious like grabbing for a pen I’ve just told him he cannot have. Sometimes just a glare combined with an ominous “ONE . . .” does the trick, but Riley often likes to live dangerously and wait until the death-pause that comes after “TWO—” before springing into action.

I don’t really know what happens after “THREE”. It’s like Room 101 in 1984.

Oh, and you know what else is awesome about a preschool-aged kid as opposed to, say, a 14-month-old? When they ignore your repeated warnings about whining or taking their brother’s toys or jumping on the couch or whatever it is, you can send them to their bedroom. I like to bust about the full name for that one: “Riley William S.! To your room this instant!” and off he goes at top speed, wahmbulancing his way down the hall and slamming his door before throwing himself on his bed to sulk. After a few minutes, he’s usually ready to come back out and join society; it’s like a system restart on whatever fucked-up kernel panic we’ve gotten ourselves into.

(Sadly, none of these methods are useful for babies, and it’s really too bad because there are at least twenty times per day when I would dearly love to send Dylan to his room. Or hover over his furious fishflopping body and say, “ONE . . .” and have something happen other than a mule-kick to the gut. Instead, it’s all about distraction and redirection, and while that’s often effective it’s slightly less satisfying to deal with a screaming devilspawn child by chirping, “Oh LOOK! A spatula! Do you want to play with a spatula?”)

Riley’s favorite question lately is “But why?” and I often find myself saying, “Because I say so.” I don’t really care if this is an unadvised course of action or not, sometimes that is the fucking sum and substance of the answer, as Al Swearengen might say. Someone recently told me how their friend’s kid—a kindergardener, I think—requires a reasonable explanation before she will do something she’s asked to do, and I was thinking, SERIOUSLY? THEIR PARENTS PLAY ALONG WITH THAT? Because I can only imagine what sort of rabbit hole you would get yourself into after a while. It would be like that Louis CK routine: “Well because some things ARE, and some things are NOT! Things that are NOT can’t BE, and—” Sure, I might explain to Riley that he needs to wear a coat because it’s cold, but if he continues to protest, well by god MY VOICE IS THE LAW.

I’m sure this is one of the brief stages in parenthood where I can actually get all Samuel Jackson on my kid’s ass if need be, because soon enough he’ll be all, “Uccccch. WHATEVER, Mom.” And I’ll be like, “one . . . ?”

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