@rab1 He might like this: Voyage of the Mimi I did when I was about that age, anyway. It's a PBS show about a ship taking a census of humpback whales. It's where I learned every humpback has a unique pattern on its tail, like a fingerprint. Child actor Ben Affleck was in it.
@rab1 The smart ones are rough from 3-5. Rough, tough, and ready to rumble. Bring your A game dad, he's only going get better. And you sound like fun!
(A thing that helped with my smart one was making sure she had agency in as much as possible. Do you want any breakfast first or pants, before you go to school? Do you want Cheerios or egg? What type l route should we take to school? I don't know whether that's your kid's deal, but mine stopped scrapping so hard for control once she got to make an many choices as I could give her. She didn't stop entirely, but she did let up a little.)
@emily3 We use the ‘A or B’ strategy too, it definitely helped a lot, but it’s starting to wear out. Now when he realizes he doesn’t want either option he’ll just say “I can’t choose / I don’t want to choose”.
First I tried explaining that “not choosing is a choice too” but he’s too young to grok that, and had no effect. Now I’ll typically answer “okay, I’ll choose for you then, you’ll have A”. That works a bit better but can make him really frustrated. It’s a work in progress..
@rab1 Reverse psychology also works amazingly well for us.
Getting him to eat is as simple as telling him, "Do NOT eat my eggs."
Don't you dare get dressed for school...
You better not kiss mom when she gets home...
@rab1 My 14 year old son modified the HTML on his school's grades page to make his grades look better than they are... I was impressed but also very angry
@renee2021 One of my mother's favourite stories is of me at 6 years old waking up in the middle of the night and getting on the family computer that had different users with different permissions set up in Windows 3.1. I wanted to play some of the cool games that were in her folder but my user didn't have access to it, so I had to circumvent by booting into DOS and launch the exe using command line.
It was a strip poker game with heavily pixelated stick figure characters for artwork, more of just a novelty thing than anything erotic haha.
@rab1 Wait til they start asking questions they know the answer to. “Dad, do you work on S days?” “Dad, do I have school on Sundays?” “Dad, what’s 1+1?” Haha
