I must say it was an exceptional weekend. We played outside most of the day Saturday, and played inside most of the day Sunday, grabbing a nap somewhere in there and sleeping in a little that first morning. The children went to be very well both nights, and I think we were actually all looking forward to going back to work and to school this morning - in a relative sense, of course. We've got a pretty full week: I've got class tonight, my wife has play rehearsal each night (show time next week!), and we've got the usual weekly schedule of church and homework and such. But for a Monday, I think we're doing pretty well.

I'm trying to teach my son the meaning of the word counterproductive. We were at my folks' house yesterday, packing up after lunch to come home. Trace has really gotten into hidden features on DVDs - easter eggs - and wanted to see some of the extra clips on the SPIDER-MAN disks. We looked at a few, and then I helped my dad hook up the DVD player properly in the living room - and since they have a limited selection of flicks, I was going to leave the Spidey DVD for Grampa to watch last night. That didn't sit well with my son, very heartbroken and whiney about not taking the DVD home to continue looking for hidden eggs.

We'd taken my whole case - has X-Men, Hulk, Daredevil, LOTR, etc - so I reminded him that other DVDs have easter eggs; let's leave this one with Grandma and Grampa and we'll look at the others. "AAWWW" - he huffed. I know it's just a DVD, not that big a deal, and my folks didn't want him to be sad, so no big deal, right? Wrong - it's a big deal to selfishly disobey and put yourself in front of others, and it shouldn't get rewarded. So I told him we'd take Spidey, that it was okay, that when he wanted to be nice and share the DVD we'd bring it back to the people we love. He felt terrible (and I felt a little rotten for talking like that), but he still took the DVD. On the way home, I told him it was best to keep quiet, that we would have to wait thirty minutes before putting that DVD in, but that we would put it in since he felt so strongly about keeping it away from the people we love (I felt bad for that one, too).

And when we got home, we had a talk. I told him that selfishness didn't get him into trouble, but putting himself first in a way that showed he didn't care about someone, and then on top of that arguing with me in a way that showed he cared more for that DVD than for me - that was wrong. And because of that, we had the SPIDER-MAN DVD, but none of the others. I'd left the whole case back at the 'rents, so they could choose what other movie they might want to watch last night. While he wanted to look for special features so bad, now there was only one disk, and there were no more movies to look at when it was done.

Counterproductive.
- posted by Rick @ 08:55