Sunday, October 16, 2011

Am I Ready for 2?

I'll be using a variety of resources to determine my emotional age. If anyone has a better yardstick then let me know. Here's a site that has this to say...*
I want to direct your attention to the bottom of this post where a poll will allow you to pinpoint this important opinion.
"And while your child is fiercely proud of her emerging independence, at other times she's still a baby, making your job one of juggling multiple personalities."

This sounds very familiar.

"Cognitive development

Talking milestone


What to expect your child to achieve by the end of the year:

  • Can point to an object or picture when it's named by someone else
  • Understands names of familiar objects, body parts, and people
  • Can talk in two- to four-word sentences"
Unless I've had too many White Russian cocktails, I think I can do all these things which actually leads me to decide I should only concentrate on emotional milestones and not cognitive ones. So here they are...

Social and emotional development

Separation and independence milestone

What to expect your child to achieve by the end of the year:
  1. Demonstrates a desire for independence — she may insist on wearing her purple pajamas five nights in a row
  2. Begins to show defiant behavior to test her limits (coloring on the walls, for example, even if you tell her not to)
  3. Decreases separation anxiety


I'm confused already. Is this a list of what to expect from a normal two year old? Or is this what to expect when everything is going horribly wrong...like for most parents? Let's take them in order.

  1. I demonstrate a desire for independence. In fact, I've worn my purple pants for the last 5 days. How odd. Maybe purple pants is a two year old fetish.
  2. One only needs to look at my recent border crossing for defiant behavior. So, I guess I pass that one. Or did I fail? Is defiance expected of 2 year old girls but 40 year old men should conform and comply obediently like McDonalds drones?
  3. Separation Anxiety. Uh-oh. It doesn't say the two year old has conquered separation anxiety. So, I think emotionally I'm at least a below average two year old.
What do you think?

Bonus Question: Toilet training milestone

  • Able to hold urine for three hours or more
 I barely pass this test as I must piss more often than I like to admit now that my prostate and sphincter have applied for early retirement.
 *This article makes me think of a funny parody, "What to expect from your 40 year old." hahaha

Oggy's Emotional Age

Old Man of The Mountain

 There were hundreds of people on Mt. Major even though I promised myself I would only hike it at night. But how else can you see the nice colors?







Happy 1st Birthday Oggy!

In light of my crybaby attitude I'm going to conduct an experiment. See, I'm emotionally stunted. You could say this was caused by my mother walking out when I was 5 years old and my father treating me like I'm perennially in grade school, but it's my fault in the end. I might act like I'm 15 years old but inside I'm around 10. So I'm going to take the advice of my friend in Mexico who told me to grow up and "at least act like you're 11."

I'm going to start over completely. I feel like adults are not made by their parents but by how good they parent themselves after they leave their parents. Well, I've allowed myself to run amok and while I have learned some things one *would ordinarily not learn*, and even managed to avoid most drug habits, it has not prepared me for a life among drug addicted Americans. I will start over at one year old and go from there.

Since emotional birthdays have no set date I'm going to have to go on my instincts and maybe you can help and tell me, "Oggy, you sound like a 4 year old today." Or "Oggy, that was a good choice. A teenager might make that choice." Or, "Oggy, when you whine like that about your transmission breaking you sound like an infant." Many of you have children my age so you should be able to give good comments. It'll be like a board game where you go forward or back two spaces. I'll have to get the S.F. junk man's help in designing the board and game pieces. The game will be called "Grow Up You Big Baby!"

Wait! I'll go to a store and buy one of those "What To Expect From Your 2 Year Old" books and see if I qualify.

*Is that a split infinitive?

Digitized Memory

The camera is so badly damaged by the multiple times I dropped it and the abuse from the vibration in the van that some of the footage is coming out terribly distorted. This is part of the reason why I didn't buy a better camera for the trip, knowing it would be junk upon my return. Or maybe this is what happens when you tape over previous footage. Maybe it's the tape's fault that it appears a highway is running through my head. This is a good example of being too dumb to talk myself out of going to Labrador with a broken camcorder to find the arctic wolf and video the whole thing...and make a movie from the footage. I almost feel the jaded cowards were right and I was better off crimping fiber optic cables and watching life pass me by on the 8 o'clock news.
I may have to wait until I get a whole new camera to capture it to my computer. This is crazy. Really, I need a minidv tape deck so I don't use the camera as  vcr. I'll put that on the wishlist with self esteem and a job and an apartment and a servo gasket for the tranny.
Gros Morne Fjord. I should've jumped when I had the chance.
Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.