child

Dear Pegasus – Baths

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Hello My Little Pegasus,

A few months ago, you had shellfish in pasta sauce. You had a really bad night. From that and another incident, we have been assuming that you have an intolerance. (No breathing issues or hives, just puking and upset stomach.) We’ll have to get you tested post Covid, but until then, we’ve been trying to avoid it.

Unfortunately, we gave you some food a two weeks ago that had been cooked with shrimp. You didn’t puke, but you had really bad diarrhea. I was tired and very surprised and I didn’t react great. I had to bring you to the other bathroom and clean you there, a quick shower seemed the right idea, but I think it might have been a little traumatizing for you.

Unrelated but adorable picture of Pegasus sleeping.

So baths haven’t been much fun lately. You seem terrified you’ll poop in the tub unless you’ve already pooped. Even then, you don’t seem to enjoy and play the way you did before the incident. I’m sorry I didn’t handle it well and I hope I haven’t ruined baths for you.

This weekend, you watched Dragon’s bath and she had a great time, so hopefully that will help. I’ll probably try a bath with both of you together and see how that goes.

I hope we can go back to you loving the water. It’s hard to bathe you when you don’t want to be.

Time will tell.

I love you little Pegasus,

Papa

Good and Bad

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Hello My Imaginary Friends,

We’ve been watching Falcon and the Winter Soldier. No spoilers, I promise. My daughter is having a really hard time following it, which is interesting on its own, considering she had no issues with WandaVision.

Her biggest problem, besides the sheer quantity of military, political, and racism language; is figuring out who the bad characters are.

Television, books, and movies normally have very well defined good and bad characters. She understands the twist baddie, but this show’s characters are all so ambiguously bad that it’s hard to tell.

Even the main characters do some bad and dumb things.

I’ve been trying to explain to her that in real life, bad or good isn’t what you are, but what you do. We’ll get to how it can be hard to tell the difference later, but right now she needs to understand that its not an innate state of being. No one is Good and no one is Bad. We are defined by our actions.

It’s important to me that my kids understand the difference both for themselves and for others. Because once you decide people are one way or another you put them in a box and start to paint their actions based off of your preconceptions. It leads to hero worship and accepting bad things because someone is good.

It’s a hard concept, but we have a lifetime to discuss it.

Stay safe, and be kind,

Éric