My four year old can’t stop calling “mosquitos” “muh-skittles.”

He talks incredibly well and coherently, but he just can’t get that one down, and it has let to just some wonderfully fun conversation.

The mispronunciations are the best. It gets kind of sad when they start getting it right. :(

Love that.

(FTR, I don’t seek the parenting community I envision building an participating in to have a monolithic world view or be limited by politics. But I’m not going to refrain from my views as they’re relevant to the conversation.)

I’ll share more later on, but largely agree and love this approach. I personally think there are so many benefits to it, and you lose out on a super valuable resource if you write it off as something bad for kids.

I’m sorry to hear about your kid being sick. :( Hope his fortunes turn.

Oooh. We haven't checked that one out. I guess the season has passed now, but I'm going to have to remember that for next year.

With the abundance of relatively cheap looking 3d animation in children's TV (including Mickey Mouse Clubhouse) it's nice to see the quality they put into these.

Ultimately, as a dad, I'm proud of the effort my 7-year-old put into this. I choose not to dampen his achievement or pride in it. I choose not to temper the appreciation he's been taught for our veterans with my concern over these faulty patriotic messages. There may be a time, but it's not yet.

Does our country live up to any of these messages anymore. Do I want my kids to believe in these messages even if I think we're actually falling well short?

"Indoctrination" is brought up so frequenlty in our political discourse surrounding schools, usually about other thigns. But what of this?

Am I proud to be an American? At least I'm free or at *most* I'm free? Do we stand shoulder to shoulder? Do we share America or do we actually seek to make it exclusive? And then there's the many baked in references to "God," not the least of which is in the pledge of allegiance.

Will I ever forget the time I caught my slipping very young child at a water park preventing him from cracking the back of his head open on the side of the kiddie pool? No, I will not.

I’m still not sure why my wife never gave me my medal.

The man, the myth, the legend

Too real

In any case, having these three around (plus our younger pup) has meant everything to us. Don’t know how we’d get through it without helping them through their grief and/or allowing them to distract our attention away from our own.

No big moral here. Just an experience I wanted to share.

And so sometimes he manifests that feeling in himself whether it was initially coming naturally or not. But that’s not to say it’s a false reaction. He truly is and becomes sad. But it’s grief in his own way, and it’s perfectly valid.

He also grabbed a phone we let him text relatives with and sent “my dog died” to a few of them well before my wife and I had broached that conversation. But that was his way of coping and caring.

At the same time, he knows the feeling he should be having is sadness during this time.

It’s been hardest on our seven year old. His autism leads him to be extremely matter-of-fact. Almost as soon as we told him (minutes after it happened), he marked the daily calendar he keeps with “RIP” and dogs name.