Thursday Thoughts: Children are Bad

Before the subject of this blog post makes you pick up the phone and report me to CPS, hear me out.  This is a quote from John Rosemond's book The Well-Behaved Child, and when I read it yesterday I laughed out loud and it put me in a good mood all morning.  If you're an avid reader of my blog, you may have noticed on the left-hand side of the page that I finished Rosemond's book Making the Terrible Twos Terrific.  It was the second time I read it (the first time was when Sydney was about a year old, back when I thought she'd never be a "terrible" two-year old), and I definitely gleaned more from the book the second time around.  However, a few weeks ago I started noticing a change in her behavior (behavior that was not covered in the book).  I finally realized I needed to read the next book in the series, and I can already tell that it's going to help a lot.

Anyway, from The Well-Behaved  Child, here's the context surrounding the proclamation "children are bad":

This book exists because children misbehave -- not some children, all children...They do not misbehave because their innocent nature has been corrupted by bad parenting or chemical imbalances or rogue genes or "issues"...Children misbehave because they are bad, and the sooner parents understand and accept this, the better for them and the better also for their children.

Maybe it's just me, but I think this is hilarious.  John Rosemond's tone in his books is not completely serious -- he aims to entertain as he educates, and I think he succeeds brilliantly.  He is a Christian, so what he really means by "children are 'bad"' is that children, like every other human being on this planet, are sinners.  Children are born with a sinful nature and they do not have to be taught to sin -- they just do, and it comes quite naturally to them.

Sydney has already proven she is human, but not Lorelei.  She is still a perfectly sweet angel.  Here's what Rosemond has to say about Lorelei:

A child's badness awakens from the slumber of infancy sometime during the second year of life.  Parents put a sweet little eighteen-month-old angel -- a child who's never given them a moment's trouble -- to sleep one night and the Demon Spawn of Satan wakes up the next morning, raging.

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!  :-)

Just one more thing before I share pictures (if you've even read this far): I highly recommend John Rosemond's books, because they make so much sense.  His philosophy is that parents need to get 'back to basics' and start raising their children the way our elders raised children -- before the 1960's when everyone started listening to psychologists (John Rosemond is one) and psychiatrists instead of their elders.  His simple strategies for disciplining work, and he did not create them -- he simply reintroduced them.

It's been a while since I've posted random pictures of Lorelei, so without further ado...

These were taken at a Target Starbucks where we stopped during our drive from Houston back to Gulfport after Hurricane Isaac.  She had just woken up from a very long nap.

She likes to crawl under the table and move chairs around.

This is what happens when I have to go somewhere and the girls stay with Daddy...they get to ride in doll strollers (super safe, I know).  (Those are mosquito bite scars, not bruises, on her left ankle.)

She had food in her hair, so I cleaned it out with a wet rag and gave her a "faux"hawk.

Sliding at the park in her 80's shorts.

She loves riding like a big girl.

Wallowing in Sydney's chair (she's getting a chair like it for her birthday).

She had a mosquito bite on her leg that we covered with a band aid.  The band aid found its way to her forehead during a nap.

Watching Sydney play.  What a big girl!