Jack has always been a pleasure to take to restaurants; we don’t go very often, so when we do he is so curious and interested in what’s happening that he just sits back and observes. Usually this means he eats A LOT (at one of my former consumer goods co’s we called this “mindless nibbling”. . . the tendency to forget how much you’re eating when you are watching TV or a video). So, while it’s great for most of the time, getting Jack out of the restaurant can be a challenge because he would be happy to sit there for hours, observing the people – particularly the wait staff who deliver the food and bus the tables as they really move fast!

Yesterday, I found the solution.

At the end of our meal – or at least at the end of everyone else’s meal, with the check delivered and paid – I try to hurry Jack along.

• Me: Jack, are you about finished?

• Jack: I’m not done. (Another bite goes in.)

3 minutes later. (Felt like 10 minutes to me, because Luke, our 1 yr old, who’d been great the whole meal had reached his limit and was alternating between eye-rubbing and attempting a high-chair escape.)

• Me: Jack, you’ve eaten so much! Aren’t you finished?

• Jack: I’m still eating. (Another bite goes in.)

3 minutes later. (Again, it felt like 10 minutes, because I had just noticed the time and we were 15 minutes past bath time already, and we still had drive/cake/presents to do before the bathtub.)

• Me: Jack, don’t forget we have birthday cake to eat when we get home.

• Jack: DONE!

We were out of the restaurant in one minute, max.

This is not the first time I’ve learned this lesson of getting your kids to transition from one activity to another by presenting them a better alternative. (OK, you might call this a bribe-gasp!) This also works to get them to do what they might consider unpleasant activities. Whether it’s getting Jack to brush his teeth at bedtime (so we can read bedtime stories!), or getting him to leave the playground (we’ll have chicken nuggets for dinner!), life with toddlers – at least in my household – is a constant game of choosing the best “carrot”.

While I’ve read that certain parenting experts believe that bribing your kids scars them for life, I have to disagree. Bribing is actually quite common in adult life, I’ve found, when you need to get people to cooperate with your plans and objectives. In corporate, they call it the “what’s in it for me” method, but basically it’s a principle based on bribing: Figure out who your audience is (in this case, a toddler) and what they really care about (cake, bedtime stories), and use the promise of this reward to encourage cooperation. They just don’t call it that because bribing sounds manipulative, whereas targeting your audience appropriately is smart.

Human nature is human nature, whether you’re 3 or 30 years old. Or whether your bribe is a trip to the playground or a good performance review. I figure learning this young is actually a good thing for my boys, versus scarring them.

I just don’t want them to learn to quickly how to bribe their parents into doing what they want….though I’m suspicious my almost-3-year old is on the verge.

But, before all of you with totally normal kids stop reading because you’re thinking this blog entry is about gifted children, let me stop you. It’s not. I believe the “rage to master” is actually more common than experts might say – or at least varies by degrees.

And I think every young child has it. Especially my 1 year old, Luke.

What exactly is the “rage to master”? To quote from a quite interesting blog post on the topic from Wandering Ink: “it is the intrinsic motivation of gifted and talented children to master an area of interest; it’s absolutely obsessive in nature, driving the child to focus intensely on that subject matter and voraciously consume new information and skills.”

For those of you who have parented young children, you probably remember these moments of extreme obsession. Periods in a child’s life when they are acquiring new skills and can’t – it seems – waste time on anything that’s not propelling them toward mastery of the challenge. These “rages to mastery” happen around every major milestone: learning to roll over, learning to pull up, learning to crawl, learning to stand.

And, the obsession we’re witnessing right now: learning to walk.

I should have seen this one coming. Luke was an uncommonly happy baby (one of the main reasons we actually think we could handle a third). If presented even the slightest challenge by a toy being out of reach, he would proceed to entertain himself by playing pattycake or staring at a ceiling fan. He was happy to just observe. And with our household of grandparents, parents, 1 big brother, 2 dogs, 2 cats, and various neighbors and friends coming and going, there’s a lot to observe.

With the whirl of constant activity around him providing hours of viewing pleasure, Luke didn’t have the need to move. He was a late crawler, not learning this skill until 11 months. But wow – since then! The whole world has changed. And so has Luke. He quickly progressed to learning to stand, which caused him several late nights and short naps as he practiced and practiced in his crib. And now, a short month later, he is voraciously practicing walking.

Gone is our happy baby who was content to sit and observe. In his place is a determined, one-track-minded toddler who teeters laps around our den/kitchen area until he literally can’t take another step from fatigue. And then, he’s a fussy, discontented toddler who doesn’t understand why when his mind wants him to move, his legs may not cooperate. He’s even more fussy when he gets himself into a corner that he can’t figure a way out of, resembling the Energizer Bunny banging his drum and marching over and over into a wall.

As I watch him, I marvel at his persistence and insatiable desire to master walking.

And I am struck by the parallels in my own life, as a neophyte entrepreneur, with the Rage to Master driving me each day.

The same voracious appetite to master walking in Luke is the same all-consuming desire that I have to realize the vision of Moms Out Loud. I see it in my head, it swirls in my brain, it weaves its way into my dreams and unconscious thoughts making it extremely difficult to focus on anything else. And just like Luke, I find myself at times entirely spent with the overwhelming energy expended on the various aspects of executing against a vision that I feel so compelled to bring to my friends and fellow Moms.

These are the moments when I force myself to stop and remind myself of why I’m doing this business in the first place: to give me more flexibility around moments I can spend with my family, and to build a company that allows my employees – who will, when I’m big enough to hire them – be women or Moms who also want to contribute great things to our world at large….between the hours of 9am – 3pm (or so). And so, I make myself shut down the computer early a couple of days a week, and go home to be with my boys.

And when I do, I spend a little extra time with Luke, assisting in his “Rage to Master” by getting him out of those corners and sending him down a straighter path.

For them.

Their world is pretty much black and white. They have no hidden agendas (or at least ones so hidden that an adult can’t pretty easily figure them out). They have two speeds: high gear (for running on the playground and eating birthday cake) and dawdle (for getting to bed and for when you are trying to get them out the door for pre-school).

And, apparently, there is another simple reality in my 3-yr old’s life. It is the absolute power of the four magic words: “Please may I have.”

It’s happened gradually over time, almost without us noticing it. At first, they were sweet statements of what he wanted – or at least, comments that when stated in that toddler boy singsong voice, sounded sweet. “I want some milk” or “I want to go outside.” We soon helped him turn those statements into requests: “Can I have some milk?”, or “Can I go outside?”. Without thinking much about it, the requests were granted (when granting was easy to do, and when you only have one child to worry about, it almost always is).

Then, we remembered we should be teaching him about the magic word: Please. So we coached our little man to say “please” along with his requests. “Can I have some more juice, please?” or “Can I have some more Veggie-Tales, please?” He got the hang of that so easily that we quickly moved to a more proper way to state his requests: “Please may I have [whatever object has his attention at the time]?”

But somehow, almost imperceptibly, his requests have evolved back into statements based on the belief that the four words “please may I have” will unlock every door, open every cabinet, and get every toy.

While I’m often proud that we have successfully taught our son the grammatically perfect, and politically correct, way to ask for something, I’m also often stunned at how much faith he puts in those four words to make whatever he wants magically materialize.

• Like the Saturday morning when he woke up and wanted to go to school: “Please may I have school?” Well, no, Jack, school is closed. That took a long time to explain.

• Like the Tuesday afternoon when he wanted to have a swim lesson with Ms. Tara: “Please may I have Ms. Tara?” Well, no, Jack, Ms. Tara is not teaching today. That one was solved by going to the pool ourselves.

• Like the Thursday morning when he wanted cake for breakfast: “Please may I have cake?” Well, no, Jack, we don’t eat cake at breakfast. We compromised by putting cake sprinkles on top of his cream cheese & bagel.

Recently, I struggled between mortification and laughing out loud when Jack tried to pass this lesson on to another child, a little older than him, at a birthday party. The party was at the Dallas Arboretum, and our festivities were held in an amazing area with a huge expanse of lawn (I think it’s called the Camphouse Patio). Jack had ended up with two play mowers from the toy stash, which – given this great lawn – were certainly prime toy choices. A little girl came up and tried to take one from his hand. Jack held tight. The girl tried again. Jack was firmly NOT letting go.

• “You have to say: ‘Please may I have’,” Jack told her, in total seriousness.

• The little girl looked stunned. She reached for the mower again. Jack pulled it back again.

• “You have to say: ‘Please may I have’,” he said again.

At that point, I was about to step in to make up something to tell Jack about how he needed to share, even if the other little girl didn’t say please, but she decided this was too crazy of a situation and bounced away. The really funny thing was, I’m sure Jack would have given her the toy – had she said “please may I have”. For him, those four words hold absolute power to grant access to any object of desire.

Fast forward 33 years to me. I sit at my computer writing this, wrestling with a decision that is monumental in my little corner of the world….or even the hundreds of small little things I struggle with daily. How I wish “Please may I have” were that powerful. I’d just say them, and then what I want would magically appear. Right?

Wrong.

I can’t just say: “Please may I have a size 8 body?” and have it materialize. I can’t just say: “Please may I have a trip to Hawaii?” and immediately be lying on Poipu Beach. And – though how I wish this were true, especially right now – I can’t just say: “Please may I have an absolutely stunning, working perfectly, totally user-friendly web site?” and pull it up in a flash on my computer.

Unfortunately, life is not this simple, as Jack will soon learn now that his little brother Luke has just become mobile and has a mind of his own. “Please may I have” only works in situations where someone (the person you’re requesting from) has the will and ability to grant the request. Just this morning, Jack asked Luke this morning: “Please may I have the dump truck?” as Luke was playing with it. (Well, OK, this was after I scolded him for trying to take it out of Luke’s hands. Even for Jack, there are limits to his application of manners, and apparently brothers are one of them.) But voila! – nothing happened. Let me rephrase: something happened – a tug of war.

The point – and the lesson – is, even with a “please may I have,” what he desired didn’t automatically materialize.

Jack will have many more years of learning this lesson. The world at large will consistently wear down his expectation that “please may I have” results in anything magical. So for now, when I can do so without undermining other lessons of the day, I will quickly grant all requests preceeded by “please may I have?”. Because even if it doesn’t always work automatically, I do believe he’ll get a lot further with a “please” than with a tug of war.

I think my approach is somewhere in the middle.

Generally, if Jack (my almost-3-yr-old) labels something incorrectly or mispronounces something, I try to encourage his effort while still making sure he understands the correct name or pronunciation. This means I find myself providing a correction like: “Well, actually, it’s a pink” (not red), followed by an encouragement to keep trying: “What other things can you think of that are pink?”

I didn’t realize how much I must be using the term “Well, actually” until a week or so ago, when we were reading a bedtime story. Our routine getting Jack and Luke to bed takes longer than it should, and sometimes (especially recently) I’m so tired that by the time we are reading books, I am falling asleep myself. It doesn’t help matters that Jack loves to repeat his books in a cycle, so we read 7 nights of “Pearlie the Oyster” and “The Berenstein Bears Go to School” followed by 7 nights of “Ten Apples Up on Top” and “Fox in Sox”, etc.

To fend off boredom after (seemingly) endless nights of the same books, I try to shake things up a bit by taking some artistic license during the reading.

I might start counting the number of ladybugs with Jack, or watching for where a particular side-kick character in the book is going to show up next. The Mercer Mayer books are good for this last game, because there are little side-kick characters throughout the book that do funny things throughout if you’re paying attention.

Our first book this particular night had been the Mercer Mayer book “Bye Bye Mom & Dad”. This one features a mouse and a spider on every page, participating in whatever chaos the Little Critter is doing at that time. We watched them help with the grocery shopping, make lunch, and almost get smashed by a bowling ball. When we moved on to our second book, the Mercer Mayer book “Just Me & My Mom,” a frog is the featured side-kick.

Half-paying attention and half-falling asleep, as we start the book, I ask Jack: “What’s the mouse doing in this picture?”

My husband’s belly laugh jerked me awake, and I laughed, too as Jack replied:

“Well, actually, it’s a frog.”

When I was describing to our son Jack why we were taking this trip, I found myself talking about marriage.  By the way – any of you with toddlers know that you never knowingly walk into these conversations…they just happen.  And when you look back, it’s hard to even find the thread sometimes.  But that’s what happens with a little “why” machine in the house.

Me:  Honey, when you go to school today, Mommy and Daddy are going to go on a trip.  Grandma and Ms. Leanne will put you to bed tonight.

Him:  Why?

Me:  Mommy and Daddy are celebrating being married.

Him:  What’s married?

Me:  Well, when a man and a woman decide they love each other so much that they want to be together forever and have babies, they get married.

Him:  What’s married?

Me:  Well, Mommy and Daddy are married.  Grandma and Grandpa are married.  Aunt Anne and Uncle Kerry are married….(this went on for a while, with me providing a laundry list of married couples he knows).

Him:  <very matter-of-factly> I want to marry Grandpa in two weeks.

WHAT?!?!?