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My new pencils finally arrived! Staedtler Mars Lumographs - a tin set of 12 (one in each grade from 8B to 2H) plus a 4H and a 6H. Because :EU: the entire back of the tin is taken up with the label of: Soft pencils of premium quality for professional sketches and drawings. The finely graded degrees from (8B to 2H) generate diverse effects with varying contrasts and effective shading.
Mars Lumograph pencils are especially break-resistant, easy to sharpen and erase. Mars Lumograph pencils are available in 16 degrees, ranging from particularly soft (8B) to very hard (6H), obtainable as a set or individually.
In really quite small font, you understand - it's just printed in German, English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese.
Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon I babysat for a one-year-old boy. And I found myself doing something I'd never had to do before, in all my time spent supervising small children, and which I felt weirdly conflicted about.
I babysit J. regularly, and he and I get on very well. He seems very fond of me, and I adore him utterly. It has reached the point of familiarity where in a range of circumstances I am utterly unmoved by him crying, but I'm not conflicted about that.
To explain why, I shall give you an example set of events:
( Babies and crying and why sometimes loving guardians don't care. )
Anyway, yesterday, he was supposed to have a nap. He doesn't like afternoon naps, a lot of the time (and may be transitioned shortly to just "afternoon quiet time", supplied with a toy, but he really needs to rest and chill a bit or he becomes a somewhat unhappy baby for the rest of the day anyway). Yesterday afternoon, he spent the entire period he was supposed to be napping grizzling, except when he decided to escalate grizzling to crying to a full-blown tantrum. He worked himself up into such a state that he cried so hard he choked, and then was hyperventilating.
Obviously, that's not something I ignore; I ran to his cot, scooped him up, and soothed him until he was calm. But I did it sitting next to the cot, in his father's computer chair (for complicated, but *extremely valid*, reasons, J. is currently sleeping in his portacot, set up in what was, until recently, his parents' study, rather than his bedroom). It was actually time for him to be allowed to get up, and not be in the hated-only-in-the-afternoon cot.
... And then I put him back in, and left him there for another fifteen or twenty minutes. (During which he was relatively quiet. I think he may even have slept, although briefly.)
I knew he didn't want to be there, and in theory, he didn't have to be, any more. But I couldn't let him out, then - he'd just thrown a baby tantrum, and I couldn't let him think that that was what got him what he wanted. The only thing giving in to a tantrum does is generate more tantrums, because the kid then knows that it works. As a friend to his parents, I can't teach him that lesson - and hell, as his regular babysitter, I don't want him to throw tantrums at me when he wants something I've refused him.
But I felt really bad about it. This is what children do. They make you feel guilty for looking after their long-term interests when it conflicts with their immediate wants. Children are evil.
I have a video I took yesterday on my phone that kind of hilariously demonstrates this: it starts with J. halfway across the room. He looks towards me, his face lights up, and he charges towards me, crawling at speed, clambers up my legs, and, giggling, appears to attack. It's adorable, but if you imagine that a child is some kind of deadly monster, it could be terrifying.
(J.'s personal evil was clearly demonstrated the first time I ever babysat him, when he was a few weeks old. His mother dropped him off at our place so she could go to an appointment. In theory, he was supposed to sleep the whole time. In practice, he woke up literally seconds after she left. I spent about an hour and a half trying to get him back to sleep; he went back to sleep five minutes before she came back to collect him. He was totally trying to pretend he'd been an angel baby, sleeping soundly the whole time; I was having none of that, and told his mother *exactly* how much he hadn't slept. (Because mothers of newborns need to know that kind of information.))
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