Mike, it's a challenging situation. I can relate vicariously I suppose as I have a close friend (not me, but a very close friend) who married a woman with two daughters and then they had one more child together. There were all sorts of habits that these first two truly adorable girls had that weren't exactly the ideal way to behave according to my friend.
One was eating vegetables, or at least avoidance thereof. Now, I know, all kids avoid vegetables, but these girls at first looked at eating vegetables much they way you or I might look at eating bark off a tree or grazing weeds out of the ditch at the side of the road. It was a heavy lift to get them to do so much as look at carrot without running screaming from the table. Anyway ... to make a long story short ... what my friend did was just play it cool and gained their trust on all sorts of other fronts and role modeled the eating of veggies ... and slowly ... over time they began to eat more balanced meals. But I'm talking years here.
It's really hard to un-learn a habit. I realize thermostat behavior is not the same as vegetable avoidance, but there are some parallels in the sense of what a person, even a youngster, gets used to. Takes more time than it should, but then again, I guess a lot of time went into establishing it, so it's probably some kind of cosmic balance here in general. Anyway, that's my two cents ...
You and FF are both correct. As is Charley. I hope nobody here missed the point that things are indeed pretty harmonious and I have not even come close to deciding to make this a thing and die on that hill. He'll only be here a few more years, he's very motivated to launch, just like his older brother, and then who knows how much we'll get to see him. I don't want anything about his time here to reek, particularly in light of the fact I did not have a good experience with my stepdad when I was his age, and I would never want an environment like that for him. Mostly it was just a story about my quirks I thought I'd share.
I've been posting here since 2006. I was in my mid-20's, a young adult but with less cares and responsibilities than many other adults. I've learned all kinds of junk from y'all over the years, in more categories than I can count. I've met several of you, some of you multiple times. Some of you I even have phone #s for and text infrequently. Y'all are kind of like my big brothers in a sense. Suddenly little brother who was basically Peter Pan and never faced some of the challenges of adulthood (not always by choice) got married and gained and instant family, without the natural progression of going through the stages where you first learn to clean poopy diapers and THEN you learn all the dumb things you say and do that will probably psychologically damage a tiny human being. Basically I just think it's neat to keep the CFN family updated on the progression of kid brother. Sometimes you get a stepson and realize maybe
I need to grow up a little bit. Sometimes people tell me they had their own biological, tiny children, and realized they needed to grow up a little bit. Maybe it's a wash.
There are a lot of things my wife loves about me that she hopes her boys develop, but we both agree that at this point it's too late to coerce things into them you want them to have. That's for children, and these aren't children. Besides, they have a dad for a male role model already (even if he is a certified asshole) and--more importantly--as noted, they really are great kids. I can't imagine I could raise better kids myself. Some quirks that make you raise your eyebrows is surely nothing. Lord knows my mom, and my dad in particular has to just shake their head sometimes at the way I am, despite their best efforts.
