Torrefaction

I have become my grandpa. Yesterday Charlie was playing with his choo-choos, and they were not behaving the way he wanted, and so he did his usual thing of smacking them off the track and being generally pissed at them. When I put a couple on the floor so he could use them without the track, he picked one up and threw it at the bookcase. It bounced off the bookcase and hit him in the forehead, causing him to make a startled face and causing me to say "see what happens when you throw things?" Then he started crying so I switched into nice-mommy mode and cuddled him while I tried very hard not to crack up laughing. I feel bad that I wasn't instinctively nicer but at the same time, that IS what happens when you throw things, and further in my defense, it was funny.

Consequence-based learning is something my Dad has always been fond of--he was never a dick about it, but when I would get hurt or have a bad result because of something I did, he would point out the sequence of events and make sure I understood the causality. I think this is a good thing. Dad's dad, however, took this philosophy a bit far. Dad told me, with great amusement, that when he was a toddler he started throwing his cup when he was sitting in his high chair. Grandpa tied a string to the cup and tacked the other end of the string to the ceiling, so when Dad would throw the cup it would swing off into the air and then come back and thwap him. Ingenious, but wow, too mean.

ETA: Grandpa was awesome in many ways, and was a nice Grandpa to me, but was sterner than Dad, and believed in old-school discipline. Once I was crying and Dad was comforting me and Grandpa accused him of coddling me, to which Dad said "Look, did I tell you how to raise your kids?" Grandpa thought that was hilarious and the greatest thing ever.