“Good fences make good neighbors.” ~ Robert Frost
As the boys get older, rides in the car have gotten more and more noisy. It’s all pretty standard stuff- grabbing toys from each other, HE’S TOUCHING ME, Little D crying because he wants out and Big J yelling at Little D for crying because he’s too noisy (oh, the irony). Obviously noise is expected, but it just got really out of hand, and I decided I’d had enough one day and cut a large piece of cardboard from a box and slid it between them. Our back seat is actually divided in two, so the cardboard fits snugly and is tall enough so the boys can’t see each other at all.
The difference the wall has made is like night and day! Since they can’t see or touch each other, they mostly just ride along quietly. I love the wall. I think I will write a letter to car-manufacturers to tell them that if they put in a wall feature into future models, that parents would snap them up.
Like many reasonably bright kids, Big J is easily frustrated. VERY easily. He can see the result he wants and he thinks it should just work right away with no problem. When it doesn’t work, he grunts, groans, screams and yells in his frustration, which drives us out of our minds. Our first instinct has always been to jump in and try and make the screaming stop. Recently I’ve realized that’s the totally wrong reaction.
Big J is also naturally prone to laziness. “I can’t do it!” “I need help!” are frequently heard in our house. I can’t stand laziness in an adult and if I do nothing else, I want to train that out of him. That laziness in combination with the frustration could lead to a highly unsuccessful adult.
So, I was at a loss as to how to teach him to manage his frustration while encouraging him to be persistent. Then I realized… I was focusing so much on trying to teach him to manage his frustration because the noise he was making was so hard to listen to, that the persistence message kept getting lost. I realized I needed to forget about the frustration for a while. He’s 4 and it’s really hard to manage your emotions when you’re 4. I was circumventing the process of learning persistence by jumping all over the frustration thing. I would far rather raise a child who never learned to manage his frustration that one who never learned to persist at a task. What I need to be doing now is encouraging him to persist despite the frustration, and managing the emotional outbursts will come later. Let’s hope so anyway…
I joined a gym. I had never even considered doing such a thing until I had a conversation with a woman in McDonalds about a month ago who was telling me about the gym down the street and how it was pretty reasonable and the childcare was free so she got to enjoy some much needed “alone time”. I had a sudden epiphany. It was exactly what I needed! We need to get out of the house most days or risk going crazy, but there are few places to go in colder months. What better place to go than were they can play and run off some energy and where I can get some BADLY needed exercise? Why had I not thought of this before??!!??
So, I went right over and joined- it’s only $45 a month. Little D has a mini-panic attack when he sees the play area as he’s still in the “keep Mommy within sight at all times” stage, but he calms down eventually. Big J has to struggle not to have a fit when we leave, and the fact that he loves to go there to play will be added incentive when the newness wears off for me and I start wondering if we really need to go EVERY day. And we do need to go EVERY day, I’m telling you. I am ridiculously out of shape.
Today, as I was walking on the treadmill watching Rachael Ray talk about this new treatment where they freeze your fat cells to get rid of them (!), an instructor came by recruiting for a cycling class. I thought that sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a try. It was not long before I remembered why one should not try to do an hour-long cycling class if one has not sat on a bicycle for over 5 years. It was not the pedaling. I could have done that for an hour, but after sitting on that seat for only a couple of minutes I was wishing for some of those embarrassing looking padded bicycle pants. After about 20 minutes I had to give up, and I felt totally lame walking out of the class. Not that I care all that much what people think about me… It was a fun class. I’d do it again. After I spend some quality time on the bicycles in the main room that is.
The big gift this Christmas was this Up & Down Roller Coaster
It is a great toy. I’m not a big fan of giant sized toys, but we have a very large back patio to put it on and the reviews on Amazon were all 5 star (plus they had it on sale for $30 off and free shipping). They love it!
I am just finishing The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl and the people who lived through it. Can you imagine remaining in an area where dust storms like this one rolled in every week? I guess if the land was the only thing you had in the world it would be difficult to leave it.
I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but I am looking towards this new year as a time for improvement over the last. I pray that in 2010 I will be:
A better disciple – I’ve gotten so lazy. Inexcusably lazy. God has blessed me so much and I spend so little time focusing on His Word and prayer, using the demands of two children as a lame excuse.
A better wife – less argumentative, more respectful and helpful.
A better parent – more self-control, more simple enjoyment of my children, more patient and wise.
A better steward – of our finances, my body, our home
Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. Hebrews 12:1
I’ve always been rather less than diligent about giving my kids a variety of foods at any given meal. I knew I needed to be offering multiple things, and offering new things regularly, but just didn’t pay as much attention as I should in my hurry to get food in front of them and move on to the next in the long list of things that needed to be done. Recently we were shopping at Target and ran across these cute divided plates, and bought them, having no idea that they’d actually transform how I feed the boys.
Because the plates are divided, it automatically causes me to try and fill each space with something different. The space is there- it must be filled! Big J is magically more interested in eating too, because it’s just plain fun to get a cool monster plate with lots of different things on it. I’m also much more likely to offer a small amount of something he isn’t as fond of, and he’s more likely to eat it. Awesome!
When I get an idea in my head for a new project, I have a hard time resting until it’s done. That’s why I haven’t been around here much lately. My sister and I have begun a new website project called the FunPlace Database! Because you can never have too many websites…right?
We’re trying to build a central place to find all the places in your area where you can go to get out of the house with your kids. There’s no good resource like this on the web, and we are going to need lots of help to fill up the database.
It only takes a couple of minutes maximum to add a place- if you could add one or two (or lots!) and tell your friends we would be grateful and you’d be helping to create a great resource for other parents! Thanks!
This little flow chart is right on the money. I’ve had so many people ask “how did you learn so much about computers?” Now I have a visual aid to answer that question with.
via Natalie Jost
The question of whether or not we were going to send our kids to public school or homeschool them has never really been a question for us. We always knew homeschooling was the right thing for our family. Big J is 4 and has been rather off and on with his desire to sit down and do any type of schoolwork or reading, which is totally fine because, well, he’s 4. We signed up for a once a week “Kindergarten Concepts” class at the local homeschool co-op and I was hoping it would help us sort of ease into the school thing this year, and it has. We’re not ready for more than 15-20 minutes a day of sitting down to work on handwriting/fine motor skills, of course, but because some of it is “homework” from his class we just sort of fell into doing a little schoolwork every day. Other things I’ve begun to make more concerted effort to teach “along the way”. We don’t sit down to learn about the calendar, telling time, money, etc. but we are learning about those things as there is opportunity.
I know homeschooling is going to be challenging, especially since Big J persists in the belief that he knows more than I do. But at this moment I’m really looking forward to it.
