“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’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!