Today Meatball went down early for his nap, as I mentioned, and I got about 45 minutes of time "to myself" before I needed to pick up The Boy from school. The den and the kitchen were total disasters, so I cleaned, and then I relaxed.
What I probably SHOULD have done is given up one or both of those activities in favor of PRACTICING.
But soon, I'll make a date with Herman the German.
For those who don't know, I'm not stepping out on Musical Daddy with some other guy. I play a 1979 Pöllman double bass, and the previous owner, who was my bass teacher, named him Herman.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
More ills and thrills
Musical Daddy has strep. How in the world did he get strep, and of all the people in the house, why would he be the one to get it, considering that he does NOT spend his time around little germ factories children? Of course you'd think that The Boy would pick something like that up at school, or that Meatball would pick it up because he still has the annoying habit of putting stuff in his mouth, food or not. So he was home yesterday and is home today and has spent almost the entirety of that time in bed. Thankfully, he got himself some antibiotics. And those are wonderful things to have when you really need them.
The Boy is having a keen time going to school. Today he brought his Alef-Bet Yoga book to school to show his friends. When we were visiting New Jersey over the "winter break," we visited a synagogue, and we spent the time with other little kids and moms. One of the activities that they did was Alef-Bet Yoga, right out of this book that we got. It has real poses, or variations on real poses, that resemble the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Amazingly enough, The Boy remembered doing this weeks later and started doing it at home, so we bought the book. I would love to go through the book with him every day or almost every day so that we remember how to do it and we get a little yoga practice in. I don't know how my time just fills up but perhaps next time he asks to play a game or watch something on TV we'll do this instead. Not sure if Meatball is ready for this yet.
That said, Meatball does an excellent job of performing the motions for songs and games that he knows, and he even starts to fill in the words. Patty-Cake, Row Row Row Your Boat, If You're Happy And You Know It, and The Wheels On The Bus are among the ones that he enjoys. So maybe he would get into a session of Alef-Bet Yoga.
Meatball has gone down for his nap, and since Musical Daddy is right across the hall from him asleep, I can just leave and go get The Boy from school. I hope he is still having fun. The teachers told me after last week that he is really enjoying himself and is doing a great job falling into the various routines. That's something that is much easier to teach to a group of similarly-aged children because they all want to do what the other ones are doing, and--much less important--they want to please the grown-ups. Peer pressure is not always a negative--if the other kids are putting on their own coats or cleaning up toys or going potty, then that's good.
Anyhow, I'm going to get The Boy. I'm sure I'll have more to say later.
The Boy is having a keen time going to school. Today he brought his Alef-Bet Yoga book to school to show his friends. When we were visiting New Jersey over the "winter break," we visited a synagogue, and we spent the time with other little kids and moms. One of the activities that they did was Alef-Bet Yoga, right out of this book that we got. It has real poses, or variations on real poses, that resemble the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Amazingly enough, The Boy remembered doing this weeks later and started doing it at home, so we bought the book. I would love to go through the book with him every day or almost every day so that we remember how to do it and we get a little yoga practice in. I don't know how my time just fills up but perhaps next time he asks to play a game or watch something on TV we'll do this instead. Not sure if Meatball is ready for this yet.
That said, Meatball does an excellent job of performing the motions for songs and games that he knows, and he even starts to fill in the words. Patty-Cake, Row Row Row Your Boat, If You're Happy And You Know It, and The Wheels On The Bus are among the ones that he enjoys. So maybe he would get into a session of Alef-Bet Yoga.
Meatball has gone down for his nap, and since Musical Daddy is right across the hall from him asleep, I can just leave and go get The Boy from school. I hope he is still having fun. The teachers told me after last week that he is really enjoying himself and is doing a great job falling into the various routines. That's something that is much easier to teach to a group of similarly-aged children because they all want to do what the other ones are doing, and--much less important--they want to please the grown-ups. Peer pressure is not always a negative--if the other kids are putting on their own coats or cleaning up toys or going potty, then that's good.
Anyhow, I'm going to get The Boy. I'm sure I'll have more to say later.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Inertia
Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion tend to stay in motion. That's inertia as we learn it in basic physics classes.
To divert from real science into personal practicality, if you have something that you HAVE to do, it is easier to muster up the energy than if you don't really have to do it, or if you can put it off until later without much trouble.
I had only recently recovered from a terrible cold, and I ended up with another one to start the week. I'm guessing that it came from the new preschool student in the house, who did have both a fever and a stuffy nose over the weekend. I don't think I had a high fever like The Boy did, because I never bothered to take my temperature, but I was definitely knocked on my behind from Monday afternoon through yesterday evening.
Fortunately, the weather cooperated with me and kept me home from Tuesday night's rehearsal and gave me a pretty easy out from last night's travelling music lessons, which I might have been able to handle if they were all close by, but they're far away with quite a bit of travel time in between each one. I have to make them up this weekend, but I'll manage. And since I am making them up, I won't lose the money.
I still had to get up to take The Boy to preschool on Tuesday, because he was feeling perfectly fine by then, but taking him to school is a net gain for me in the napping department, even with having to leave the house twice, because it meant that he was tired enough to nap with me.
I wonder, if I were working full-time, how many of these days would have been "sick days" for me. Maybe Tuesday, but probably I would have kept on trucking and gone to work, because once I'm moving, unless it's REALLY bad, I can at least function. It's hard to get up out of bed when you're sick, though. Your whole body feels heavy and slow.
Objects at rest REALLY want to stay at rest.
To divert from real science into personal practicality, if you have something that you HAVE to do, it is easier to muster up the energy than if you don't really have to do it, or if you can put it off until later without much trouble.
I had only recently recovered from a terrible cold, and I ended up with another one to start the week. I'm guessing that it came from the new preschool student in the house, who did have both a fever and a stuffy nose over the weekend. I don't think I had a high fever like The Boy did, because I never bothered to take my temperature, but I was definitely knocked on my behind from Monday afternoon through yesterday evening.
Fortunately, the weather cooperated with me and kept me home from Tuesday night's rehearsal and gave me a pretty easy out from last night's travelling music lessons, which I might have been able to handle if they were all close by, but they're far away with quite a bit of travel time in between each one. I have to make them up this weekend, but I'll manage. And since I am making them up, I won't lose the money.
I still had to get up to take The Boy to preschool on Tuesday, because he was feeling perfectly fine by then, but taking him to school is a net gain for me in the napping department, even with having to leave the house twice, because it meant that he was tired enough to nap with me.
I wonder, if I were working full-time, how many of these days would have been "sick days" for me. Maybe Tuesday, but probably I would have kept on trucking and gone to work, because once I'm moving, unless it's REALLY bad, I can at least function. It's hard to get up out of bed when you're sick, though. Your whole body feels heavy and slow.
Objects at rest REALLY want to stay at rest.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
A little Sunday wrap-up
The Boy had a successful first week of school and will be happy to return this coming week. He said he played with friends, he told me a few times with whom he sat at lunch, and the teachers said that he's doing just fine. Pretty successful in terms of potty at school as well!
We feel like we've finally turned the corner with this potty business. He has been good about taking himself to go, even when he has clothes on. We don't get on his case about it too much. Would he have done it himself had we just left him in diapers and not worked with him on it? I doubt it. There were a lot of habits that he needed to learn and there is a lot of "potty rhetoric" that he has finally adopted. Such as, twice when he has needed to go, he has said "I have to stop what I'm doing!" which is right out of the Elmo's Potty Time video, but has been something that we've said to him over and over, because he used to NOT stop what he was doing and then we had a problem.
Lots of sadness this weekend, unfortunately. A close online friend of mine lost her husband on Friday to a brain tumor. They knew it was coming and he held on for quite a long time, but they couldn't treat it, couldn't cure it, and he finally passed away. They have three sons, two of whom are close to the ages of my children. Of course there was the shooting in Arizona which, while it is convenient to say that there's some sort of partisan connection, just sounds like some crazy dude did some crazy stuff, irrespective of his politics. Not that I condone the manner in which some politicians choose to communicate their desires for change and opposition to certain people being elected, but I don't think that this particular whackadoo has anything to do with them.
The Boy had a fever last night which seems to have mostly gone away, and Meatball has been off and on feeling lousy. I'm still not feeling 100% from having been sick before. My nose is getting all stuffy again. Perhaps it's early to bed for Mum.
We feel like we've finally turned the corner with this potty business. He has been good about taking himself to go, even when he has clothes on. We don't get on his case about it too much. Would he have done it himself had we just left him in diapers and not worked with him on it? I doubt it. There were a lot of habits that he needed to learn and there is a lot of "potty rhetoric" that he has finally adopted. Such as, twice when he has needed to go, he has said "I have to stop what I'm doing!" which is right out of the Elmo's Potty Time video, but has been something that we've said to him over and over, because he used to NOT stop what he was doing and then we had a problem.
Lots of sadness this weekend, unfortunately. A close online friend of mine lost her husband on Friday to a brain tumor. They knew it was coming and he held on for quite a long time, but they couldn't treat it, couldn't cure it, and he finally passed away. They have three sons, two of whom are close to the ages of my children. Of course there was the shooting in Arizona which, while it is convenient to say that there's some sort of partisan connection, just sounds like some crazy dude did some crazy stuff, irrespective of his politics. Not that I condone the manner in which some politicians choose to communicate their desires for change and opposition to certain people being elected, but I don't think that this particular whackadoo has anything to do with them.
The Boy had a fever last night which seems to have mostly gone away, and Meatball has been off and on feeling lousy. I'm still not feeling 100% from having been sick before. My nose is getting all stuffy again. Perhaps it's early to bed for Mum.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
School!
The Boy now attends preschool every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from about 8:45 (drop-off time is from 8:30-9:00 and we probably get there in the middle of it) until 12:30. His first day was yesterday, and I wanted to write about it yesterday but as soon as I got home from rehearsal, Meatball was awake and looking for Mum.
The Boy is in a class with 9 children (including himself) and 2 teachers. That's a darned good ratio! There are 6 girls in the class and 3 boys. I have memorized the names of all the kids in the class and can identify them all within the class; some of them I knew already, and some I knew their parents. Also, there is a girl in the class who had a kidney transplant.
There are a few structured/scheduled activities that the kids do. They sit at the table for snack and lunch. They go up to the gym to run and play. They go outside to play. They have library on Tuesdays, something else on Thursdays (I'll find out tomorrow, might be music) and they do Shabbat on Fridays to get the kids familiar with traditional songs and blessings. At some points the kids sit together and do activities or songs. One of the teachers reported that David picked the ABC song to sing with the group.
They have little froggies with the kids' names on them.
I'm glad he seems to like it, and he is excited to go back tomorrow. I'm also enjoying the prospect of spending some time with just Meatball.
Speaking of Meatball, he is exactly one-and-a-half years old today!
The Boy is in a class with 9 children (including himself) and 2 teachers. That's a darned good ratio! There are 6 girls in the class and 3 boys. I have memorized the names of all the kids in the class and can identify them all within the class; some of them I knew already, and some I knew their parents. Also, there is a girl in the class who had a kidney transplant.
There are a few structured/scheduled activities that the kids do. They sit at the table for snack and lunch. They go up to the gym to run and play. They go outside to play. They have library on Tuesdays, something else on Thursdays (I'll find out tomorrow, might be music) and they do Shabbat on Fridays to get the kids familiar with traditional songs and blessings. At some points the kids sit together and do activities or songs. One of the teachers reported that David picked the ABC song to sing with the group.
They have little froggies with the kids' names on them.
I'm glad he seems to like it, and he is excited to go back tomorrow. I'm also enjoying the prospect of spending some time with just Meatball.
Speaking of Meatball, he is exactly one-and-a-half years old today!
Sunday, January 2, 2011
2011
I realized that I spent far less time "connected" to the outside world via my trusty laptop over the course of my vacation. This can be attributed to my spending more time actually talking to human beings and, additionally, time spent attempting to sleep. Trying to get over the plague cold that has lingered in my system longer than nearly anything that I've had except mono.
And, as such, I have said very little about either my vacation experiences or my thoughts on the ending of one year and the beginning of the next. Being that I finally have a quiet moment to myself not earmarked for sleep, I'll go for it.
2010 was a year of healing. 2009 may have been the worst year in many ways, but 2010 was when we finally allowed ourselves to hit bottom and realize that we were broken people, and thus, the rebuilding could begin. Having my parents here, acting not just as loving grandparents but as caretakers for both the children and us, meant that we could focus on exactly what the constant fighting had done to us. Fighting cancer for our son while fighting just to keep our younger son happy for more than 2 minutes, while fighting with a bumbling idiot over my husband's career (a fight that while we didn't win it, we have heard about the results of this bumbling idiot's work, and he does a crappy job while teaching false discipline and phony confidence--no use teaching field commands if you can't teach actual playing and marching. Yeah, second-to-last in championships and outscored by our favorite group 2 band when you're a group 4. I'm talking about you, you overhyped buffoon. Looks like "cleaning house" didn't work out as well as you thought). Once we were able to stop fighting everything so much, once we were able to take care of ourselves as a family, we saw how much it hurt that we hadn't been able to do that before.
So we went to therapy. We started DOING things like playing in orchestra (me) and singing in a chorus (him). I did a little substitute-teaching in the city schools. He got a long-term sub job for the rest of the year, teaching math. While that ended poorly due to them not being able to find his gradebook, and way too much animosity being passed around over that, he was very successful. Granted, he now knows that he'd rather shove a fork in his eye than teach middle school math again.
We had two major miracles in the first half of this year. The first was that our giant scare at the end of 2009, where we thought that The Boy had a new tumor in his liver, turned out to be a whole lot of nothing. He was opened up for surgery, and the internal ultrasound that was run over his kidney and liver, after the spot that was supposed to be there, wasn't, confirmed that The Boy continued to show no evidence of disease on his treatment plan and could continue with what he was doing instead of us facing the prospect of a Phase I trial or having them give up. The second was that they took The Boy off treatment on April 1. April Fools' Day, you know. Not that I thought they were joking, and not that it was entirely good news--they were concerned about his kidney function and the fact that he was taking longer to recover, even from reduced doses, led them to believe that they'd done enough. Also, the fact that many other kids had received portions of this treatment without completing it and remained cancer-free.
Certainly we're not out of the woods yet, as we have to re-check every 3 months to make sure that the cancer stays away, and we get so anxious during that time leading up to those check. Scanxiety, even though he doesn't get CT scans but instead has ultrasound and X-ray.
Cancer treatment left The Boy with some cool scars as well as hypertension, controlled by medicine, and mild to moderate hearing loss. Fun souvenirs. He got the hearing aids, as I mentioned, and he is doing reasonably well with them. We haven't yet gotten to the point where he just puts them on all day. You know--set it, and forget it! But he has worn them at least for several hours at a time and should be able to get through his preschool day without a problem.
And yes, The Boy starts preschool this week! I'm excited. I'm nervous. I really hope he doesn't poo his pants too many times. I hope the other kids are nice to him, hearing aids and all. I'm thrilled that he is finally allowed to be around other kids.
Topic shift: vacation! Our New Jersey trip was enjoyable, although both too long and poorly planned. Next time I'm going to have to make arrangements with some friends ahead of time, because otherwise we just won't get it done. We left the week pretty open, because priority #1 was my brother-in-law and his kids. They'll probably not be making another trip out for awhile, but at any rate, we still had a great time with them. Our niece and nephew were great with our kids. It was particularly thrilling to watch the boys play.
Even so, it seemed as though we could do without such a long visit. Not that anything went wrong, and we really enjoyed ourselves, but we probably could stand to visit for a shorter time next time.
We did spend New Years Eve with our usual crowd. Except now it's a family party because just about everyone has kids. Great fun watching the kids interact (and pile-on, just like the grownups do).
New Years Day involved a family brunch (I made pancakes, eggs, and steak. What?) followed by dinner with Musical Daddy's BFF and family. They have an adorable niece who also came. She is 2 and loves to play with boys; fortunately, we had 2 for her!
So. Another year. I've never been one for big resolutions and dogmatic efforts to adhere to something without actually making the right changes. I like the idea, though, of using the new year as a stopping point, to recenter and refocus. I can't resolve to get a good job, because that's not entirely in my control--all I can do is make the effort.
I will resolve to continue to be patient. My children are lovely and wonderful, and so smart and so sweet, but sometimes they try my patience. Most of the time, I set the right tone for problem-solving and resolution; I'd like that to be even more of the time, because nothing ever gets done when anyone is screaming.
I will make a generalized resolution to be more active. Just for the sake of getting off my behind and taking the kids out more places where I have to chase them around. They need to be more active as well, although they do fine running circles around the house.
I don't have any major self-improvement projects on the horizon, just the usual. And I'll try to write in my blog a little bit more often.
2010 is history; 2011 is here so let's live it.
And, as such, I have said very little about either my vacation experiences or my thoughts on the ending of one year and the beginning of the next. Being that I finally have a quiet moment to myself not earmarked for sleep, I'll go for it.
2010 was a year of healing. 2009 may have been the worst year in many ways, but 2010 was when we finally allowed ourselves to hit bottom and realize that we were broken people, and thus, the rebuilding could begin. Having my parents here, acting not just as loving grandparents but as caretakers for both the children and us, meant that we could focus on exactly what the constant fighting had done to us. Fighting cancer for our son while fighting just to keep our younger son happy for more than 2 minutes, while fighting with a bumbling idiot over my husband's career (a fight that while we didn't win it, we have heard about the results of this bumbling idiot's work, and he does a crappy job while teaching false discipline and phony confidence--no use teaching field commands if you can't teach actual playing and marching. Yeah, second-to-last in championships and outscored by our favorite group 2 band when you're a group 4. I'm talking about you, you overhyped buffoon. Looks like "cleaning house" didn't work out as well as you thought). Once we were able to stop fighting everything so much, once we were able to take care of ourselves as a family, we saw how much it hurt that we hadn't been able to do that before.
So we went to therapy. We started DOING things like playing in orchestra (me) and singing in a chorus (him). I did a little substitute-teaching in the city schools. He got a long-term sub job for the rest of the year, teaching math. While that ended poorly due to them not being able to find his gradebook, and way too much animosity being passed around over that, he was very successful. Granted, he now knows that he'd rather shove a fork in his eye than teach middle school math again.
We had two major miracles in the first half of this year. The first was that our giant scare at the end of 2009, where we thought that The Boy had a new tumor in his liver, turned out to be a whole lot of nothing. He was opened up for surgery, and the internal ultrasound that was run over his kidney and liver, after the spot that was supposed to be there, wasn't, confirmed that The Boy continued to show no evidence of disease on his treatment plan and could continue with what he was doing instead of us facing the prospect of a Phase I trial or having them give up. The second was that they took The Boy off treatment on April 1. April Fools' Day, you know. Not that I thought they were joking, and not that it was entirely good news--they were concerned about his kidney function and the fact that he was taking longer to recover, even from reduced doses, led them to believe that they'd done enough. Also, the fact that many other kids had received portions of this treatment without completing it and remained cancer-free.
Certainly we're not out of the woods yet, as we have to re-check every 3 months to make sure that the cancer stays away, and we get so anxious during that time leading up to those check. Scanxiety, even though he doesn't get CT scans but instead has ultrasound and X-ray.
Cancer treatment left The Boy with some cool scars as well as hypertension, controlled by medicine, and mild to moderate hearing loss. Fun souvenirs. He got the hearing aids, as I mentioned, and he is doing reasonably well with them. We haven't yet gotten to the point where he just puts them on all day. You know--set it, and forget it! But he has worn them at least for several hours at a time and should be able to get through his preschool day without a problem.
And yes, The Boy starts preschool this week! I'm excited. I'm nervous. I really hope he doesn't poo his pants too many times. I hope the other kids are nice to him, hearing aids and all. I'm thrilled that he is finally allowed to be around other kids.
Topic shift: vacation! Our New Jersey trip was enjoyable, although both too long and poorly planned. Next time I'm going to have to make arrangements with some friends ahead of time, because otherwise we just won't get it done. We left the week pretty open, because priority #1 was my brother-in-law and his kids. They'll probably not be making another trip out for awhile, but at any rate, we still had a great time with them. Our niece and nephew were great with our kids. It was particularly thrilling to watch the boys play.
Even so, it seemed as though we could do without such a long visit. Not that anything went wrong, and we really enjoyed ourselves, but we probably could stand to visit for a shorter time next time.
We did spend New Years Eve with our usual crowd. Except now it's a family party because just about everyone has kids. Great fun watching the kids interact (and pile-on, just like the grownups do).
New Years Day involved a family brunch (I made pancakes, eggs, and steak. What?) followed by dinner with Musical Daddy's BFF and family. They have an adorable niece who also came. She is 2 and loves to play with boys; fortunately, we had 2 for her!
So. Another year. I've never been one for big resolutions and dogmatic efforts to adhere to something without actually making the right changes. I like the idea, though, of using the new year as a stopping point, to recenter and refocus. I can't resolve to get a good job, because that's not entirely in my control--all I can do is make the effort.
I will resolve to continue to be patient. My children are lovely and wonderful, and so smart and so sweet, but sometimes they try my patience. Most of the time, I set the right tone for problem-solving and resolution; I'd like that to be even more of the time, because nothing ever gets done when anyone is screaming.
I will make a generalized resolution to be more active. Just for the sake of getting off my behind and taking the kids out more places where I have to chase them around. They need to be more active as well, although they do fine running circles around the house.
I don't have any major self-improvement projects on the horizon, just the usual. And I'll try to write in my blog a little bit more often.
2010 is history; 2011 is here so let's live it.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Children need...
My children have, despite recovering from their little bouts of contagion, adapted pretty well to the new surroundings here at Grandpa's house and the deviation from the norm that naturally occurs when taking the family on vacation.
Fun for all--a BIG snowstorm. There are piles of snow all over the place, with the totals in this area of New Jersey being around two feet. Yesterday, as the snow was beginning to fall, our children and my brother-in-law's older two children excitedly played outside. He and the kids came here from California, and the last time they saw real snow was five years ago, when they were here for Grandpa's 70th birthday. And the younger one was only 2, and barely remembers. Today, with there being PILES of the stuff, they again went outside to play. I figured that 2 feet of snow wasn't so great for my kids being that they're both on one side or the other of 3 feet tall, and that's just not enough wiggle room.
I'm sure that schoolchildren everywhere on the East Coast are very disappointed to have gotten this amount of snow yet aren't missing any school, since school is out for vacation anyway. It's like taking a sick day when you're actually sick (for the record, I never liked taking sick days because, shocker, I loved my work, so I only took sick days when I was REALLY sick) and can't enjoy it. I had to explain to the Cali kids about snow days.
We've been here several days, and the boys are just fine. They feel better, if not completely well, and they're in the groove of things here. They know where the kitchen is. They know that Grandpa keeps most of the toys in the basement and that's where to go to play with toys. Meatball knows where the remote control is and also knows how to turn the TV on. Generally we catch him in time to take the remote and put on something that he wants to watch.
We haven't all been eating our meals on the same schedule. The California crowd has been a bit jetlagged, and my kids are not waking up at the same time, as they have a tendency to do at home. Usually, breakfast at home with the boys happens with both together, and me making them whatever they like only to have them finish by the time I make the mistake of thinking that I have the luxury of cooking a breakfast burrito (wheat tortilla, 2 eggs, cheese, veggie sausage, salsa, and plain yogurt or sour cream, with avocado if we have it) or even egg and cheese on a bagel. Meatball can be stalled by the buckles on his high chair. But here, one kid gets up at a different time, I get up at a different time than Musical Daddy, and it's never the same. So breakfast is...whenever....and then my kids want snacks, and sometimes Meatball has a nap after snack and sleeps through lunch. I'm not worried about them eating enough, though, considering how The Boy wanders into the kitchen and says "I am hungry!" multiple times a day. He also calls meals by name although he rarely gets the right one...so he'll wake up in the morning, come downstairs, and sit at the table, saying "I want some dinner."
It's been slow around here, though, since we haven't been going places or making plans, yet still fun. We have toys, books, the Wii, computers and iPods/iPhones/iPad (not ours), and TV of course. I brought some craft stuff as well. Our 7-year-old nephew has been great with our little ones, which is nice. Not that our 11-year-old niece hasn't been good, because she has, but he has been chasing the boys around and wrestling with them just like they do with each other. We grownups have also been getting along well. Not that I'm surprised about that either...because we're acting like grownups.
One thing that has not happened this trip is that The Boy has not slept one second away from us and has been insistent that we be right there with him. Meatball has spent most of his sleeping time in the crib but also spent some time by my side at night. It's a lot easier in a king-sized bed. The Boy has definitely been more in need of affection and been less interested in going to bed at a decent hour and at least starting his night in his own bed, as he used to do. I think this started before we left for our trip, though. He's just needed a little extra care.
He has also been more in need of verbal confirmation, whether it is in response to something he says (like when he purposely mixes up the beginning of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, saying "A told T!") or, when he is building letters or numbers out of any building material he can find, he will say the letter/number and we have to at least say it back before he'll go on.
Musical Daddy and I agreed that we never want to be too busy to listen to our children, even if they're saying or doing the same thing OVER AND OVER, as it is still exciting for them. We don't want to stop them from talking to us or telling us jokes. We don't want to put them down or belittle their efforts because, as much as we don't want to think about it, there will be other people in their lives who do exactly that, and we want them to be able to stand strong against that with our help.
I guess it goes back to manufactured hardship, as I posted about a little while ago. I don't need to get my kids into the habit of NOT talking to us or sharing things with us just because there will be people in their lives who won't always have the time.
Fun for all--a BIG snowstorm. There are piles of snow all over the place, with the totals in this area of New Jersey being around two feet. Yesterday, as the snow was beginning to fall, our children and my brother-in-law's older two children excitedly played outside. He and the kids came here from California, and the last time they saw real snow was five years ago, when they were here for Grandpa's 70th birthday. And the younger one was only 2, and barely remembers. Today, with there being PILES of the stuff, they again went outside to play. I figured that 2 feet of snow wasn't so great for my kids being that they're both on one side or the other of 3 feet tall, and that's just not enough wiggle room.
I'm sure that schoolchildren everywhere on the East Coast are very disappointed to have gotten this amount of snow yet aren't missing any school, since school is out for vacation anyway. It's like taking a sick day when you're actually sick (for the record, I never liked taking sick days because, shocker, I loved my work, so I only took sick days when I was REALLY sick) and can't enjoy it. I had to explain to the Cali kids about snow days.
We've been here several days, and the boys are just fine. They feel better, if not completely well, and they're in the groove of things here. They know where the kitchen is. They know that Grandpa keeps most of the toys in the basement and that's where to go to play with toys. Meatball knows where the remote control is and also knows how to turn the TV on. Generally we catch him in time to take the remote and put on something that he wants to watch.
We haven't all been eating our meals on the same schedule. The California crowd has been a bit jetlagged, and my kids are not waking up at the same time, as they have a tendency to do at home. Usually, breakfast at home with the boys happens with both together, and me making them whatever they like only to have them finish by the time I make the mistake of thinking that I have the luxury of cooking a breakfast burrito (wheat tortilla, 2 eggs, cheese, veggie sausage, salsa, and plain yogurt or sour cream, with avocado if we have it) or even egg and cheese on a bagel. Meatball can be stalled by the buckles on his high chair. But here, one kid gets up at a different time, I get up at a different time than Musical Daddy, and it's never the same. So breakfast is...whenever....and then my kids want snacks, and sometimes Meatball has a nap after snack and sleeps through lunch. I'm not worried about them eating enough, though, considering how The Boy wanders into the kitchen and says "I am hungry!" multiple times a day. He also calls meals by name although he rarely gets the right one...so he'll wake up in the morning, come downstairs, and sit at the table, saying "I want some dinner."
It's been slow around here, though, since we haven't been going places or making plans, yet still fun. We have toys, books, the Wii, computers and iPods/iPhones/iPad (not ours), and TV of course. I brought some craft stuff as well. Our 7-year-old nephew has been great with our little ones, which is nice. Not that our 11-year-old niece hasn't been good, because she has, but he has been chasing the boys around and wrestling with them just like they do with each other. We grownups have also been getting along well. Not that I'm surprised about that either...because we're acting like grownups.
One thing that has not happened this trip is that The Boy has not slept one second away from us and has been insistent that we be right there with him. Meatball has spent most of his sleeping time in the crib but also spent some time by my side at night. It's a lot easier in a king-sized bed. The Boy has definitely been more in need of affection and been less interested in going to bed at a decent hour and at least starting his night in his own bed, as he used to do. I think this started before we left for our trip, though. He's just needed a little extra care.
He has also been more in need of verbal confirmation, whether it is in response to something he says (like when he purposely mixes up the beginning of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, saying "A told T!") or, when he is building letters or numbers out of any building material he can find, he will say the letter/number and we have to at least say it back before he'll go on.
Musical Daddy and I agreed that we never want to be too busy to listen to our children, even if they're saying or doing the same thing OVER AND OVER, as it is still exciting for them. We don't want to stop them from talking to us or telling us jokes. We don't want to put them down or belittle their efforts because, as much as we don't want to think about it, there will be other people in their lives who do exactly that, and we want them to be able to stand strong against that with our help.
I guess it goes back to manufactured hardship, as I posted about a little while ago. I don't need to get my kids into the habit of NOT talking to us or sharing things with us just because there will be people in their lives who won't always have the time.
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