From the Mouths of Babes
06 Jul 2011 5 Comments
in If Only They Would Use Their Powers For Good, the Pea, the Princess, Who's In Charge of All These Little People?
Yesterday the Pea was on dish duty. He had washed all the dishes in the sink but none of the stuff stacked on the counter around the sink.
Me: Pea, the dishes are not done.
Pea: I don’t care.
Me: Yes, but I care and I’m the mom so mine’s the caring that matters.
Why is it that my children think that the fact that they don’t care about things being messy has the slightest bearing on whether they need to clean it?
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The other day in the midst of a fight with her father, the Princess asked why she should respect him, specifically what he had ever done to earn her respect.
Umm, let’s start with putting a roof over your head and food in your mouth for the last 11+ years and move on from there shall we?
Aren’t the tag lines that kids learn as they head in to teendom fun?!
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Endurance
09 May 2011 7 Comments
in the Princess, Who's In Charge of All These Little People?
If you tell your daughter that she does not have to go to school but that she may not be in the house for the 8 hours that she would be at school (and you be sure that you’ve got her iPod in your pocket) and it’s cold and rainy outside it will only take her about 15 minutes to give up and go to school.
(I wonder how that scene will play out in her movie?)
Be My Valentine
10 Feb 2011 3 Comments
in Shortys, the Pea, the Princess, Who's In Charge of All These Little People?
I’m thinking of putting together a calendar of how my kids “celebrate” different holidays, something like this: For Valentine’s day the Princess and the Pea empty all of the tissue boxes in the storage room of all their tissues so that they can make valentine boxes for school.
Cute huh?
When They’re Helping Mom’s Happy
01 Feb 2011 4 Comments
in the Pea, the Princess, Who's In Charge of All These Little People?
My life (or at least my kitchen) has been completely transformed by assigning the Princess and the Pea two days per week each of dish duty.
Best. Decision. Ever!
I’m Just Sucker With No Self Esteem
10 Nov 2010 5 Comments
in I'm Too Lazy To Pick A Catagory, the Princess
A few thoughts:
I got an email today from one of my friends at work who’s also sort of my boss (it’s complicated). He sent it to me and another guy who had been having an email discussion about something that didn’t get done by the people that it should have and… anyway it was pretty dumb and it was something that I was done with. The email that I got this morning was telling us to drop it. It wasn’t aggressively worded or unkind. And yet, I feel like a puppy who’s been slapped. I find myself wanting to send an email saying “I was done with it anyways so nanny nanny nanny” or ” maybe just pointing to the other guy and saying “he started it” or… I don’t know, it’s dumb and I’m over it. (But I did think it was funny how I initially reacted.)
I was reading some of Elizabeth Smart’s testimony in court yesterday (holy crow, the crap that girl had to go through…) there was a statement in there that through the whole thing she always knew that there were people who loved her and that she was a person of worth. Say what you want about the Smarts but they had them some crazy effective family home evenings in their home.
Lately the Princess has been very sweet, kind and mostly reasonable. Now I know that kids go back and forth between testing boundaries (and just generally driving their parents nuts) and living comfortably within those boundaries so this turn of events may be totally organic but I can’t help but give at least some of the credit to her current best friend Katie. It’s not that Katie is some amazing perfect child, I occasionally find her to be very annoying and an insufferable know it all, but she does have one thing going for her. She’s one of those kids who’s perfectly happy being who she is, and more importantly I think for little girls, being the age that she is. Before this the Princess was spending a lot of time with a girl who was a year older than her and who herself wanted to be older than she was. I think that just makes for a lot of angst. But when you accept where you are and just have fun with it it makes you a much more pleasant person. (There might be a life lesson there…)
Happy Wednesday Everyone.
Stupid Questions
01 Nov 2010 7 Comments
in Shortys, the Baby, the Infantile Delinquent, Who's In Charge of All These Little People?
Me: “InfaDel, why is the (not so) Baby crying?”
InfaDel: “I whapped him.”
Me: “Great, you can go back to your bedroom.”
It’s 8:20 am. Sigh.
Hey Boo-boo
14 Oct 2010 4 Comments
in Adventures in Physical Fitness, the Baby, Who's In Charge of All These Little People?
I do all kinds of workouts. Two days a week I try to do some kind of strength training and the other two days that I work out I do cardio. Monday was a strength training day. Usually I do some kind of Jillian Michaels or something like that but every once in awhile I do Yoga.
Monday was one of those days. Now I know that yoga is supposed to be this spiritual, cleansing experience. You’re supposed to center yourself and breathe deeply and focus on your energies and chi and a lot of other new agey stuff that I tend to be really dismissive of (except that I secretly sort of believe some of it). Basically it’s supposed to feel kind of like this:
And I guess for some people, doing yoga alone on a beach at sunrise or something, that is how it feels.
But I do yoga in my living room with my kids and their friends running through and my two year old yelling at me that he hates me and well, my yoga experience feels a little more like this:
I think I may be missing something there. Today I go back to squats and lunges.
E-I-E-I-O
30 Sep 2010 4 Comments
For those of you who are new here let me be clear, I’m not exactly the world’s most doting mom. I’ve never been one to whip out the pictures of the Wonderkids at the slightest provocation, I’m just not that guy. That being said let me tell you about my morning.
Actually, let me set the scene for you a little bit.
The Infantile Delinquent is 4, so this year he started pre-school. We’re sending him to the same pre-school that we did the Princess and the Pea. It’s run out of the local high school, it’s a class for the high school kids and because of that I figure the student to “teacher” ratio is better than most. (There is a real adult teacher who supervises but mostly it’s the high school students who are hands on with the kids.)
I called and registered the InfaDel for preschool last spring, we didn’t hear much over the summer and we still hadn’t heard anything when school started. I went by the school and they said they’d be in touch. About three weeks ago we got a letter from the school giving us a start date for preschool. The InfaDel was so excited to get that note and to be going to preschool, that he carried the letter around for the intervening two and a half weeks. The date start date was the 28th, Tuesday. I work on Tuesdays but Sean was home so he took him. The InfaDel had a great time. I called after he got home and he told me all about the bear hunt song that they sang and about the activities that they did, all that jazz.
This morning he had preschool again. He didn’t want to go.
It required most of my powers of persuasion to get him into the car. And then he wouldn’t get out. Finally we got him out by telling him that we all, him, The (not so) Baby and I were going to go in and see what the other kids were doing. So we did. He wasn’t seduced to join them like I thought he’d be. He did eventually join them but I had to stay. And stay, and stay.
I watched him plant a seed, I watched him paste together a construction paper barn, I watched him do a puzzle. My son is amazing. He was shy and quiet (something he never is at home) which meant that most of the time the “teachers’” attention was turned to another kid so he quietly did it all on his own.
The InfaDel doesn’t talk very well, he has some speech problems and will probably send a fair amount of time in therapy, he’s hard to understand even for me (I find it especially difficult when I’m driving and I don’t know what he’s looking at so I have no context clues as to what he’s saying, not mention that I can’t concentrate on that when I’m trying to cncentrate on driving.) But he is amazingly spatially talented. He looked at the example barn picture, picked through the shapes he had been given and choose the correct one every time. He then put some glue on it and put it just where it should have been. He does puzzles all day.
I stayed in preschool with him through snack time and song time but when I disappeared, to take the (not so) Baby to the bathroom, he got spooked that I was just going to disappear and it wasn’t long before he insisted we all go home. So we did.
I don’t understand how he went from being so excited about school that he carries a piece of paper that he can’t even read around with him for 2 weeks to refusing to go at all, which is what I’m anticipating will happen Monday. I don’t have time to go to preschool with him whenever he has it but I do think that some sort of prep for kindergarten is in order, especially given today’s turn of events.
It’s not that the Princess and the Pea never balked at school, they did, but I feel like this has a different quality to it, like the motivation is different or… something.
Whatever, we shall persevere, I’ll come up with some brilliant solution.
But I do have a question for you: Why do none of the teenage girls who are taking this high school class know the words to Old McDonald? (Seriously, I had to make sure to sing it loud enough that they could follow me because they kept getting lost.)
This Morning
27 Sep 2010 5 Comments
in the Infantile Delinquent, The Job They Pay Me For, To Prove to Dad I'm Not A Fool
Over the Weekend I had a pretty good idea for a blog post but I just can’t make it work out today and I’m giving up trying.
Mostly I can’t make it work out because I have a lot of other stuff on my mind this morning, stuff that’s making it really difficult to focus.
So I thought I’d tell you a little bit about that stuff instead.
(In no particular order)
1. My boss is currently in the ICU at a local hospital. He was in a motorcycle accident over the weekend and last I heard, was on a ventilator. I believe that his prognosis is fairly good (as in they don’t expect him to die and he’ has the use of hands and legs) but still it’s a little … worrying.
2. I’ve been having trouble with one of my co-workers. There’s a gal that I work with who I don’t particularly like. I’ve been making a conscious effort to have a better attitude about her (not spend quite so much time finding fault etc…) but this weekend there was an incident that is causing trouble for another gal that I work with, one that I love to death, and it looks like I’m going to have to do better than I have been so that I can make work ok for my friend. (That’s a little convoluted and confusing, I know but I’m trying to explain without getting specific).
3. My kids are off track.
4. I have a test on Wednesday.
5. I have a project due Wednesday.
6. The InfaDel is currently cutting the (not so) Baby’s hair. I Gotta go…
Time (Well?) Wasted
24 Sep 2010 3 Comments
in A House Of Order?, If Only They Would Use Their Powers For Good, Shortys, the Baby, the Infantile Delinquent, Who's In Charge of All These Little People?
I just spent 20 minutes trying to convince the InfaDel and the (not so) Baby to clean up the dirty laundry that they had emptied from the basket.
And then another 10 minutes trying to console the (not so) Baby, who was upset because his brother cleaned up more than he did.
