Day: June 5, 2006

I spent this evening at the park practicing counting to 7. One, Two, Three, Four, (my kids) Five, Six, Seven (my brother’s kids whom I’m watching for the next 3 days.) The counting was made additionally interesting by the fact that the seven kids in my care were mixed in with 14 children from Howard’s extended family who also happen to be in town for a visit. The little playground was full of children and I knew most of them by name. That didn’t change the fact that I had to keep counting to make sure that one hadn’t gone missing. Sometimes I varied the counting by clustering One, Two, Three large boys, Kiki, and One, Two, Three little ones. Seven again. No matter how I broke up the counting Seven is still a lot of kids to keep track of and feed and put to bed.

Having that many kids in the house forces some changes in how I run our household. Since food must be pre-planned and mass produced I don’t have a whole lot of patience with special orders or finicky eating. I handed out plastic cups, wrote names on them, and informed the kids that they were to re-use their cups so that I wasn’t washing every glass in the house hourly. They out number me greatly and so I have to make them work or we’ll spend all of every day knee deep in stuff. With that many bodies running around, the living spaces have to be clear.

Most of these changes are just amplifications of things I already try to do. I actually like the fact that the kids have to co-operate and work to make family a good place to be. Large families can’t afford prima donnas for very long. Everyone has to pull together or the family crashes and burns. When a large family crashes and burns the shrapnel goes everywhere. I’ve witnessed that before and it was truly painful to watch. Small families have to pull together too, but the internal dynamic is different.

So this week I get to pretend I have a truly large family. Next week I’ll be really glad to go back to just my own medium largish family.

The summer schedule seems to be working so far, although the day has seemed really long and the accounting took forever to get done. The success of potty training has been less measurable. Patches sat on the potty 3 times and peed his pants twice. Ive decided to take this slowly. I’m less focused and less patient in the afternoons, so we’ve put him back in pull-ups with the understanding that we’ll try underpants again tomorrow. Mostly Patches needs to build his sensory awareness. He pays no attention to his body’s elimination signals. Hopefully we’ll gradually build that awareness because he’s got most of the other skills he needs. Patches was relieved to put the pull-ups back on. I don’t think I’ll have to battle to put underpants back on tomorrow. I hope not. I don’t want potty training to become a battleground.