Family

Facebook Status:
Dear Children, Monday is not the best day for you to get sick, as your mother is too busy working to be very sympathetic. I suggest you select Thursday next time.

Schedule note:
There is no such thing as a “quick errand” when snow is falling and the snow plows are awol.

Observation:
When movies and video games are forbidden, two semi-sick kids will find ways to occupy themselves quietly by reading and writing stories. There will be a period of squabbling, but then they will break out the legos and spend nearly two hours experimenting with making and spinning lego tops.

In the category of miraculous occurrences:
Kiki cheerfully scheduled her afternoon and managed her homework sans drama. Perhaps the two hour long battle last Wednesday was worth it.

Note to floral department at Albertsons:
If you want to sell flowers in winter, try stocking brightly colored ones. The last thing I want is white flowers, which make me think of the six inches of slow I had to slog through just to arrive at the store.

Parental Judo at it’s best:
For family activity have a lesson on teamwork while the entire family cooperates to mix up a brownie fudge cake. Then use the baking time to split the family into teams and assign them rooms to clean up. The lesson on teamwork and the promise of a treat can get two rooms clean in less than 30 minutes.

Addendum: Now figure out how to make them excited about cleaning the rest of the house.

Additional house cleaning addendum: They might do better about keeping things clean if you offered a better example. Have you looked at your office or bedroom lately?

Gleek has been wrestling with many complicated emotions. Her inner turmoil leads her to run fast, play hard, and be a bit demanding of her playmates. This frequently leads to conflict with those playmates, which creates more inner turmoil. There are brief windows of time when she is ready to talk about her feelings and sort through them. Usually these times happen inconveniently, when we’re headed out the door to school, or when it is already past bedtime and I’m trying to get her to lay down, or when three other kids are all needing things from me at the same time. I try to listen as best I can while still addressing the other tasks at hand. Her inner turmoil is comprised of loneliness, a feeling that something is missing, sadness, and a desire to be more connected with people. The times she is picking to try to discuss them with me are conducive to adding to the feelings rather than resolving them.

This evening she sat me down and very sadly told me that she doesn’t feel like Kiki loves her and that she feels like our family is breaking apart, like we’re not a real family. My first internal reaction was a tired frustration. I spend an awful lot of time trying to build family togetherness and relationships. Here was my child telling me that my efforts had been fruitless for her. A split-second later the frustration was followed by the knowledge that I just need to listen to Gleek. She feels what she feels. She feels it regardless of the things I have done which I think should make her feel differently. So I listened. I asked questions. I tried to get the full picture of what she felt was wrong. As I did, I also tried to think how I should handle this.

The “how should I handle this” question is one that I’ve been asking a lot. I’ve been presented with so many “thises” to handle of late. Just in the past 24 hours I’ve had 2 major (multi-hour) and at least 10 minor (30 min or less) behavioral problems to address. Right now peaceful play is rare. When the kids are at home, I am constantly helping, negotiating, and disciplining. I know this time is temporary. The kids are just simultaneously in developmental stages when they are challenging everything around them. The stages will pass. Things will settle down. But I can’t help feeling like the challenging developmental stages are like watershed moments in a child’s life. It sets the course for what comes next. So I put pressure on myself to get it right, to make sure that the necessary lessons are learned; the lessons which will serve the kids well in the future.

Gleek’s tale of woe wound to a close. I didn’t have a solution for her, so I simply asked what she thought she should do about it. I’ll admit that the question was stalling for time. But the moment it was out of my mouth, I realized that it was the answer. I elaborated for Gleek, explaining that we have no power to change other people, we can only change ourselves. If Gleek wants her relationships to be different, then she needs to do something different. I don’t think she liked the answer at first, but she listed a couple of changes she could make. Then we got talking about Kiki. Gleek suddenly came alight. She realized that she could do Secret Santa things for Kiki. She could make little crafts and leave them as surprises. Gleek jumped up and began with a paper snowflake. Then I was finally able to maneuver her into bed.

The more I think about this solution, the more I feel like it is the right one. I could run myself completely ragged trying to create events so that Gleek would feel like our family was strong. I could nudge and coerce all the other kids into doing nice things for her. The result would be a still-lonely Gleek and a newly-resentful set of other kids. We already do plenty of things as a family. Our family is strong, if a bit chaotic at the moment. The change needs to be inside Gleek so that she can see it. The best way I can think of for Gleek to feel loved is to teach her to show her love by serving others. When she is focused on helping others feel happy, she will find that she is happy.

This is going to mean more work for me, but I’d rather spend the time helping Gleek do service, than spend the same amount of time breaking up squabbles. I hope it works.

Here are some of the bits and pieces that today was made of:

I sorted through piles of pictures in preparation for assembling the family photo book. Looking through all the pictures reminds me of all the fun things we’ve done and inspires me to do more fun things. It is more than just a desire to have more events to photograph. It is a reminder that all the fun stuff is the reason for the stress and that if I let stress eliminate the fun things, then my life is wrong side out.

Last night Gleek requested to have sponge curlers put into her hair. This meant that today she had beautiful ringlets. She felt beautiful too. I could tell by the way that she bobbed her head to make the curls bounce.

Biology homework is much more fun when you use a shrink wrapper, hair gel, and beads to create a three dimensional model of a cell. As an added bonus, you can squish everything around when you’re done.

Snow. We woke up to snow this morning and I was forced to realize that winter is in fact on the way. Howard joined me at the window and tried to cheer me up by calling the light dusting just “holiday sprinkles.” I don’t think that the holiday sprinkles should be allowed until after I’ve managed to get outside and rake up the carpet of leaves covering my lawn.

A friend recently wrote a blog entry about reading How To Be Ridiculously French and chronicled her application of what she learned. The idea is to dress nicely, wear make-up, and be conscious of looking good as you go about your business. I decided to give it a try for church today. I curled my hair, wore some make up, and picked fancy ear rings. I don’t know that I really felt French, but it was still kind of fun. I definitely felt more attractive than usual. It was a good way to break out of the impending winter doldrums brought on by the snow.

I don’t know why wearing an apron made cooking more fun, but it did.

Kiki and I bought flowers last week. They are still beautiful in my kitchen with warm autumn colors.

Apples make a really nice addition to chicken-pot-pie. I threw them in at the last minute and they were the best part.

I’ve just been pounced by a pair of giggle kids. Time to go giggle now.