Burning Up

So I've been reading (really, studying) the Spirited Child handbook in the last few months (which I think has helped a lot - mostly me). I put something from that book into practice today with a lot of success. It's not often that something actually "works" over a very short period of time - I was so pleased with the technique that I wanted to write it down. Will can be very intense and really work himself up in a frenzy. One of the suggestions of the SC book is to give children alternative outlets for their feelings, particularly anger, instead of not allowing them to feel/be angry.

So this morning Will was all upset because I wouldn't let him wear his Spiderman costume to school. "But I have to save people," he argues. I tell him that if the costume is going to make him disagreeable that's not very super-hero like and I'll have to take the costume away until he's ready to act nicely (if the costume makes you have bad behavior then the costume is going to need to be put away yadda yadda). So then he tells me that he's very angry with me (which I think is a good step - that he's saying that versus just having a complete hissy fit).

I told him that it was okay for him to be angry with me; I understood that and I felt angry sometimes too. Then I asked him (this is from the book) if he'd like to draw a picture of how angry he felt. He said that yes he would so up we went to get the markers and paper out and he plopped himself down and began to draw. He started with black. Then he got yellow, red and after that pink. About this time Kevin came home from running and asked him what he was drawing. He tells Kevin very matter of factly that he's angry with me for not letting him wear his Spiderman costume and so he's drawing a picture of fire burning me up (maybe I was the pink?). Kevin, of course, is pretty taken aback but in typical Kevin fashion he keeps his cool and doesn't really react to it (I later explained the technique to him). He showed Kevin the fire and the black (which he said was the smoke) burning me up.

In the car on the way to school he was still angry with me (according to him) but when I picked him up from school and we got into the car he said to me right away, "Mommy, I'm not angry with you anymore" (I hadn't asked - I had just acted normally when I picked him up; he brought it up specifically).

Here's a picture of the drawing he made. It's a pretty obviously "angry" image - but I thought it was pretty cool that he could get his anger out that way (versus having a fit, hitting something or someone, or even just yelling). So I got fictionally burned up in the process. As my book suggests, parenting should be about progress, not perfection :-)

Mom, How Come ...

Will: Mom, how come there's rain in the clouds if I can't see it, even if I go up in an airplane?

to Ty: Have you heard of "On Beyond Zebra? Which letters do you know?

to Ty: You can't see the air but you can feel it, right?

June 21, 2009

Things I Hope I Never Forget

Lindsay at the fair, her first time seeing a cow. I had been wheeling her around in her stroller but when we got to the AgriFair building I took her out and let her go into the petting zoo. The floor of the petting zoo is a thick layer of shavings and normally Lindsay is pretty particular about her footing (not venturing out into deep sand, often not even wanting to walk on wet grass) but I put her down and she saw the cows and I just saw the lightbulb go off. "Moo!" she squealed and headed over to the cows as fast as her little tripod walk would take her repeating "Moo! Moo! Moo!" all the way. Then "Sheep!" Too bad I had never told her about goats (bad mom). She had no words for them but she walked right over and patted them too.

It all just clicked in her head that these things we'd been seeing in books are really animals, not some little plastic toy.

Art A Day

Kevin and I have decided that the next fifteen months are so are the "sweet spot" of parenting. Today is the first day of summer for us (Will's last day of school was yesterday) and in just about 15 months he'll be starting kindergarden (sighs). Like the Keith Urban song, "these are the days that you'll remember" and we want to spend them, as much as possible, enjoying the freedom of this time in our lives.

As I was pinning up some of the school artwork that came home with Will yesterday it occurred to me tha t, beyond me lobbying to put more art and music into our schools, I ought to be walking the talk and doing exactly that. Instead of worrying about donating to fundraisers to bring art education back to our school district, maybe we should just be getting down and dirty ourselves more often. I love doing art projects - and part of the joy of getting messy is getting clean afterwards. I set a goal to do at least one art or music "project" every day - some days it will be as simple as getting out our MusicTogether CDs and our instruments and playing together but I hope that most days it will mean getting out the crayons, the paints, the glue, the playdoh, t he scissors ... and just getting creative.

On the first day we made a chalk city on our driveway and painted dinosaurs. Well, we started out painting dinosaurs ... then the dinosaur became the ocean. Then we put fish in the ocean. [then mommy paints a sun over the ocean]. Then we paint a purple whale breeching out of the ocean. Then we give the whale a mouth. Now the whale is a megaladon (ancient shark). Then the whale is actually a ladder up to the sun. Then we mix the purple with the sun - now we have a sunset ... and that's where we stop for the day (although we may continue to paint after "quiet time" - to that end the stuff is still set up in the driveway.

Like my goal of getting back into running this year, it's all about momentum. The more you do it, the more you do it. First day of summer and we're on a roll :-)

ArtADay - Day 2

Day 2: we played off of our matchbox car chalk city and ran our cars through paint and then "rimmed" the cars on the paper to create our artwork. We also had fun with Lindsay's bubble machine (she can say "bubble" now very distinctly) and Will's bubble sword. I made giant bubbles with the bubble sword and Will ran around the street popping them with his other sword. This is now referred to as "the bubble game".

Day Three - start of a cheetah, painting the base

Day 3: decided to go with a theme for the week (African Animals). He chose a cheetah today. We looked at pictures on the internet (thank you Google Images) and then decided that cheetahs are yellow. Then I had to cut out a template. Of course Will wanted a cheetah running, so I had to freehand draw that, then cut it out, then tape it down onto the newspaper so he could paint it. Now it's drying and after "quiet time" we'll punch out black dots (that's a skill, right?) and glue them onto the body. Don't know if we'll make eyes or just glue googley eyes to it. I found a cool multicolored snake thing for tomorrow.

the finished cheetah

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Day 4 - paper plate snake. Note to self - make note of which pieces go where before you paint. In theory it's a great idea to practice cutting by cutting the paper plate into pieces and then painting the pieces and then reassembling the "puzzle" back into a snake ... but in practice it's harder than it looks to remember which piece goes where! (and it's also hard to figure out which side to paint if the pieces aren't labeled so we ended up painting both sides of all of the pieces, just in case.

Day 4 - colorful snake

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Day 5 - I've already learned something. Even though I like having a "theme" and the goal of doing at least one art project each day, I've learned that being too rigid about either really takes the entire point out of it. Yesterday we had a fun, easy day - walked to Starbucks, baked banana bread together, played the bubble game but then it was 5 PM and I realize we haven't done our art project for the day yet (handprint lions from this site: http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/lion_handprint_painting.htm) So this week I feel compelled to complete the theme but after tomorrow (Friday) I'm going to adopt a looser definition of "art project". I want to do creative things but I don't necessarily need to create things in the process. There's too much pressure that way - which entirely defeats the point of the project in the first place.

Day 6 - this morning Will had a playdate with a friend whose mom is also very into doing art with her son. She showed me a few cool things that she has to do with Mason (that I now totally covet) and she had a face painting book complete with face paints, a brush, etc. We turned Mason & Will into superheroes with face paints - it was fun. Now if I can only get to Michaels today maybe I can just paint Will's face as a zebra .....

To Be Or Not To Be ...

After a difficult trip with a friend to the Wild Animal Park I started thinking about the way we raise our children and what we're really teaching them and how much of our parenting is not about our child(ren) but about ourselves. And what I ultimately realized is that, as parents, most of the time we're not being honest with our children and maybe that's the reason they're not learning what we're teaching.

When other children are "too loud" we tell our child to say to that child, "You're hurting my ears, please stop screaming" or when they are playing in a way our child doesn't like (chasing, too physical, etc) we teach our child to "use his words" to tell the other child, "stop, I don't like that." But, in truth, as adults, we would never say that to someone who was offending us. When people are laughing and loud in a restaurant we don't go up to them and ask in our most polite tone of voice, "Excuse me, I don't like how loudly you are talking, could you please speak more quietly?"

So why are we teaching our children to "use their words" in this way if we know that, as adults, we don't practice this? Is this really the way we as adults should be acting? Do we think that this is actually the "right" way to interact with people. Should we, as grown ups, walk around using our words to politely correct everyone's behavior because we don't like it? Would we feel better if we did that?

Somehow I don't think so. If you're a "touchy feely" person that likes to hug and kiss people when greeting them how would you feel when the reaction to your affectionate greeting was, "I don't like it when you touch me that way"? What if you like to sing along with the radio and your passenger admonishes you, "You're hurting my ears. Could you please stop?"

As adults we would never do this. We know that would hurt the other person's feelings. But as parents this is exactly what we are teaching our children to do. We're not teaching them about accepting other people's differences or being kind to other people, we're teaching them that to assert their thoughts is supreme. Shouldn't we be teaching our children how to cope with the real world? And I don't mean that we shouldn't teach our children to keep their hands to themselves, or use inside voices - that's not what I'm wondering about at all - teaching children self control is a big part of what parenting is about. What I'm wondering about is what we are teaching our kids with respect to how they react to those situations when others do things that they don't like. Should we be teaching our kids to speak out or grin and bear it as we, their parents, do?

Shakespeare dealt with this very question in Hamlet's best known speech:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.

When we teach our children to ask (however politely) for other people to change their behavior just to please their own sensibilities aren't we really teaching them that they are more important than anyone else? And then we wonder why they challenge US?

the Spoiling of Husbands

I'm never quite sure how to react when people tell me that I spoil my husband. From where I sit I think that should be a compliment but when people say it to me it doesn't come across that way. It's not a critique, really, but it's definitely not a compliment.

There are two main times that people tend to say this. One is when I am making dinner (which, by the way, is my dinner too, not just his) and the other is related to the care of our children, specifically times when I leave him to "babysit" them. "It's not babysitting when they are his children!" I'm repeatedly told. "He doesn't know how lucky he is" is the other thing that people tell me. In fact, I've heard that very statement at least three times in the last five days. Once from my very good friend, once from his mother (I think SHE really did mean it as a compliment, after all, he is her baby) and once, just about an hour or so ago, from my good friend and neighbor who stopped by while I was making dinner.

I want to say up front that I'm in no way offended when people say this to me, nor do I feel the least bit defensive. But I do find it curious which is why I'm writing about it here (I started this blog solely to have a place for these random thoughts and musings). Why is my cooking him a nice dinner or wanting to not leave him to take care of both kids while I'm off doing "my thing" too often such a cause for notice and comment? Nobody makes this kind of comment when you do something nice for your girlfriend - but husbands seem to be in a different category (apparently of people you should not "spoil" too regularly).

Will and the Bullies

There comes a time in every child's life when the "real world" starts creeping in and encroaching on the carefree days of childhood. Figuring out how to protect your child from those not-so-nice realities and, at the same time, teach him to navigate this new world is the struggle of every parent. Will is 3 1/2 now and fairly obsessed with "mean guys" or "bad guys". He's recently become very interested in Spiderman the superhero who protects people from the mean guys. When he's not wearing his costume (which is often), he's "Peter Parker" (Spiderman's alter ego). He has taken to locking his bedroom door to keep the mean guys out and he asks us all the time about where the mean guys are. He was very relieved to learn about jail and learn that mean guys are locked up there so that they cannot get him.

Will also loves school so it was suprising to me that he came home from school on Monday saying that he didn't want to go back to school anymore. When I asked him why he told me that on the playground that day there were some mean kids from Red Gamal and they would not let him on the slide. Red Gamal is one of the other classes of three year olds but they are the oldest class so most of the Red Gamal kids are four now and, from what I've read, four is the age when bullying starts to rear its ugly head in schools.

I asked Will how he had handled the "mean guys" and he told me that he had "used his words" to tell them to stop being mean and to please let him on the slide but that didn't work (which made him feel sad he said) so then he went over to his teacher, Dana, and told her and that Dana had then gone and talked to the boys and that they had gotten off the slide. This all seemed good to me but it weighed on Will (as things tend to do with him) and he couldn't let it go. He brought it up again and again. We talked about what words he could use and what he could DO (walk away and go play with his friends Zach and Mason). We even role played that a bit when he brought it up again last night. I mentioned it to Kevin that this was really weighing on our little boy and he said it was sad that he had to deal with bullies so young.

This morning before school Will was adamant that he didn't want to go to school and mentioned the mean guys again while getting into the car. He told me that if I was going to make him go to school then he was not going to go outside and play on the playground so the mean guys couldn't be mean to him. Sigh, I thought. Our sweet little boy meets the big bad world.

I decided that I would at least mention it to his teachers when I dropped him off - if four is the age of bullies, three is the age of fantasy and since Will has been so obsessed with "mean guys" I wondered if the story was even true. I also wondered if I had inadvertently blown up the issue by talking with Will about it and humoring his worrying.

So when I went into Will's classroom I mentioned the incident and Will's obsessive concern to Dana and asked her if she even remembered something like that happening. She looked puzzled for a moment and then her eyes opened wide. "It wasn't kids from Red Gamal," she told me. Their class had had a field trip on Monday so their schedule was a bit off and they had been on the playground at the same time as the Pink Tzipor class (two year olds). It turns out that it was a couple of two year olds who had been on the slide (normally Will's class is out on the playground at the same time as the Red Gamal kids) and not let Will pass. She said that the two year olds were not being mean, they were actually pretty afraid of Will (hands down the biggest kid in his class) and were just frozen there when Will was trying to "use his words" to have them move. They didn't know what to do!

She reassured Will that she and the other teachers would always help him and that he didn't need to worry, they were there to protect him. Then she just kind of laughed and said, "Well, that's Will. He's twice their size but he'd never think of just climbing over them or pushing them out of the way and he is just so puzzled when he tries to use his words to get something and it doesn't work!"

I can just picture these little Pink Tzipor two year olds frozen in their tracks and Will gesturing and talking to them (loudly and close!) trying to convince them to let him have a turn :-)

So the "big bad world" is kept at bay another day.