24Apr
A couple months ago, I accidentally stumbled on an article through Pinterest on the things your child needs to be able to do before they enter Kindergarten. Normally, I avoid milestone charting like the plague. They just stress me out, and it’s like Chris says, “Have you ever seen a college student who isn’t potty trained and still drinks from a sippy cup?” But somehow I found this article and was instantly sucked in.
Most of the things Bean can do pretty well, like recognize numbers and letters, can follow one and two-step instructions, can sort and characterize by different features, and definitely has an eagerness to learn. There were some things on the list that he just isn’t ready to do yet, but that I have no doubt he will master within the next few years, such as cutting shapes out of construction paper, sequencing pictures in a logical order, and using shapes or letter-like objects to communicate ideas on paper. But there were a handful of things that he certainly had the ability to learn, and we just hadn’t thought to teach him yet.
One of those things was learning the names of all his immediate family members. He now knows me, Chris, and Gracie’s full names (and thinks it’s hysterical that Chris and I have actual, real names besides Mom and Dad), along with all his grandparents. And we also worked with him on learning both upper and lower case letters, which he is getting really good at recognizing. But the one that I think I am the most proud of is that he can now spell his name.
We tried writing his name and having him tell us the letters, and that worked, but he couldn’t ever repeat the letters without looking at them. Finally, I wised up and realized that Bean memorizes best when he’s singing a song. So, I turned his name into a little chant (don’t tell Chris, but it’s more like a cheer from my cheerleading days…and before you ask, I was a reject cheerleader on the reject cheerleading squad in 8th grade…not too many fond memories there). Within a day or two, Bean could spell his name using that chant. Over the next few weeks, I practiced the chant with him by asking him to spell his name at unpredictable times to see if he could truly recall the information, and he always could. Gradually, he dropped the chanting pattern and can now spell his name in a normal inflection, and can recognize it when it is written. Though, when I ask him to spell his name with a camera in his face, he hams it up pretty good…
So the lessons learned in this spelling experience:
A) If you’re trying to teach your child how to spell his or her name, try a chant or song because they are easier to remember for kids.
B) Milestone charts (while they aren’t the end all, be all of parenting) aren’t really the worst things in the world. When I stop freaking out about them, they can actually be a very useful tool to help guide my parenting.
C) Bean can cheer with the best of ‘em.
23Apr
**Alright, folks. This is my last diaper bag post. I promise! It’s just been on my mind lately, and I had to blog it out!**
Now that Bean and Gracie are getting a little older, the needs of my diaper bag have changed. I don’t really have to carry around bottles and burp cloths and multiple changes of clothes for each kid. Now, my diaper bag is more about entertaining the kids when we are out somewhere. Actually, just this past weekend I cleaned out my diaper bag and repacked it for this new phase.
Though I don’t have to carry bottles for Gracie anymore, I still always make sure I leave the house with snacks for the kids. Not only does it keep them busy when we’re out and about, but it never fails that the one time I don’t pack a snack, both kids start whining for one. Usually, I stick with something simple that both kids can have so that I don’t have to pack multiple snacks. Goldfish are a big hit, as are graham crackers, Puffs, and apple slices. Also, I make sure that their sippy cups are full of water. (This has a picture of a bottle for Gracie, but as of this weekend she is a sippy cup only girl! Go Gracie!)
Because Gracie is still in diapers, I carry this little travel-sized diaper case with me. Inside there are two diapers, a small pack of wipes, and a small tube of diaper cream. If we’re just running out somewhere, I sometimes leave this at home because I have a very similar travel case that I keep in my car. But if we’re going somewhere all day, I toss this pack in the diaper bag. It’s really slim and light, so it doesn’t take up too much room.
A new addition to my diaper bag these days is an old formula box filled with some small, entertaining activities that I save specifically for meals out at restaurants. I just came up with this idea a couple weeks ago, so I haven’t filled it completely yet, but right now I have a brand new pack of special crayons (different than what Bean has at home), a pack of jacks (Bean loves to collect tiny things and put them in piles), and a container of Play-Doh. Bean loves this thing. When we go out to eat, he sits very quietly and plays with all his “new” toys. I think it’s a good idea to have some things that are designated for specific times or places. It makes them seem more important and special. Plus, the formula box is just the right size for Bean to have complete control over what he plays with. It’s essentially like having a tiny toy box that he can dig through at the table.
Another new addition to our “big kid” diaper bag are sunglasses. At first, I used to buy sunglasses for the kids because… I mean, what’s cuter than a kid in sunglasses?
But living in Florida, sunglasses are almost a necessity, even for wee ones. Bean has gotten to the point now where he asks for his sunglasses in the car when it’s really bright. So, I keep these in the outside pocket of my diaper bag now partly for pure entertainment, and partly for practical use. Even little bitty eyeballs need protection.
Other staples in my new diaper bag include activities that will keep the kids entertained. I replaced all the small hand toys and stuffed animals this weekend with activities instead. I put in coloring books, animal alphabet cards, lacing cards, and a few beginning reader sight word books that my mom got Bean for Easter.
I used to carry around a lot of baby toys for Gracie, but all she ever wanted were Bean’s toys, so now I just give her whatever he is playing with. If he has flashcards out, she looks at them with us or Bean gives her a couple cards for her to carry around. If he’s playing with lacing cards, she likes to wave around the strings. We basically just adapt whatever Bean’s playing with for Gracie and that seems to keep her attention these days more than baby toys.
I should also say here that when I go somewhere with just Bean, we don’t take the diaper bag at all. Instead, he has a little backpack that he carries. I put some activities and games in there, along with his sippy cup and snack, and he’s good to go. He even likes to carry it around by himself.
What about you guys? What do you carry in your bag for older babies and toddlers?
17Apr
Bean is entering a new phase. I think this must be the three-year-old behavior people warned me about. These days, Bean is like a PMS-ing tiny warlord hyped up on steroids. He’s emotional, moody, demanding, bossy, and very rambunctious. My sweet, shy, quiet little two-year-old has become a little turd.
I say it with love, but it’s true.
The biggest change in him would have to be his roughness. I remember a few months ago we were at a birthday party for a little boy in Bean’s class who was turning three. There were other three-year-old boys there and I remember watching them push and shove and literally roll around on the ground playing in the dirt. Meanwhile, Bean was hanging out over on the sides, kind of close to me, just watching and checking things out. I remember thinking, “Thank goodness Bean isn’t a rough boy.”
Oh, boy.
It’s like all the rough and tumble that comes with being a boy just suddenly came surging through Bean in the past two weeks. He’s rough and pushy now. He kicks things and jumps on things and throws things and takes things from Gracie. I don’t think he’s intentionally being mean, but it’s like he can’t control it. He reminds me of the Hulk.
All these changes are driving me crazy! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “Michael, is that how we play nicely?” over the past two weeks? Bean hasn’t sat in time out in months, but lately I feel like he’s been in time out more than he’s been out of it! To a certain extent I’m trying to let him ride through this phase. I know this is just part of being three and being a boy, so I try not to stay on him ALL THE TIME. But at the same time, there are rules in our house that we do not break. We share toys, we don’t push or kick, we treat our toys nicely. And no matter what phase my kids are in, those rules have to be followed. Which is usually how Bean ends up in time out…
The difference between the two’s and three’s from what I can tell is that at two, they are still learning how to control their emotions. You get random outbursts and meltdowns because they are learning how to use those emotions and actions, so they can’t really control them yet. And then they learn how to control them, so they like to practice using them – like, a LOT. Two was tough, but the actions (no matter how frustrating) made sense in some way.
But this three-year-old thing? From what I can tell, now it’s not about learning to control those emotions and actions, it is knowing what’s right and wrong and deliberately choosing the wrong, just to try and cross the line. I’m sure that psychologically he’s learning about boundaries and limitations right now and that these little acts of defiance are to test our limits, so I’m glad that Chris and I are holding firm about what rules we have in our house. But GEEEEZZZZ! This is going to be tough!
Last night Bean was particularly challenging. He wasn’t being very nice to Gracie and I ended up sending him to bed early because of his behavior. This morning wasn’t much better as Bean pitched a total temper tantrum about not having a THIRD bowl of cereal because we were running late for school. By the time we got to daycare, I have to admit that I was ready to drop him off. I had told him that he could have breakfast at daycare since he didn’t get to finish his bowl of cereal at home, so I took him into the cafeteria to eat after we’d dropped off Gracie. Normally, if Bean eats breakfast there, I just drop him off and he sits at a little table, eats his breakfast, and then the cafeteria girls take him to his classroom when he’s done. But this morning when I went to drop him off, he took my hand and looked up at me with those big blue eyes of his daddy’s and said, “Mommy, will you sit with me?”
I was so late for work already. So, so, so late. But it was so nice to see my sweet boy shine through for just a minute and so I sat down with him and we ate breakfast together right there in the middle of the daycare cafeteria. There was the normal rush of morning drop off going on around us, but Bean ate his waffle and talked to me like we were the only people in the room, and soon I felt like we were. It only took him about 10 minutes to eat his waffle, and then I walked him to his classroom before I left. And I smiled all the way to school.
Three is going to be rough. I can already tell. But three might also be very surprising on random Tuesday mornings, and that part I’m really looking forward to.
15Apr
We’ve had our kids in daycare since they were each about four months old. Our health insurance is provided through my job, and so we can’t really afford for me to stay home. Plus, I like working, and especially teaching. Overall, I really like that our kids are in daycare. I like that their days are active and full of interactions with people and experiences that they wouldn’t get if I were just home with them or if we had them home with a nanny. I like daycare especially for Bean’s age because they have an actual curriculum they teach and he is always coming home with new things he has learned and new stories to tell us.
Gracie is a little different. With toddlers and older kids, I can see a benefit in daycare, but in infants and babies I have a hard time justifying daycare. I love Gracie’s teachers and she does, too, and I know that they love her right back. But I still cringe just a little bit when they say things like, “We got her to drink out of her sippy cup today!” I smile and squeal right along with them, but inside, for just a split second, I think, “Damn. I wish that had been me.” So, the first year or so of daycare is harder for me. But if I had to say I am either for or against daycare, I’d still say that I’m for daycare.
The part of daycare that will never, ever be justifiable to me, though, is the sickness.
(I’d just like to pause and tell anyone who is pregnant and going to have to put their baby in daycare to turn away for a minute here because I’m about to have a bit of a cyber meltdown and I don’t want to scare anyone.)
I try not to blog often about Bean and Gracie’s health. For one thing, it’s one of those privacy lines Chris and I set for our family on the blog and I try to respect that. But for another, health issues for some reason bring out all kinds of meanness in people on blogs, and since I already have a healthy dose of guilt for having my kids in daycare, I’d just prefer not to hear someone else make me feel worse. So, specifics aside, can I just say how awful it is when your kids are sick all the time from daycare?!?!?
We’ve been to three different daycares and they’ve all been the same, so I know it isn’t one facility issue. Gracie has a much stronger immune system than Bean does, so she isn’t so bad. But Bean Man seems to catch whatever goes through his classroom. He has a weak little respiratory system and so when things settle into his chest, it becomes a real problem. He was very sick over the past three weeks, almost to the point of hospitalization, because we couldn’t get his little chest to clear out. He was on breathing treatments through his nebulizer (which we call his “nebby”) every four hours for the past week and that, along with some really strong antibiotics, seems to have kicked it finally. But it has been exhausting for his little body.
Sick kids are never good. When one of my kids are sick, my whole world slows down to a snails pace. Everything else I do is through the fog of knowing “my baby is sick.” It’s exhausting and mentally taxing and I pretty much walk around feeling like I’m doing everything wrong. But when your kids are sick because of daycare, there’s another level of emotion that goes along with sick babies for me. There’s the guilt because I’m the one who put them in daycare. It’s my fault they are sick. And so when they are crying with a fever or coughing in the middle of the night, I not only worry about them being sick or uncomfortable or tired or upset, but in the back of my mind (and usually not so far in the back) there’s also the guilt that I carry that gets heavier and heavier.
On top of the guilt and the sickness itself, there are the logistics that go along with a sick baby when you’re a working parent. Chris and I have both used up all of our time off for the year taking care of sick wee ones. For me, every day I take now is an unpaid day, which we can’t afford. For Chris, his job is a little more flexible, but as a manager in two different positions, he really can’t miss all that often either. So, when someone gets sick, Chris and I get stressed out about having to miss work and we take it out on each other. Because who else are we going to take it out on? The kids? It’s not their fault. It’s not mine or Chris’s fault either, but the frustration has to go somewhere and so we get frustrated with each other. We’re lucky to have family close by now (I really don’t know what we’d do if we were still in Connecticut), but we try not to unload on them too often because it’s over an hour drive to our house one-way from theirs and we feel like we can only ask so much.
The hardest part for me is deciding when to send the kids back to school after they’ve been sick. We need them to go back ASAP so that we can go back to work, but we don’t want to push them back too soon before they are healthy enough. There’s no worse feeling in the world than on your child’s first day back to daycare after an illness and having the daycare call and say they are running a fever again. It literally brings me to tears as I drive to pick them up. How could I have sent them back? What kind of mother am I? I am tearing up just thinking about it, so let’s move on…
Last week at the height of Bean’s illness and at the end of my rope, I stopped by the front desk of my daycare and pulled the sweet manager aside for a minute. “Please tell me,” I pleaded. “Are my kids sick more often than other kids here? I can’t tell if this is just the price of being in daycare or if I’m doing something wrong. Because I feel like I’m doing something wrong.” She gave me a hug and told me gently that unfortunately this was just part of daycare. My kids were no sicker than any others, no sicker than her own son even. It was encouraging to hear, but that afternoon when I took Bean back to the doctor for his last breathing check, I asked every nurse who came in and our pediatrician the same question. Was this just my kids? Was I doing something wrong? My pediatrician explained it the best. She said that not only are my kids in daycare, but they are both under three years old, which makes them more susceptible to illness. Add to that how close they are in age and the fact that they play so closely together, which means they are always passing things back and forth, and it’s just a breeding ground for a hot mess.
“But no,” she said. “Your kids are just going through the regular cycles of being in daycare.”
On one hand that relieved me, but on the other hand I felt even worse because the next day I was going to be sending my kids back into the jungle (cue the guilt). But that night around 2am, Bean spiked another fever (cue the guilt) and we had to figure out who was going to stay home with him again (cue the frustration and argument).
See how that works? It’s awful!
I realize that reading this, many of you are probably thinking that if I’m this upset about it, then I should figure out how to keep my kids out of daycare already! But as bad as this sounds, it really isn’t like this all the time. We’re just coming out of a couple months here of sickness and my frustrations are at a peak at the moment. It’s times like these low points when I pacify myself by praying prayers of gratitude that the Good Lord saw what I couldn’t when he left me unemployed two years ago so that I had to switch careers and become a teacher, and now I have summers off with my kids. Summer is just around the corner and I can’t wait to keep my kids home and healthy for a few months, and I know that when it’s time for me to go back to school, we’ll all be glad that the kids are going back to school as well. They’ll miss their friends and their teachers, and I’ll miss my students and my paychecks!
But for now, I’m just in that place of parenthood where I feel like I’m doing it all wrong.
So. That’s that.
And now, I’m going to sneak into my kids’ rooms, make sure their feet are all under the covers, and give them little butterfly kisses without waking them up. And then I’m going to go downstairs and pack my lunch, Gracie’s diaper bag, and Bean’s backpack for tomorrow. Because it’s Monday morning for a working parent family.
Get updates via Facebook |
Become a fan of Marriage Confessions
Categories
Boys
Beancast
Bellycast
Family
Milestones
parenting
The Bean
About Beanie
Angry Bean
Baby Products
Bean and Molly
Bean's Hair
Conversations w/ Beanie
Daycare
Food and Eating
Fun with Dad
Fun with Mom
Growing Bean
Out and About
Play Dates
Playing
Sleeping Bean
Sweet Bean
Travel with Bean
Video
What I've Learneddiscipline
GiveawaysPregnancy
Sweet Pea
Toddlerhood
Sick Bean
Potty Training
Gracie Girl
Fun Baby Things
Siblings
Parenting Ideas
About Gracie
Conversations with Bean and Gracie
Sweet Gracie
Angry Gracie
Conversations with Gracie
Holidays
Birthdays
