HOSPITALS ARE SO COOL!!!

How do you bring your children through a tragic and scary situation? A friend of mine had to explain to her three year old daughter that her grandmother died very suddenly and her daughter accepted the fact and when they go visit the grave, looks up, waves goodbye to heaven and says, “bye Grandma, I love you”. It is amazing to me how honest and practical children are with sickness and death.

Recently my husband needed to be hospitalized and I had to find a way to explain to the boys what happened. I am pleased that when the ambulance came the 4 year old was still sleeping so he doesn’t remember the experience and my 3 year old is still young enough to be totally excited to see an ambulance and paramedics – gotta love the simple joys of the young. My husband is fine but when I asked my 4 year old to pray with me to help Daddy get better he said he wouldn’t. That completely shocked me, but knowing my son, I asked him why. He said because sometimes he wanted to go to visit the hospital to visit daddy and say goodnight. What a lesson in seeing the treasure in the trial. There was no concern how everything would work out or stress about the situation, all they saw were the dazzling flashing lights of the rescue vehicles and the fun buttons and equipment of the hospital. I am listening my sweet young children, teach me, oh teach me.

TOAST

Did you know you can cut a piece of toast the wrong way? I cut the toast into triangles when they were supposed to be in squares. That was my mistake last night with my 2 year old (who is just turning 3 this month!). A couple of years ago, for child #1 (when HE was 2 years old) I cut his piece of toast in half instead of leaving it whole. Oops. The world ended that day, sorry about that. You would think that after 4 years I would be getting better at cutting toast. I tried the “let’s glue the piece back together with jam” angle. Nope, that didn’t work. The only thing I didn’t do was make a whole new piece of toast. It might sound cruel, but all I could see was a future of making things over and over again because of a tired little tenacious child.

I feel like I am a bundle of blunders and mistakes, trying to keep up with the latest wish of the gods! You know, doing something for them when they can “DO IT MYSELF!!!”, or serving them cheese strings instead of cheese slices. Maybe my children are ubber-picky but I’m trying to find a balance between serving them and being their servant. I even built the train track wrong – it was supposed to be BIGGER, or was it supposed to be longer…sigh. Good thing my self-confidence doesn’t rest on the whims of little boys.

So, as I endeavor to improve on my toast cutting and train-track building and wish my new little 3 year old a Happy Birthday– I’m going to try my best not to tick you off this year and pray you do the same for me -- Love, your (longsuffering) mother.

POTTY TRAINING

So, I’m talking to my girlfriend on the phone and all of the sudden I smell something very poopy and the 2 year old is nowhere to be found. Normally this is just yucky, but we have begun potty training, so this is verging on disaster. I hang up, obviously, and start the search for the little guy. I find him. He is sitting on the toilet. All by himself. Alone. “So” I ask him “how’s it going?” He replies “good. I’m pooping”. Awesome! Overjoyed is a mild statement. Now, he’s not completely there yet, but what a great start!

Now, with the other one, I didn’t even start until he was, like, 3 ¾. Honestly, I wasn’t ready. All I ever heard were horror stories from people (like they were trying to trump their birthing stories or something) about how this was the worst part of bringing up children, or it took them a year of constant battles. No way. So I waited. We did the “train your kid in a day” program and it worked pretty good – but I’m glad I waited with him – he is unbribable. Seriously. How do you potty train a child that cannot be bribed? The second one – well, he’d do almost anything for a jelly bean so that has totally helped the potty training I think. The first one, if you tell him that if he gets out of bed again I’ll have to take his teddy away, and he has decided to get out of bed again he’ll come to me and hand me the teddy. Sigh. I’m glad I waited with the first one and didn’t create a horror story of potty training and I’m proud of my 2.5 year old for starting the process and making little victories every day.

I’m also proud of myself (and we parents need to say that to ourselves more) that I’m learning how to teach my children in their different ways. Ironically, although I don’t have to carry diapers, I do carry an extra change of clothing, just in case, and my purse just got bigger…