So this whole summer, I was mixed with fear and eager anticipation of my daughter starting school. I wanted her to go to school because 1) I felt I just wasn’t able to spend as much as time I wanted teaching her the basics and 2) with one kid gone most of the day, that meant I’d have more time to work, right?
Um, no. Not at all.
Let me put it this way. My three-year-old son is like a certain Hurricane that blew through New Orleans in 2005. My daughter was the levee. As long as she was around, I was able to withstand most of what my son could throw at me. Now that she’s gone, I’m getting pounded by his three-foot tall force of nature.
All day long it’s just an endless loop of…
“Put that back.”
“Where did you get this from?”
“Why would you color all over yourself?”
“Did you pee on the floor?”
“Where are your socks? Are your undies on backwards?”
“Where did you put the remote?”
“Don’t eat the pencil!”
“You’re hungry again?”
“Yes, it’s time for a nap.”
“You’re hungry again?”
“What is this on the floor? Did you pee on the floor?! ”
…all said with love of course. I quickly discovered that with only one kid, our time together had to be more structured than when two of them were able to entertain each other. I’m trying to downgrade my little hurricane of a boy to at least a tropical storm.
So we started to implement a couple of changes. So far so good…
1) We have 15-20 minutes of learning in the morning. My son is probably more advanced than his sister was at his age, mainly because he has her to follow and emulate. So I wanted to make sure he was stimulated with me (which cuts down on his opportunities to get into stuff). We do some fine motor skills work and letter and number recognition. He already knows his letters (and letter sounds!) and now we’re working on writing and numbers 30 and up. (More on this in a later post.)
2) We run errands either right before or right after nap time. Packing a snack helps him stay in line and we’re in and out of the store/post office/bank quickly.
3) Get dinner ready around 2:30. I used to wait until his sister got home at 3:30, thinking that the two of them could occupy each other while I cooked. So much for that plan. When she gets home, she wants attention from me, not her brother. I have to sit with her and listen to her day. And honestly, it’s my favorite part of the day, so I don’t mind, even if that means dinner is late or unfinished by the time I have to run off to class.
The most beautiful part of all this is I’m learning how to make changes on the fly, to be flexible with my expectations and to simply learn to be a more present parent. So much of my life is go, go, go but being a parent to a guy as rambunctious as my little one has forced me to slow down and understand how I can best be a parent to the kids I’ve got. So far it’s working.
Great post I love this, it sounds like you have a good plan going. When you listed the endless loop of questions that you had to ask your son repeatedly I laughed out loud cause it sounds so much like my day. I go to school online and it hasn’t been easy, my son is an only child (he’s 2) and he’s pretty good and entertaining himself but I can almost promise he has some radar that goes off everytime I sit down to do some school work cause that’s usually when he wants ALL of my attention. I have tried schedules in the past and they have worked pretty well my problem is just staying on the schedule everyday, I usually forget about the schedule about a week into them. It’s a working progress lol.
I can so relate. I’m home with my nearly two year old boy and he is a handful. However, when I use activity after activity (like his older sisters’ development center did) I find that he’s pretty easy to handle. I can even get quiet time, if I do it right. “Right” varies from day to day, some days he just can’t be contained. LOL. Thanks. I really admire they way you regimen things out, even though I know I won’t do it, I see where if I had done that with my older children they might be more disciplined. Instead they have work style like mine that is more like “order within disorder.”
I called myself taking a break from the workforce, taught and stayed home more. Boy did I learn what real work was! You have a great plan – cheers. My plan just consisted of getting out of the house and back into an office. lol
Great picture by the way!
Dude… is your Thomas my Aiden, or what?! I totally find myself saying the same thing to Aiden when his day is unstructured. Of course, with love and sugar and all that jazz. But seriously, that last paragraph about sums it all up — learning how to tailor OUR expectations, be a more present parent, and parent them the way that they need us to parent them. WORD!
Children are such a blessing and little boys are definitely forces to be reckoned with haha. My little cousin is almost 3 and he is busy busy busy.
Hahaaa! Sounds like Jayden! He’s been screaming hungry all darn day long lately and he likes demanding things with “please” on the end. And saying “okay” like “mom, you’re trippin'”. He’s so bouncy and will run circles from the living room to the kitchen. And he’s always bottomless, lol, but lately he hasn’t been tearing things up since he’s been tearing things up on the PC, flinging birds and building roller coasters. Boys!