so i know that when your kid is not feeling well, you should give them what they want, but it just kills me to do this to an extent because it ruins the rules i've set up... now i want kathryn to be comfortable don't get me wrong, it's just, where do you draw the line? and when do you stop?
kathryn has been glued to the TV since her surgery...there have been a few "away" times, but the majority of the time has been spent in front of the TV. i'm not a stick-your-kids-in-front-of-a-movie-all-day kind of mom... so this has bugged me... but we don't have cable so tv for us is movies, and since all but 4 of her movies are scratched beyond playability, she doesn't usually watch tv. well, i knew she would want to be stuck in front of the tv, but i wasn't about to get stuck having to hear the stupid looney tunes cartoons over and over and over, so i asked Jamie if she would let us borrow some of their movies. she brought them over on monday, and kathryn has really taken to the Dora movies, she brought 3 Dora movies over. literally the last 2 days have been nothing but Dora and the occasional word world on pbskids.org... i at first thought Dora was a cute show. but after hearing it over and over and over... i realized, i can't stand some of the voices on there! and some of the phrases bug me too. i won't specify for the Dora lovers out there, but man am i glad we don't own these DVDs! and i am glad we don't have cable, because from watching the other cartoon shows for kids at friends houses, i realized there are a few shows that i can't stand... and since we don't have cable...there is no way for them to play in my house! whew! what's funny is that it isn't the repetitiveness that bothers me...stick almost any dreamworks movie in and play it all day, and i'll be reciting the lines and not minding at all... (we have over the hedge, madagascar, veggietales, and cinderella that play and i LOVE these movies no matter how many times i hear them) so i just kept thinking... what happens when they get older and they love a show that gets on my nerves! hopefully it won't be playing in the living room!
so at 1o:30 this morning i cut the Dora off, and decided no more Dora for the rest of the day. it was getting close to lunch time and i was asking kathryn what she wanted to eat while she kept mumbling over and over "i wa wa woh woh" which means "I want to watch Word World" but i had decided we weren't going to watch any show for a while. so she decides she wants to eat cereal for lunch...well, at this point (today she seemed totally herself, energy levels and all) i wasn't going to argue that cereal wasn't a lunch food, so i told her she had to wait till it got soggy, and i asked her if she still wanted it "yah" so i made it. "i nh wah cuol" ok, do you want oatmeal? "yah" "you sure?" "ya" so i made it, and took out rice for daniel to eat and warmed it up...suddenly, she wants the rice instead... i give her the rice, go to make daniel a sandwich and when i give it to him she doesn't want rice, she wants oatmeal... ok... whatever. daniel scarfs down his sandwich so i go to give him the rice, and kathryn wants it again..so i share it between the both of them till it's gone... then i pull the cereal over to see if daniel wants it, he does, so he eats all of kathryn's soggy cereal, and she wasn't touching her oatmeal, so i pull it over to see if Daniel wants some, and he ate some and kathryn finished some too... i just couldn't believe how much daniel ate!
so we ended up having a lot of fun. first we found all the balls and bean bag we could and we played toss it in the basket, then we took just the balls (a lot were golf balls) and i showed kathryn a game that my sisters and i used to play as kids all the time...rolling the golfballs back and forth to each other down the hall (we had a ton of golfballs growing up and we found interesting ways to have fun with them- i used to build pyramids!) it was so much fun, and it got me to thinking about back in the day when i was still a kid... anyway, i taught kathryn how to "roll" the ball by pushing it forward with your hand and we tried to see if we could hit the other golfballs that we already rolled...she had fun and she learned a bit of coordination, and maybe how to aim at a target... well daniel came along , and i showed him how to roll the balls too, and he had fun too, but it didn't last long after daniel joined...so i tickled that silly boy, and kathryn got in the way, so i tickled her too, and then i chased them around the house for some more tickling, and then we just started playing chase, daniel LOVES to be chased...i got a video of the boy, he is too hillarious the way screams when he sees you coming. so then i changed it up with kathryn and she started chasing me, and i ran ahead to "hide" to show her the fun of jumping out and saying "boo". i made her jump when she came where i was hiding...but she loved it...i tried to explain how you do it, you find a place to sit quiet and wait for the other person to come by you, and you jump out and yell boo...well, she didn't quite get it, but it was still fun. we played that until i was pooped out from all the running, then we sat and put a puzzle together, but when daniel comes along, he gets kahtyrn upset, and so puzzle time never lasts long...and then we played with some memory cards i made with words on them instead of pictures... so she can start learning how to identify words. and since she's been sick, i pulled out the "Your Baby Can Read" DVDs and her and daniel watched them all... so i figured we'd watch them again today... well i had passed about 1 1/2 hours of playtime but it sure seemed like 3 to me! i was shooting for 2 hours without tv, and with lunch i think i got that. so both kids were in a good mood, and it was time to wind down it was about 2pm, and i needed to fold about 7 loads of laundry, so i put on the movie of my choice "iron giant" and i folded laundry while they watched the movie. at one point daniel came and crawled in my lap, and so i took a pause to hold him...and i realized he fell asleep! lol. within 5 mins. so laid him down. finished laundry and kathryn even helped put the folded clothes away without me even asking! what a sweetie.
i even got a chance to fiddle with some ribbon while the kids played with stuff in the craft room (buttons on the printer powered off, all the gadgets on the sewing machine, spools of ribbon in a box) but that's ok, they weren't harming anything and at least i could see what they were doing. and i had put away all the things i didn't want them touching, so that was nice.
on a side note, i really don't remember it raining so much last december! and i remember now i am so glad i don't have Henry (the dog), every time it would rain he would always potty in the house almost never outside (it's raining, come on) and when he did go outside he'd get so filthy i'd practically need to bathe him every time! just thinking about how annoying that was makes me oh so glad i'm not going through that with all this rain.
another side note! i forgot to post it earlier, but Dec. 15 marked the 8 year anniversary since John and I started dating... i can hardly believe we've been together for that long, and wow have we changed...as everyone does. i laugh just thinking about how we declared we wanted to marry each other within the first week of being together... but look at us now...married with 2 kids. wow how the time flies. sometimes i look back at the letters we wrote to each other, and marvel at how much we loved each other even then, of course we were "in love" where the other can do no wrong and life is all butterflies and roses. lol. and oh how times change even love. our love is on a different level, and it's interesting looking back on how it evolved. the next few pics are within the first few months we were together...
too cute.
so i've caught kathryn telling daniel no and getting all upset about him doing something as trivial as climbing on her bed, and i try to tell her it's not a big deal, but how do you explain to toddlers that you want to "pick your battles" i don't want her following him around telling him no all the time, but if he is doing something he shouldn't that could hurt him, and i wasn't around to see it and she was, i'd want her to tell him no and stop him... but lately, when i tell her to stop bugging him she turns to me and says "tell daniel no!" (he was jumping on the recliner and i don't care, it's not likely he'll hurt himself bad enough to warrant keeping him from doing it...now if he was bouncing on a chair where he could fall on tile...different story) and suddenly it clicked. she must think it's not fair for me to not discipline him EVERY time he does something wrong or something like that... i don't know exactly the way she is associating it, but i'm pretty sure she's thinking i'm not being fair to her. man that's hard. she was my first kid, so yeah i had been hard on her in the past, but i feel like she's stepping out of "toddlerhood" and into whatever the next stage is...where she is being more obedient without me having to discipline her... so as she steps out, daniel is entering into the toddler stage where he pushes his luck and my patience. but i feel like i've developed a different way of correcting bad behavior or bad "choices" since i was there with kathryn...does she remember? bottom line, different forms of discipline work with different ages, and i don't think daniel is old enough to really start hammering out all the bad... or at least the success will be low...
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