Mommy Time

We live in a beautiful area.  Lots to do outdoors and many swimming holes to investigate and yummy blueberries in the middle of summer.  So we decided to go on a hike with some friends this morning and look for blueberries.  We’ve been picknicking a lot this week and doing a lot of running around, and this morning for whatever reason I decided NOT to bring lunch.  Why?  I have no idea.  I just had it in my head that I wanted us home for lunch today.  A less rushed afternoon?  A less rushed morning?  Is it really more work to make lunch in the morning and bring it with you?  No.  Just different work.  In any case….

Lesson learned:  Never box yourself into a corner.  Leave your options open.

We hiked down a beautiful trail.  Stopped to pick some blueberries and even managed to get quite a few into a container to bring home later.  I counted this as a victory since I never managed to pick as fast as the kids can eat them.  We continued down the trail to a shady stream, where I carefully protected my blueberries.  It’s supposed to be 95 degrees today…so the shady stream seemed like a very good idea.  The kids had a wonderful time hopping around on the rocks, and they found a frog and a butterfly in the process.  Then my friend told me it was 12:15.  So we ate our snack while the other kids had lunch and then I rushed us out of there so that we could get home for lunch.

I really wanted to be home for lunch today.  Why?  I’m still not sure why.

In any case, child #2 fell asleep in the backpack almost immediately.  And child #1 was obviously hot and tired, having left the comfort of the shady stream.  The way back to the car was all up hill.  I needed a motivator.  Enter the blueberries.  I tried to persuade her that we were almost to the blueberry bushes and if she just walked a little further she would see them…but that didn’t work.  So I offered her a few blueberries from my stash.  Just a handful.  What could that hurt?  Then she wanted to carry them.  I managed briefly to get the container back when we got to the bushes.  She couldn’t pick blueberries and hold blueberries at the same time.  But somehow when we started walking she remembered the blueberries in the box again.  I can’t say my little box was empty when we got back to the car…but I could see the bottom.

At least we had enough blueberries to eat with our lunch.ови услугивикКартиниИдея за подаръкСувенириикониикониПравославни иконииконописikoniподаръци

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Today was swimming lesson number three.  An adventure for Mommy.  We decided to stay at the pool and play with friends after our swimming lesson.  It was the first time since last summer since #2 had been in the water.  He was pretty averse to the beach this weekend so I had no idea how it would go with the swimming.

E has a Speedo swim vest.  It isn’t a life saving device, but a “swim-aid”.  She can wear it in much the same way that they wear the training bubbles around their waists during class.  So she paddled around pretty confidently.  W clung to me like I was trying to drop him off a cliff or something.  So I wandered around in the 3 feet deep end of the pool with a 19 month old stuck to my chest watching E swim.  She had a friend there with her with no swim aid.  He had a mommy holding his hands and was experimenting with floating under the water and holding his breath.

The adventure came at the end of our swim time when I asked everyone to get out of the pool.  I had removed E’s swim vest and was toweling off her brother when she took off again for the water.  I told her to come back, but she got back in the water.   Then, much to my surprise she pushed off from the edge, kicking her legs, and tried to swim back over to the side.  She didn’t paddle with her arms at all. She managed to keep herself off the bottom of the pool, but not above the surface of the water.  Her little eyes looked at me in panic as she sank under the water until I could get hold of her fingers and get her back to the side.  She was coughing a little but not much.  She was mostly just scared and embarrassed.  She really expected to be able to swim.  She was genuinely confused about why on earth she didn’t stay above the water.

I suppose I could have opted to teach to the moment and gotten back in the water and tried to show her something about staying afloat or something about swimming under water.  Or at least that she could touch the bottom there and that she could push off from the bottom to go back over to the side if she was stuck.  So much of it is psychological.  Instead, I told her I would bring her back to the pool later.  We’ll see if I can take her back for a one on one.

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When E first got glasses we had different health insurance than we currently have. I picked the best optometrist I could find for the given plan and hoped I’d made a good choice. Our insurance changed and we had to go to a different office when she last got new lenses. Having never worn glasses myself, I didn’t really know what I was looking for in a good optometrist, but I’ve since learned a few things.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

1) Some optometrist offices (but not all) will replace the ear pieces (templars) free of charge for as long as you have the glasses, at least on children’s glasses. Since these are easily broken this is a valuable service.

2) Also make sure that you can go in for complementary “adjustments” whenever the glasses get yanked off by a sibling and one lens is sitting lower than the other.

3) Especially when choosing children’s glasses, the number of choices for frames will vary widely from place to place, so choose a place with a good inventory.

4) A good fit from an experienced staff is one of the most valuable things you can have. The frames are the most expensive part of the whole thing. E got her glasses when she was 2. She has had them for 2 years. She’s grown a lot, but she’s still wearing those frames. We’re getting close to having to replace them, but I feel very fortunate that we got the advice we did when we bought the glasses.

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There’s nothing that says summer more than heading down to the local pool for swimming lessons, right?  I don’t know about that….maybe the warm weather says summer.  In any case, I was digging out bathing suits and towels and trying to remember what else I used to carry around in the swim bag last year.

I took E to the YMCA for swim lessons in the spring in previous years, but it never seemed like they expected her to do very much.  I know she’s only 4 so she was only 3 last year…they can’t learn to swim, right.  Not so.  We went to visit a friend last summer who’s daughter, only 6 months older than mine, was swimming like a fish.  The secret apparently is not using “the bubble,” otherwise known as a swim aid.

In any case, I decided to skip the Y this spring and opted for the town pool over the summer instead.  We’ll see how it goes.  It turns out that the town pool program is run by…. you guessed it, the Y.  A different Y though.  They started them today without bubbles to see how they would do.  The kids all flopped around and clung to the side of the pool sort of desperately.  I asked the instructor about it and she said that they are watching to evaluate how much floatation they think the kids actually need.  That seemed like a very reasonable answer.  We’ll see what they come up with for E…I’m very curious.

She’s what they call…slow to warm up.  She tends to look before she leaps.  She takes life sort of cautiously and tests everything before she lets herself feel comfortable.  Once she decides that something is okay she leaps in with enthusiasm, if not a little seriously, but she’s slow to make the decision.  She’s decided that swimming with a bubble on is a good thing.  I’m not so sure she liked being in the pool with total strangers and no bubble.  So I don’t have a lot of confidence in their ability to assess her swimming needs from today’s class.

We shall see….Картини

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I have a book.  I’ve had it for probably many years and not done a thing with it.  It’s called “First Steps in Quilting” by Leslie Linsley.   About two years ago I decided, while I was pregnant and obviously in some sort of nesting mode, to try my hand at the quilting.  I am now thoroughly enjoying myself.  I like the way the book takes me through progressively more difficult techniques and builds on things it has taught me as it presents new projects.  I’ve improvised a few projects too.  The only thing of which I’m a little critical is that occasionally I find that a measurement is slightly off, and I end up having to recut a piece of fabric or buy additional fabric.  My best piece of advice there would be to read all the instructions and attempt to understand the process of assembly from beginning to end before buying and/or cutting fabric.

More soon on my latest project.

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Sкомпюo I know that tv is bad. Our pediatrician says bad bad bad…well, actually he says “evil.” But E really likes Word Girl on PBS and you know what, I do to. The villains are quirky and funny and E’s learning some vocabulary in the process. They just added it to our tv line up 5 days a week and my anxious pre-schooler is so concerned about not missing Word Girl that she isn’t napping for fear of oversleeping. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Word up!

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When #1 was born I had a lot of friends with boys. They seemed to have much more trouble than I was having with chaos, climbing, accidents, and general household destruction. I said no, she stopped. She didn’t put things in her mouth. She climbed and she walked at 9 1/2 months…but we never child proofed the garbage because she never went in it. We never child proofed the bookcases because she never went near them. Boy energy they called it. I wasn’t sure I believed in Boy Energy. I mean can they really be that different at 10 months old.

So now I have a boy.

The problem is…there’s poker casino onlinecasino internetcasino online italiagiochi casino online gratiscasino gioca gratiscasino bonus benvenutoi video pokercasino tropez gratison line casinogiochi slotsgiochi jack black in lineaslots casinocraps gratisi migliori casino onlinemetodi roulettegioco roulette gratiscasino net,casino on net,questionario casino on netroulette on line gratisgiochi di casino gratisbetandwin casinocasino on line bonusil gioco della roulettecasino paypalgiochi video pokercasino italiani con bonusgambling casinogiochi blackjack in lineavideo poker virtualevideo poker gratuitovideo poker online gratis,giochi online video poker,video poker onlinecasino on line sicuriswiss casino onlineplay blackjack onlineslots machinesonline gamblingsexy casino onlinemigliori bonus casinoroulette online gratisno deposit casino on line,casino on line italiano,casino on linecasino liveregole roulettedownload roulettegioco keno gratis in lineablack jack in lineacasino games probonus europa casinoslots gratisroulette gamesplaying poker onlinetexas hold em odds also the question of the difference of personality just between individuals. So how can you even tell? And I would certainly disagree about the commonly held belief that boys are faster with physical milestones and girls are faster with verbal. Mine are the opposite.

But #2 does have Boy Energy. He attacks the garbage can with zeal. Squeezes the life out of the cat on a regular basis. He’s scratched and bruised before I can finish looking the other way. Not to mention biting and hair pulling.

So how much of this energy is child specific and how much of it is gender specific? I have no idea….

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I wrote last year about our daughter E getting glasses. We’ve learned a lot since then.

She has something called accomodative esotropia. As I understand it (and I don’t completely understand it), we use greater muscle power to focus on items close to us. She over-accommodates with the weaker of her two eyes. This means that when she tries so hard to focus up close that the eye actually pulls in to the center. But there is something else going on as well…she isn’t using that eye so it’s floating towards the center??? The vision in the strong eye gets stronger and the vision in the weak eye isn’t developing.

She is on her 3rd prescription in a year. We visit the eye doctor every 2 months and he checks her vision. They did this at age 2 using a picture chart and hoping that she would cooperate. He could also tell a certain amount by reflecting a light in her eyes. Also by making her focus on objects near and far and watching what her eyes did. He has adjusted the prescription when he saw that her eye was still crossing even with the glasses. But at age 3 they have new tricks to use. They have been able to test her depth perception using some 3-D picture cards. She has also been able to read the letter chart, which is more accurate than the picture chart. They aren’t happy with what they now know.

They have determined that her weak eye has 20/80 vision with correction. It’s letting the other eye do all the work. So we’ve been instructed to patch E’s good eye for 2 hours a day. She wasn’t happy about that.

The standard eye patches we were given are adhesive. “Just like a band-aid” did nothing to make it more appealing. She doesn’t like them either. We were also given a brochure to order Anissa’s Fun Patches. These have been more of a success. They attach to her glasses, so they are reusable…which was great during the first few days when our 2 hours a day was done in 10 minute increments. They won’t last forever, with all the taking on and off that we are doing, but today we did two patch sessions of an hour apiece…so we’re making progress.

What was horrifying to me, as the mom, was that when I put the patch on her good eye she started crying and saying that without that eye she couldn’t see. With everything that the eye doctor had been saying, I still couldn’t believe there was anything significantly wrong with her vision. She’s just too active. But here she was telling me that she couldn’t see with her right eye. And she acts like it too. The first few days she wore the patch she would refuse to do anything. We were instructed to use it for activities like reading and coloring….coloring is one of her favorite activities. But she didn’t want to color…obviously something wrong.

I’ve since realized a couple of things (hindsight is 20/20). First of all, I look into her right eye when I’m talking to her. Sometimes it appears to me that her left eye is crossing…but that isn’t the case. It’s just that she’s looking to my left and although she appears to be looking at me with her right eye, it’s that eye that is crossed…and the other that is looking. I was worried when she was an older baby, young toddler…that she didn’t make eye contact enough. I thought about autism or another learning disability…none of it seemed to fit with her developing personality. I never put it together until the eye started to cross that it might be a vision problem. And when I go back and look at pictures from her at age 1…knowing what I know now, I can see that she is looking at the camera with

her left eye. You can’t beat yourself up, right? We actually did a great job catching the problem early.

We visit the eye doctor again in late September and I’m hoping that she’ll show some improvement with the patching.

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Someone said to me recently that 3 is the new 2. What does this mean? Well…everyone dreads the “Terrible Two’s”, but we hit two and wondered, gee…why do they call it that? We must be really lucky. Our toddler is really great. Then we hit three. And obviously if my friends are saying that “three is the new two,” we aren’t the only ones who were disappointed when year two ended.

At lunch time today E, almost 3 1/2, threw a bucket at me when I took away the tension rod thing with which she was playing. It’s hard to describe the item. We have a Thomas the Tank Engine play tent, which is a very fun toy. The rod is part of the structure and needs to be taken out when the tent is folded. It separates into two pieces and has a piece of elastic in it for tension. She was pulling it apart and bending it in half and waving it around…all within arm’s reach of her baby brother, and it looked dangerous.

Do I sound like I’m defending my decision to take away the toy…wait, it wasn’t even a toy. Why do I need to defend myself? Because my almost 3 1/2 year old is the household artbitrator of what’s fair and just. And she certainly didn’t agree with the decision. I thought it was fair. Dangerous item. Not to be played with. I removed it from play.

So she threw a bucket at me. I gave her a time out. She started screaming “I want to take a nap!!! I need to take a nap!!” She then left her time out place and went to lie down on her bed. Now I can appreciate that she was tired and hungry, but isn’t she supposed to stay where I put her?

I failed in every attempt to get her back to the time out spot. So I told her she’d lost her afternoon privelege of going to the pool. It felt a little childish to do that really. Like, “fine, if you won’t do what I say then I’m not taking you swimming… r to disobey you and knows it. I left her on the bed and went to eat my lunch.

When I was done, I went to check on her. She wanted lunch. So she came out and ate lunch…and we had a little talk about why we don’t throw things at people when we are angry. I also tried to explain that sometimes when your parents tell you to do something you just have to do it. But I’m never sure she understands the “why” of that one. She ended up eating most of her lunch in my lap and alternating between laughing and crying and telling me she loved me and she was sorry and suddenly I had this wonderful, articulate little person in my house again.

Then she went back to her room for that nap she so desperately wanted…and never went to sleep. More crying later that afternoon…

Three is the new two.ikoni

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New baby expected any day. E has perhaps been a little clingier than her normal independent self. She sometimes doesn’t know what she wants other than Mommy’s attention. All outward signs are that she’s thrilled and excited about the baby coming, but ever since we started getting out the baby stuff (and there’s much more of it than I remember) she’s just been a little more difficult. She doesn’t want to go to bed at night. She ran away from me in the store last week. She throws temper tantrums when we’re out at people’s houses. What has happened to my child?

I assume that it’s because she’s either anticipating the arrival of baby or she’s annoyed by HER things being put out of reach because they’ve been washed and are awaiting “the baby”. Can she possibly remember using the bouncy seat or do you think it’s all from looking at pictures? The other possibility is that she’s already picking up on Mommy being less available. I’m not as willing to rock in the chair or get down on the floor, maybe I’m a little more snappish. I just feel huge and pregnant. Once I put this altogether I decided I’d make a concerted effort to be more fun and more available and give her a little extra attention. Maybe she just needs that right now.Идея за подарък

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