Bye-Bye Bedtime Battles

We have a rather small three bedroom house in which the girls have always shared a bedroom.  In the beginning we had their cribs right next to each other and the headboard and footboard were solid.  So they couldn't see or bother each other.  As soon as they were able to stand up, bedtime became a challenge.  Suddenly, we were hearing giggles and screams coming from their room and we would walk in to find the girls facing one another jumping up and down in their cribs having a fantastic time.  At this point, we moved the cribs across the room from each other.  Now at least they weren't able to throw their bears and blankets at each other.  By 22 months they were climbing out of their beds, so we had to convert the cribs to toddler beds.  This is when bedtime really got wild.  Keeping the girls in their beds and quiet was a battle every single night.  My husband and I were doing all the right things.  We had a bedtime routine that we implemented at the same time (8:00pm) each night.  And yet each night the girls didn't actually fall asleep until more than an hour after we tucked them in.  We tried the "Super Nanny" technique.  We tried sitting in their bedroom.  We tried yelling.  We tried taking prized stuffed animals.  We tried spanking.  Each night my husband and I went to bed feeling like lousy parents.  We thought about separating them.  We thought about giving them away (not seriously).  I scoured the web for advice or at least parents that could sympathize.  I couldn't find anything helpful.

Finally, after our girls were three, we found a solution that seems to work for everyone in our family.  We have a whiteboard that lives on our refrigerator.  There are two columns, one for Amelia and one for Julia.  If the girls go to sleep nicely for us at night, they get a star in their column in the morning.  Once they get 14 stars, they get a prize.  Last time they wanted a new rubber ducky for the bathtub.  We took them to Wal-Mart and they got to select the rubber ducky of their choice.  Glorious!  I spent $1 per duck and got two weeks worth of easy bedtimes.  Money well spent.

These days we all sleep like babies, minus the middle of the night feedings and diaper changes.

How thick is your bubble?

I took a quiz yesterday.  It's supposed to tell you how insulated you are from main-stream American culture.  I scored a 61.  Apparently the higher the score the less insulated you are and the lower your score the more insulated you are.  It's a highly flawed quiz, but I appreciate the point of it.  My score is supposed to mean that I should fit into one of the following three groups:
1)  A lifelong resident of a working-class neighborhood with average television and movie going habits.                          

2)  A first-generation middle-class person with working-class parents and average television and movie going habits.

           

3)  A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents.

What do these classes literally translate to in terms of household income?  The following table is from Wikipedia's Social Class of America article.

Academic Class Models

		William Thompson & Joseph Hickey, 2005
		Class	Typical characteristics
		Upper class (1%)	Top-level executives, celebrities, heirs; income of $500,000+ common. Ivy league education common.
		Upper middle class[1] (15%)	Highly-educated (often with graduate degrees) professionals & managers with household incomes varying from the high 5-figure range to commonly above $100,000.
		Lower middle class (32%)	Semi-professionals and craftsmen with some work autonomy; household incomes commonly range from $35,000 to $75,000. Typically, some college education.
		Working class (32%)	Clerical, pink- and blue-collar workers with often low job security; common household incomes range from $16,000 to $30,000. High school education.
		Lower class (ca. 14% - 20%)	Those who occupy poorly-paid positions or rely on government transfers. Some high school education.

So what does my background actually look like?  My dad is an engineer and my mom was a preschool teacher, which put us in the upper-middle class.  Upon graduating from college in 2003, I joined the ranks of the working class where I stayed until I got married in 2006.  At that point, we were in the lower middle class.  Once I graduate and start working, we will once again be part of the upper-middle class.

What I find interesting about all this is that it would be very easy with my background for me to be a very insulated person, yet based on my score (which I would say is fairly accurate) I am very familiar with average American culture.  So how did I remain so grounded and how will I help my children remain grounded?

Some may attribute it to all the moving I've done in my life.  Others may say it's because my parent's raised me to believe that you have to work hard in life and handle your money responsibly.  While these two thing no doubt play a large role, I think the primary lesson I was taught in this life was the meaning of the world blessed.

When I was in 5th and 6th grade, my best friend's mom worked for the Salvation Army in small town Georgia.  We used to go put together sacks of groceries for the people that came by.  We served food in our church one night a week for people in our suburban town in Ohio and built houses for the Habitat for Humanity.  I ran my first Race for the Cure when I was in 9th grade.  My dad and I went, just before I was in 10th grade, to a Navajo reservation in Arizona where we tore down the remnants of their church that had been burnt to the ground by arson so they could rebuild.  Later in high school and once I graduated college, I spent Saturdays building wheelchair ramps for people in the Tulsa area.  In college I gave blood at every blood drive, volunteered at the Methodist food pantry, and built a home for a family in Juarez, MX.  I went to Houston where I met homeless people that had run from gangs in other states.  In Philadelphia I made and delivered food to people with AIDs, worked at afterschool centers where kids had lost family members and neighbors to gang violence, and hung out with the homeless in the evenings.  Do you know what most of those people that I met told me when I asked them how they are?  BLESSED.  Blessed.  Blessed.  These people with bigger troubles than I have ever faced in all of my combined life tell me they are blessed.  These people know what blessed really is, but what they don't know is that they are also a blessing.  Spending time with people like theis is probably the biggest reason I am who I am today.

And with every opportunity I see, I try to encourage my children to be kind to everyone they meet.  I try to let them know how lucky they are to have all the food they want and a comfortable home to sleep in and a whole closet full of clean clothes to choose from each day.  I know people who are not so lucky.  I know people who live in fear that they will be the next victim in the next drive by shooting.  I know people who only eat when they are at school.  I know people that have to run from the past, lest it catch up with them and kill them for leaving.  I know people who don't know if they will see tomorrow or where they will sleep tonight.  I know people who own nothing but the clothes on their back.  If these people can look me in the eyes and tell me they are blessed, who am I and who are my children to complain about anything?  We are blessed every day of our lives, but especially so when we encounter these people.

How do you keep things in perspective for your kids?  What is it in life that helps you remember how blessed you are?

Teaching Kids to be Secure

My kids have reached the age at which kids start being a little mean to one another.  They are pickier about who they play with on the playground and call each other silly names.  While it would be beautiful if the whole world followed the golden rule and everyone only used kind words and counted everyone as their friend on the playground, we all know that isn't reality.  So this morning I had a little talk with the girls that I hope they will remember.  We talked about who they are.  I asked them to describe themselves.  At first I got words like "a person" and "a girl".  But, then we started getting into more descriptive adjectives, like kind and smart and creative.  Then we talked about how no matter what other people say about them, it will never change who they are on the inside.  So we have two choices when people say unkind things about us.  We can either let them hurt us, or we can remember who we are and chose to ignore those unkind things.  I'm sure this is a conversation that will be repeated on many occassions.  Well worth it if I can raise kids who work hard to live up to positive adjectives and are able to easily dismiss the unkind ones that others will callously throw in their direction.

How are you teaching your kids to be secure?

Organizing Hair Dodads

Well I didn't get everything done on my to-do list on my two-week break, but I did get some of it done. 

1.  Revising my Capstone paper ended up taking the vast majority of my time.
2.  I didn't even touch surgery books.
3.  I did manage to find time for a fiction book - The Romanav Prophecy.  It was well-written and interesting.  But the first half was pretty slow and the end was fairly predictable.
4.  I organized the bulk of my bathroom!  My messy drawers, cabinets, and linen closet have been driving me crazy for a long time and now that we are selling our house it was more than just a nagging annoyance, but a bit of an embarrassment.  So I cleaned up the floor of the linen closet, organized the make-up drawer that my children destroyed, and organized the space under my sink.  So much better.  Wish I had taken before and after pics, but most of these projects were done in small bits of time between writing my paper.
5.  We saw Brave!  As we were watching it, I thought that some of the parts might be a little scary for the girls as there are some very intense scenes.  However, when we left the theatre they said they loved it and wanted to go immediately the the Disney store to buy Merida's dress.  No nightmares yet.  I have to say that as a mother I loved the themes of this movie - duty to family and creating your own destiny.
6.  I did pamper myself a bit.
7.  We took the girls swimming, but I didn't manage to get to the pool by myself.

Once I got my bathroom organized, I turned my attention to the girls bathroom.  They had all their hair dodads in one overflowing drawer that was a disaster.  After looking online for lots of inspiration and really thinking about what would work best for us, I finally found the perfect solution.  I bought this fancy little number from Wal-Mart.com for a mere $11.97 (site-to-store shipping is FREE).

Barretts, ponytail holders, and hairbrushes all organized by color.

Bows and headbands on the backside

Yes, two organizer things in one package!

This is the girls "nicer" jewelry

The back side houses sunglasses.

Look at all the room to grow!

I wish I could express to you how happy these things make me.  We can now get the toothpaste out of the drawer without everything else trying to jump out with it!

Six months and counting!

Finally a two week break after a 24-week L-O-N-G semester.  Just six months left until my big graduation day (December 7th)!  Things have been even more crazy since the last time I wrote in here.  We found a great neighborhood that is building and decided that we would like to build our forever house in the near future there.  Jonathan is still hoping for a boy someday (and currently has a little bit of baby fever), so we need room to grow our family some more.  So in the midst of my Internal Medicine rotation we cleaned up our house and put it on the market.  We have had a few showings and will have an open house this weekend.  Hoping to sell soon because keeping the house tidy in addition to everything else on our plates is going to set us all over the edge.

These next two weeks I have several things planned.  Unfortunately some of them still involve school.

1.  Revise my Capstone paper (kind of like a thesis)
2.  Pre-read for my Surgery rotation
3.  Read a Fiction book!
4.  Organize my bathroom
5.  Take the girls to see Brave (okay, I might be as excited as they are)
6.  Pamper myself with lotions and a DIY pedicure
7.  Take a swim in my mom's pool (with and without the girls)

I kicked off my vacation by taking the girls to their first dentist appointment.  They did wonderfully.  Julia is the leader today, so she went first.  She was a little scared, but our dental hygenist is awesome and calmed her down in no time.  After Amelia saw how much fun Julia had, she couldn't wait to take her turn.

In addition to daydreaming about our new house, Jonathan and I have been planning another trip to DisneyWorld.  We will be going right after I graduate and this time we are taking both sets of our parents.  The girls are now tall enough that they can ride some of the "big kid" rides like Soarin' and Star Tours.  The promise of these bigger rides has been really great for getting the kids to eat their "growing foods" (veggies) each night at dinner.  We will have a full kitchen in our hotel suite so we plan to save a little money by eating several of our meals in our hotel.  We did go ahead and make reservations for a few of our favorite restaurants (Chef Mickey's and Liberty Tree Tavern) and we are going to try 50's Prime Time Cafe for the first time.  My parents wanted to get reservations for Le Cellier, but despite calling as early as we could, there were no openings.  Apparently if you pay cash for your room, you can make earlier reservations, but DVC members don't get to do that.  Hopefully that's something that will change in the near future.

I look forward to catching up with some of your blogs over the next couple of weeks.  Hope you are all having a good summer.

Teacher Conferences

Friday was Parent-Teacher conference day.  Both teachers were really well-organized.  They performed evaluations on the girls that gave us a lot of useful information.  My first meeting was for Julia.  She is wiggly at story time and doesn't appear to be paying attention most of the time.  When her teacher calls on her to answer a question though, she nails it every time.  She is also one of the only kids that participates in group time.  Julia knows all her colors and shapes, can recognize some of her letters, drew an awesome self-portrait with a head, two arms, two legs, eyes, and a mouth, and was able to write her name (sort of)!  Difficulties are recognizing numbers, picking up when asked, and pronounciation of some of her letters.  Numbers are something we just haven't really worked on.  I admitted that with me being in school, picking up the house is just not something we are very consistent about at home.  Regarding her language, she is having difficulty pronouncing the "s", "sh", and "th" sounds.  She had a free evaluation by a speech therapist at her school.  Their assessment was simply that her conversational speech is difficult to understand."  I tried to call and talk with them about it, but had to leave a message and no one called back.  Meanwhile, I went to the Internet and stumbled upon a speech pathologist's website where I found the following table.



Based on this table, I think we are going to wait until she is four to see if we can see any improvement.  At that point, we'll reassess the need for therapy.

Amelia's conference went well also.  Apparently (while she is noticeably less wiggly than her sister at home) she is one of the more squirmy kids in the class also.  Amelia also knows all her colors and shapes, can recognize some of her letters, drew a self-portrait including a head, neck, belly, arms, legs, feet, eyes, mouth, and hair (I'd never seen either of them draw a person before!), and was able to write some of her name (sort of)!  Like her sister, Amelia was unable to recognize her numbers.

All-in-all, both girls are doing really well.  They are currently really interested in learning to recognize letters and learning the sounds they make and love acting out the Bible stories they learn at school and church and the movies they watch.  It's so fun to watch them play together in this way.

Staycation!

The girls and I all had a week off school in July (and yes, I am just now posting this).  We had a blast.

Sunday - We read a book about honey.

Then we went to watch Winnie the Pooh.



When we got home we ate chicken nuggets dipped in honey.

Monday - we played on inflatables at our church and in the afternoon we made shoestring bead necklaces.  The necklaces were a huge hit.  We got the kit at Target for just over $5.

Tuesday - Bubble Day!  This was the girls' favorite day.  We read a great book from the library, "Bubbles Float, Bubbles Pop". 



We made bubbles with dish soap, corn starch, and water in their little pool.  Then we used their hula hoop to make bubbles around them.  That was fun for about 1 minute.  Then they decided it would be more fun to play in the soap.  *warning to moms - this type of soap can be irritating to a little girl down south*  We got the ideas for these crafts from the book, The Ultimate Bubble Book:  Soapy Science Fun.



We followed up our outdoor play with their first bubble bath!



For lunch we boiled some water and looked at the bubbles to make macaroni and cheese.  We drank a bubbly beverage.  The girls even got to chew their first bubble gum!

We tried an art project where we put bubble solution in a baking pan, added some food coloring, and blew lots of bubbles through straws.  We then popped the bubbles with a piece of paper.  The theory was great, but it didn't work out.  I think it would work better with paint instead of food coloring.


Wednesday - We talked about the number 10.  We read My Ten Book and I Can Bowl.

We tried Wii bowling, but the girls don't quite get video games yet.

We made pudding and practiced drawing the number 10 in it.

We went bowling when Jonathan got home.  This was by far the highlight.  We used the bumpers, but the girls didn't care for the ramp.  Amelia was ready to call it quits by the end of the tenth frame, but I think Julia would have bowled all night if we had let her.  Julia was a natural knocking down 80-something pins.  Amelia had her own special technique that just barely got the ball down the lane, but won her the award for cuteness.  She carried her ball up to the line, put her right foot behind her left leg, and dropped the ball on to the lane.

Thursday - Water day.  The girls always love water day.  We read some more great books in the morning.

The Drop Goes Plop:  A First Look at the Water Cycle


Water Voices


Then we went to my parent's house and went swimming.

Friday - We visited a downtown anomaly called The Center of the Universe.  This is such a cool place because you can stand on a spot and talk and hear your voice echo even though there are no walls around you.



At first the girls just kept yelling "echo".  Eventually they started getting creative yelling Cinderella, rock, building...you get the idea.

Hope you all had Summer's full of learning, laughing, and having fun together.