Memorial Day!

What a beautiful weekend it was.  I seriously enjoyed myself all weekend long.  We played it so low key it was beyond wonderful! 

Saturday I did all my cleaning.  I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned so more.  I clean upstairs all the bedrooms!  The kids room all the beds were stripped and made.  I moved some furniture around because I had to move Maya’s dresser out of the ‘toy room’ for the baby. 

I moved stuff around in their closet to make room for stuff.  I put it this way these kids have WAY TOO MUCH STUFF!  I’m done with stuff.  We have stuff everywhere.  I want to get rid of all the stuff.  It’s sad b/c when we moved I got rid of so much stuff and it’s like the stuff is BACK!  It never goes away!

I cleaned the toy room out and put up the crib.  Lehna was insistent that we needed to do that.  And I was okay with b/c honestly it one less thing to do later.  I didn’t move the changing table out yet.  And I have to clean out a dresser that is holding STUFF (useless stuff) downstairs and move that upstairs for the baby’s clothes.  I’ll get that done before the summer is over.  But I don’t have any little baby clothes here anymore so I don’t have anything to put in it. I know I’ll get that stuff eventually.  See more STUFF!  I need to just purge EVERYTHING.  That would make it better. 

So the room looks more like a baby’s room.  Nikolai saw the crib and he said he was going to sleep in there with the baby.  I asked him if he wanted his big boy bed moved in here and he said that he was just going to sleep IN the crib with the baby.  He did call the crib a jail though. 

Nikolai is in the mist of potty training and let me tell you he is doing REALLY well with it.  We had him in underwear the majority of the weekend and he didn’t have one accident.  I did put a diaper on him for church and when we left to go to the park and the little man had a big potty in his diaper but it’s a step closer to diaper less!  So I figure by the end of summer he’ll be 100% b/c he’s super close now.  I did swat his butt once this weekend and he cried and I said without that diaper it hurts a little more doesn’t it.  His favorite activity is to pee off the porch.  He asked to go potty and he wanted to pee off the porch and I took him out there and he was unsuccessful, but at least he asked!  He’s so funny when he can’t “make it happen” he was frustrated but he was able to do it.  So SMALL VICTORIES! 

Lehna has been singing like a super star this weekend.  She has it in her head that she is going to write songs and then get a record deal and become a mega star.  I don’t know where she gets these ideas, but all weekend she was plunking on the piano and making up these songs, which let me tell you every time she sung them they sounded different, notes, pitches, everything.  So it was interesting to say the least.  I have guitar lessons arranged for her to start this summer.  She’s very excited and I’ll be excited when she can learn music and really get a jump start on that.  I know it’s going to be interesting as she’s learning but I think once she gets it, it will be good.  I’ll be excited when she can read music and maybe even write the stuff down so it will at least sound the same as she sings them over and over and over. 

Maya was talking about her friends last week and she got really sad and she goes “mom all of my friends are going to leave me next year when I’m in first grade again.”  I reassured her that she will still see her friends and that they can still play with one another it will be like they are with a different teacher.  This has really been the only display of sadness she’s shown about having to repeat the 1^st grade.  She got REALLY sad however.  So I think it’s setting in as to what it will truly mean.  I talked to her about summer school and she is actually excited about it.  I asked her if she wanted to ride the bus and she was ALLLL about riding the bus and I asked her if she wanted Lehna to do summer school and she said “no I want to do it all by myself.”  Not in a mean way of course just in a very matter of fact kind of way.  I know that she will have fun and I want her to be able to gain more knowledge before the break.  When she goes back in August she will feel like a rock star b/c all of the skills she mastered she will be “learning again.”  So I’m hoping that will help her confidence and help her through the second half of the year.  I’m just hoping that this will help her and not totally impact her life in a negative light.  I am sad that she won’t graduate with Deklyn b/c this will separate them for the rest of their lives.  If we still lived in WI it would have been that way any way but it’s just sad that she has to struggle so.  We have our appointment with Riley coming up this June so maybe that will give me some answers, maybe not.  I know how she feels and I’m sad that she has to return to 1^st grade.  It does make me feel like a failure as parent like I didn’t do something for her, but I don’t know what I could have done differently.  So hopefully the guilt won’t last too long. 

So I have been reading this book called “The Child Whisperer” I started reading this book b/c it was a suggested reading from a random blog that I stumbled across and I thought that it’s better to have the knowledge then not.  At first I thought this book was going to be about me and learning about myself instead it isn’t quite that.  It’s more about profiling kids into their strengths based on their category and how best to parent.  Let me just say that I don’t 100% agree with the techniques that have been suggested in this book.  It labels kids based on the kid’s behavior and natural tendencies, which that part doesn’t bother me.  The part that bothers me is the fact that it suggests that you should then cater your parenting based on what’s best for the child and the profile they were identified as.  This is the issue I have; I personally don’t think this is the BEST the technique for raising children.  I think that there isn’t an all fire blanket that you can use to cover all types of children.  I do think that raising children does need to be changed base on the kids.  I agree with this however to only parent in the style that is best for you child I don’t think helps your children.  Take profile 1 – which is like high energy profile.  The description of this profile fits Maya to a TEE!  She is very high energy, she’s creative, she’s imaginative, and she lives in a world of her own.  It suggests that you should create games to help them learn to pick up and to get them to interact with them.  Okay I think that’s reasonable BUT I don’t think that should be that way EVERY TIME.  First of all Maya has to learn HOW to function in the world, not just her own.  So for her she needs to learn not only to pick up but she also has to learn when she needs to do that.  So yes on occasion when I’m getting resistance from her I will say okay pick up only items that are blue.  Or whatever.  But if I did this every time… what is it going to be like when she’s given a task a work that she doesn’t want to do, is her boss going to come to her and say “okay Maya not only do the tasks that make you happy, or are easy to do” no her boss is going to say give me that task.  So I think by only teaching her to live in her world doesn’t help her learn how to learn in her bosses world or heck anyone one’s world.  So I think that it’s probably not my favorite read.  I got another book called “The color Code” and this one’s supposed to be more about me verses them.  So we’ll see what happens.  I am going to continue to read it b/c maybe I’m missing something but that’s my conclusion so far.