The Way They Should Go

That’s it.  Apparently it’s decided.  LOL

I have to admit I was a little taken aback by this - because this is the girl who announces to everyone she meets, “I’m a girl who really likes bugs.”  Seriously, this is how she introduces herself to people.  So I said, “I thought you were going to be an entomologist and study bugs.”

“Well, I can do that, too.”

She has a point there.  Silly me.

Well, there’s never a dull moment is there?? 

On Sunday morning I had gotten fed up with our Lydia’s (age 3.5) lack of potty training.  I had taken to telling her, as I changed her diaper, “You know, Mommy thought I would be done changing these stinky diapers by now.”  She unfailingly said, “No Potty!  I want Diapers!”  or something to that effect.  A few times when I had tried to put her in panties to encourage potty activities, she would wail in a heartbroken tone, “Pleeeeease gimme diaper, pleeeeeeease gimme diaper.  I don’t like the potty!”

So we would go back to diapers.  Is that weak of me?  Tough.  I Just couldn’t see we would get anything productive done with that kind of stress.

There was one time about 3 months ago that I sat her down and explained, “This is really important to Mommy.  I really, really, really want you to go on the potty.  Mommy goes on the potty, Daddy goes on the potty, KTRose goes on the potty - and it would make me sooooo happy if you would go on the potty too.”  So she trooped downstairs.  Sat on the little potty, went, stood up announcing, “I did it!”  And she hasn’t done it again since.

Unfair, I know - but one of my issues with all of this is that KTRose potty trained a few months before her 3rd birthday - and we did that potty-training-in-a-day.  It worked wonderfully after just one false start day.  She only had one accident the first week - and they were incredibly rare (like maybe only 2 times) in the first 6 months.  So, I admit, I was thinking Lydia should be able to do the same thing.

Anyway.  After arriving at church and having to run to the bathroom to change another stinky diaper before even dropping her off at her Sunday school class, I started talking to some women in my church about it.  Mostly I was just venting.  There were many suggestions, but most of them not anything we hadn’t tried before.

Then Sunday afternoon Lydia developed terrible diarrhea - sorry if you are eating.  After talking to a neighbor I remembered that Lydia had had several glasses of straight apple juice at a friends on Saturday - something I have never let her do before.  She got awful diaper rash with blisters and much screaming and crying at diaper change time.  I felt so bad, but also told her that if she went in the potty instead of in the diaper it wouldn’t hurt her little bum so much.  Nothing doing. 

She got up on Monday morning and ran into my bathroom (where I was showering of course) declaring, “I have to do pee-pee on the potty!”  I almost fainted.  Then KTROse came racing in behind her with the little potty, helped Lydia get her pants down and diaper off and sat her on the potty - and she went!  YAYYYY!!!!  (And YAY!! for big sisters!) The rest of the day she went on the potty!  We had a couple misses with the pull-ups on, so I went to panties and she was quite careful about keeping them dry.

Added excitement on the day was that KTRose developed a stye in her right eyelid.  This meant a trip to the doctor.  Doc gave us meds and said it wasn’t contagious, so we then went to the girls art class (at KTRose’s request).  Picked them up afterward and went to the drug store for cream for KTRose’s eye.  Lydia did all this and kept a DRY pull-up!

I told our pediatrician (who we love, by the way) and he laughed.  He said, “I tell parents all the time, just wait until the child WANTS to potty train.  If they don’t WANT to, you are wasting your time.  If they want to, you can hardly stop them.  If you start trying at age two, and this child isn’t going to potty train until age 4, you are just setting yourself up for 2 years of frustration.”

Of course he had told me this before with Lydia, but I’m a Mom and I wanted things different.  *sigh*  Will I ever learn??

KTRose’s eye is ok.  We have to do the antibiotic cream 3xday and give her tylenol if her fever kicks in, but it doesn’t have her feeling bad today.  Hopefully it will resolve itself in 2 weeks or so - surgery doesn’t sound like a fun option!

With all that we didn’t get all our homeschooling done yesterday.  When I said that to my husband he just shook his head at me.  He reminded me we did plenty yesterday that was more important than math!  I’m glad I married him.

Hope you all are having a joyous homeschool day!

Meg.

I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this with their child - but KTRose has a downright oddly good way with animals at times.  This is primarily noticeable with insects - for goodness sakes!  I HATE bugs!!  God has such a sense of humor.

This child has been able to catch flies in her bare hands for about 2 years now.  I have pictures.  The first time she did it I figured it had to be a dead one and made her go put it in the trash over her objections.  Imagine my surprise when the little bugger flew off as she tried to throw him in. 

She can catch butterflies and moths also - not so uncommonly just reaching out as one goes by and grabbing it out of the air.  That happened most recently this past Mother’s Day.  Her cousin was especially stunned on that one.  Usually there is no damage to the little critter.

She has been stung by bees a total of 3 times (I think that’s right - maybe 4 times) because she is convinced she can make friends with them.  I was stung twice on one of these episodes trying to save her from one of the bees. 

We have had many, MANY discussions about not catching bees/wasps/hornets etc.  And yet about two weeks ago she came joyfully in the house, “I caught the wasp Mommy!”  She had caught him in her butterfly net and transferred him to her butterfly habitat (currently unocupied) and zipped him in without getting stung.

Just today we were at the park and I saw her coming toward me with hand out in front of her, measured steps and not speaking.  That can only mean a bug since her preferred mode of transportation is a sprint and she wakes up in the moring mid-sentence, I swear!  She had a moth that had (according to her) landed on her hand.  You would think I would learn, but I expected it to be injured.  Nope, as I approached too close it flitted away, landing in the grass.  She gave chase, knelt down and put her hand in the grass, easily scooping him up and carried him home.  He’s the new resident of the Butterfly habitat.

I have no explanation. 

Our lives were greatly impacted Saturday with the cry from the back deck, “Mommy, there’s a turtle!  There’s a turtle in the grass!”

I ran out to see, and what do you know there was a turtle in the grass.  Between the back fence of our yard and the woods there is a neighborhood walking path and a grassy area.  Trucking from seemingly our back fence to the woods was a rather larger than I expected Box Turtle!  I told KTRose to run out (through the house, out the front door, around to the back) while I grabbed a large metal pot that was in the house when we moved in, scooped up Lydia, pulled her and my socks off and headed out behind KTRose.

We got there and she was still trucking her way to the woods.  KTRose, with of course no hesitation, picked her up by her shell and put her in the pot.  We named her Franklin, which coincidentally we have named all varied insects, stuffed animals and critters since first pointed to a picture of Benjamin Franklin and asking ’who’s that?’  I don’t know why.  Following is a pic…

We kept Ms. Franklin for the day and there was much rejoicing most of the time.  KTRose and Ms. Franklin were inseparable.  I was actually suprised at how social this critter was.  Up until one critical moment (we’ll get into that later) she never pulled her head or legs in to hide.  KTRose would pic her up, she would just look around and mover her legs.  We put her on the table on the deck and she crawled to edge after edge looking for a way down.  It was kinda cool.

However, at one point a sobbing and nearly hysterical KTRose came in from the deck and finally got out between hiccupping gasps that she had dropped Ms. Franklin off the deck!  We have a walk out basement, so our deck is a full story off the ground.

We ran down and Ms. Franklin had landed upside down on her shell with everything pulled inside.  I turned her over while sobbing KTRose asked if she was alive.  I didn’t have any idea and told her so, and she started begging to keep her if she was ok, promising to be more gentle. 

We had to have a little talk about Ms. Franklin.  For one thing, I had looked it up on the internet and there is a bit more care to a box turtle of this size than Daddy and I were quite ready to jump into.  Like building an outdoor “little” habitat.  So I told her we shouldn’t keep Ms. Franklin, that she would probably live longer and safer out in the woods by herself than with us.  After her recent leap off the deck, KTRose couldn’t argue much.

After about 10-15 minutes of no one touching her, but KTRose keeping vigil, she peeked out and eventually trucked across the backyard.  When she found a gap in the fence and went through we all let her.

Now we have a teary-eyed girl asking for a cat?  doggie?  bird?  spider?The list is endless.

Besides the aforementioned activities, I think the highlight for the girls was the airplane ride.  We didn’t tell them we were going on an airplane until we pulled up in front of the airport.  Otherwise we would have heard about it 60 times an hour until we left.  They were SOOO excited.

When we got to the waiting area for departure KTR, as usual, introduced herself to everyone in the immediate vicinity and informed them we were going on an airplane to Disney until we made her leave the nice people alone.  Then she and Lydia made friends with another little girl also going to Disney and they sat at the window waiting for the airplane to arrive, jumping and rejoicing when it did.

They were both really good on the plane.  KTR was an old champ having been on one when she was almost 3 which she vaguely remembers.  Lydia doesn’t remember being not-quite-one and going on that trip, so it was more of a wide-eyed experience for her.  She also did great.  Her one moment of worry was when the plane did a fairly steep banking turn right after we took off.  She had been happily watching the cars and trees and buildings, and suddenly could only see blue sky.  She cried out, “Oh no, we’re going to go upside down!” in a loud, just hinting at panic voice.  Scott was sitting with her and held her, assuring her we wouldn’t go upside down, and she calmed down and enjoyed the rest of the flight. 

On our return flight Lyd and I sat with a very nice mom-of-5 and grandma of 4.  I was a little concerned Lyd was annoying, talking away with her.  But in the end the woman wanted to take Lyd home with her.  She even invited Lydia to sit on her lap to look out the window and they talked and talked.  It was cute.  

Maybe my personal favorite thing that happened at Disney, was our freakishly “coincidental” meeting at the bathrooms in Fantasyland.  We turned the corner to take one of the girls in, and there were our friends Brad and Rachel and their 3 kids!  They are friends of ours from church & homeschooling, and neither of us had any idea the other was going to Disney - or on vacation for that matter - for vacation that week.

Brad & Rachel are military and are moving to California.  We knew the move was coming up, but the finally activity for the move happened fast and we hadn’t had a chance to get together.  Our vacation was somewhat short notice, so many of our friends didn’t know we were going.  So they left for CA and we thought that was it - but they were doing a stop in Disney before driving across country.  :-)  We decided it was God’s way of saying, “Oh no, we’re not letting this friendship go that easily!”

Well, those are the highlights I’m remembering at the moment.  It was a really nice vacation.  The girls are getting to an age that makes it much easier to travel with them, and this trip was pretty much designed around their comfort, so it worked well.  Scott and I decided that if we were going to do anything differently, it would be to go even more off season to avoid sun and crowds even more, and to research indoor activity options also.  We were wanting to avoid the sun as much as possible by Friday and hadn’t really planned for that!

Hope everyone is doing well.  See ya out there again soon.

Meg.

Massive bonus points for the flexibility of homeschooling - we just got back from Disney this past Saturday!  :-)  We spent a week down there with the girls since Hubby is being pushed to “use or lose” all that vacation he hasn’t used in the 13+ years he’s worked for his company.  Not a bad deal!

The trip provided interesting insight into our girls.  LYD (age 3.5), our younger is more strong-willed, independant, generally unconcerned with people pleasing.  KTR (age 5.5) is very empathetic and likes to make people happy.  I tend to equate that in my head with LYD being stronger, more daring, etc.  While this is true in some senses (it’s much more unlikely that LYD will be giving into peer pressure against her own will) it’s definitely not in all ways.

KTR is our daredevil when it comes to rides.  Goofy’s barnestormer - a roller coaster LYD could ride with a parent with her, but still some good spirals down and speed - bored KTR.  She and I were in the front seat and as we pulled into unload after the ride her comment was, “I thought you said that was going to be fast?”  So sorry it didn’t meet your expectations!  She rode Space Mountain later that day.  What a riot.

 LYD freaked at the 3-D Mickey Mouse movie that while a little loud in spots, was quite harmless.  Then she loved (laughing maniacally at times) Epcot’s “Soaring” that simulated gliding over picturesque parts of the US complete with swooping down & climbing.

Neither was thrilled with fireworks, but KTR made it much farther than last time we tried when she was a year old.  She made it until right before the finale before looking at Daddy and saying she didn’t like it anymore and wanted to go.  LYD on the otherhand started screaming hysterically at the top of her lungs on the second effect (granted a huge fireball) and I tried to wrap my arms around her and talk to her and calm her down while leaving the show.  When I finally discerned what she was shrieking I was a bit disturbed to hear “THEY’RE TRYING TO KILL ME!!  THEY’RE TRYING TO KILL ME!!” coming out of her mouth. 

 Still trying to figure out where she got that!

 Well, Hubby is finally done working, so I’ll just stop here.  More later!

meg.