Fourth of July ranks right up there with New Years for my least favorite holidays. The only difference between the two is that on the 4th there is a better chance of it being warm than on New Years. As I look out my office window it is trying to sprinkle (apropo for the Northwest) but a lovely 70 degrees.
And since I don’t like the 4th so much we never have any formal standing plans for the day. About a week before hand we look at each other and weigh all the invites we’ve gotten and pick the one that sounds the best. It totally goes against our ye who invited first gets us, but we don’t care. At least we’re having fun.
In past years we’ve gone to Heather’s parent’s house for water skiing and hot tubbing (always a fun time). We’ve spent the holiday with a bunch of Canadians at Kathou and Paypay’s or we’ve spent it at the trusty in-laws. One year we were even so motivated to host our own party. We even bought some fireworks.
This year we had two options. A good family friend was participating in the citizenship ceremony this morning and their family was having a large BBQ to celebrate. All were invited. Or we could spend the day at Tacoma Chickadee and Neal out on the poop deck (inside joke). We voted for the latter. They live not far from a viewing point for one of the best fireworks shows in the area and well… Neal makes a barbecue sauce that makes me want to hump his leg a little. In return I make bacon guacamole for him.
So in a little while we’ll be heading to their house so I can get my drunk on. I’m looking forward to it.
This morning I decided to do a last mintue chalking down at Frost Park too. Talk about an event filled day. Have a look see at the art and vote if you like.
Oh look! A post with substance.
In my last post Jen left a comment about choices. What she actually said was,
That is a good idea to decide ahead of time what he gets to make choices about. I will have to think about that some more.
Similarly Nancy wrote a post recently about Grace and choices. (go read that post because it is a fantastic description of freedom in the baby home or lack thereof versus freedom in a forever home.)
As many of you know I’m a firm believer in raising my child to think for himself. Society has warped us into believing that we have to do everything for our children. We have to constantly praise them. For the love of Pete in some tee ball leaugues every kid gets a trophy so no one feels left out. We give goody bags at birthday parties again, so no one feels left out.
I want my child to know there are winners and losers. It’s part of life. Someone is going to get the job over you. There are no secondary positions single openings. And they certainly don’t give you a goody bag just for showing up for the interview.
We teach this at a three year old level. It’s called choices and logical consequences. Take for example this morning. Every morning in our house is a battle to get dressed, that’s a given. (If you are somewhere wondering what Elle is doing and it is roughly 8:00 a.m. pacific time, just know I’m ripping my hair out listening to my child whine that he doesn’t want to get dressed.) One of the boy’s favorite activities is watching people pull out of our driveway, especially his father. The boy was dawdling and the trusty husband had to leave so he just left. The boy pitched a major fit because he wanted to watch daddy leave. Cause and a effect. He screwed around so he missed his opportunity. Logical wouldn’t you say? (our normal cause and effect is I will strip him down to his birthday suit and leave the room. He hates to be naked. Takes him 3 minutes to get dressed then)
The point of all of this is choices. We give the child every opportunity to make his own choices. He picks what he wants for breakfast, lunch and snacks. He picks his own clothes out. But we didn’t bring him home and start giving him complete freedom. We started slowly.
Once he could communicate we would give him one of two options. “Do you want oatmeal or cereal (cream of wheat) for breakfast?” “Would you like strawberry or peach yogurt?” “Do you want the blue shirt or the green shirt?” When he mastered that he learned what the options were at any given moment. He knows that for breakfast his choices are waffles, cereal, oatmeal, Os or eggs. More importantly he knows he cannot have Os on a school day. So during the school year he would ask if it was a school day. He also knows that when it’s a weekend he gets the added options of donuts (only once a month) and pancakes. He knows what the options are for lunch and for snack. Because we’ve taught him.
Choices give him the opportunity to flex his freedom. And it gives us pride in knowing that he’s on the path to thinking for himself. I encourage everyone to give their child choices if you don’t already, but my advice is start very small.
Thanks for your validation. I’m all about the validation. At some point I like to hear I’m actually doing the right thing.
I let the boy sleep. By my estimation he fell asleep around 11:40. I went down to his room periodically and he was out like a light. I went down at 1:25 and he was finally up. He repeatedly told me that he didn’t have to take a nap again. I confirmed this and he was happy.
I didn’t have lunch ready for him because it is one of the choices he gets to make in the day. I always ask what he wants for lunch. Yesterday it was Mac n’ Cheese. Of course this was after I scared the shit out of him by suggesting that he needed to go to the dentist and actually calling to make the appointment. Poor kid was shaking he was scared so bad. Fortunately we have 15 days to prepare for it (thanks Auntie G for the dentist book, that will come in handy).
The rest of the day went really well. We made cookies, which may or may not have made me sick. (I think it was the raw cookie dough) That was fun.
And for the record it took approximately 10 minutes of playing outside last night before the child freaked out about fireworks. It’s going to be a long rest of the week.
I’m in a bit of a pickle. My child is a very schedule oriented type of person. Good thing he has me as a mother I suppose. Our days go a bit like this.
7:00ish wake up
7:30 or 8 breakfast
8 or 8:30-10 cartoons for him work for me
9:30 or 10 snack
10-12 play for him, housework for me or errands if needed
noon lunch
1:00 nap (naps 1 - 1 1/2 hours)
2:30 go outside and water and play
3:00 or 3:30 snack
4:30 come inside to start fixing dinner
5:30-6 dinner
6:30-7:30 play
7:30 bath
8:15 bed
We often deviate from this to make time for play groups or special outings, but the food element throws him off. If we don’t eat a decent lunch or if we miss snack times he gets kinda pissy.
This morning the child ate most of his breakfast and then at 8:30 (approximately 2 seconds after I sat down to cry over my lost website check my email he comes in to ask if he can have Os in a cup. I told him no because I wasn’t snack time. He pitched a fit, but eventually go over it. 15 minutes later I walked into the kitchen to get a kleenex. He asked again if he could have Os. I wasn’t in the mood to argue and gave in. Boy happy. Mommy happy.
At 11:30 the boy was playing outside and I was doing my requisite housework. He started asking for a snack. I told him no that it was 30 minutes until lunchtime and he could wait. I didn’t want to give in on this one becaues often if we eat too early it totally throws him off and he turns into a raving lunatic. On the contrary. My no caused a freak out. Crying child, irritated mommy. I brought him inside to have his tantrum in his room because I didn’t want the neighbors to think I was killing him.
He cries in his room, I sit at the computer and marvel at my beautifully restored website. After a while the crying stops. I go down to check on the boy and tell him that he can come out of his room now. Child is fast asleep.
He knows I get pissed off when he rocks at times that are not designated sleep times so when he pitches a fit and I send him to his room he gets in his bed and rocks. Evidently he cried so much and rocked that he fell asleep. Of course I cannot confirm the actual rocking since I didn’t watch. It is just my assumption. In any case he fell asleep. At 11:40 a.m. Without lunch. Curtains and door wide open.
So my question becomes, do I let him sleep or wake him up. I called the trusty husband and we both agreed to let him sleep, but I’ve never come across this situation. Odds are that if I woke him up he would never take a nap later in the day. That would suck. But the crapshoot becomes how long will he sleep without lunch.
What would you have done?
Thanks for the emails from some of you who woke up this morning and said, “what the hell.” I appreciate that some of you noticed and cared. If you have no clue what I’m talking about that’s ok, it’s still mostly a blur to me.
Ironically I was working on my new header (which I’m not 100% sold on, but oh well) and getting ready to start doing the color changes when I received an email from Melissa. We were discussing the project I am doing for her and said I was going to take a break from working to play with my own site. Nothing like the last minute eh? I jokingly said that if she wanted some entertainment she could keep hitting refresh on my site and watch the changes take place. Normally I make all of the changes on my test site and then upload the final file when I like it. But last night I was lazy and thought I’d do it live. Some people get a kick out of it. Well… that’ll learn me.
I uploaded my css file, made a change and uploaded it again. I hit refresh on my site to see if I liked the change and oh mah hell. Site gone, weird error, no undo. Ok, I’ve had hackers, I’ve screwed up my own site. I can handle this. 20 minutes later, still broken. The trusty husband came home from picking the trusty in-laws up from the airport and found me in tears. Only dogs could hear me as I tried to explain that I’d broken my website. 40 minutes after that I finally had to walk away. At that point I considered not restoring it at all and believing it to be a sign that I should stop blogging.
Derek stayed and tried to figure out what I’d done (we still don’t know) and how to fix it. We deleted, we reinstalled, we set up new databases, nothing. He thought he had it figured out only to wake up this morning to realize that wasn’t it.
I spent an hour this morning deleting my site, totally reinstalling wordpress, and calling our hosting company to find out how to restore a backup. I could see the dashboard, but there wasn’t anything on the main page. Come to find out, the built in default template for Wordpress is broken in the new version. I had to pick a different template and it was fixed.
Of course I still don’t know what broke it to begin with. In a panic (which I always do when my site is broken) I deleted everything that wasn’t a subdomain. Consequently, that deleted 100% of the photos that I’ve ever posted. Because photos are month and year specific in WP I can’t go back and re-upload them. I could, but with as many photos as I’ve posted it would take me weeks. So we start new with photos.
The theme for the month still isn’t finished. It will have to wait until I have a little free time to work on it. So don’t leave comments saying you can’t read the sidebar links. You don’t look at those anyway.
All I care about at this moment is that I can post and I didn’t lose 600 posts and 4300 comments
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My Company
Life of Elle is
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More Sell Out Goodness
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Elle's Shoe Fund
Photos of the moment
