Sometimes I have a lot to say and other times I find myself at a loss for words (you hush, it happens.)
But I don’t always spew it all over this blog. Sometimes I share it over on BabyCenter.
Here are a few of my rambling thoughts from the past month.
The kids are learning to swim and I want to vomit.
My daughter, on the other hand, at three years of age just wants to get in there. She refuses goggles and jumps up and goes under water in the shallow end, consuming half the pool with every jump. (We actually closed the pool down last weekend because she vomited. Fun times!)
She’s learning. She wants to swim. But it scares the crap out of me. All those stories about dry drowning? While I’m certainly glad to be educated, I almost wish I’d never read those articles.
One slip and she’s under. It’s happened several times and I’ve been there to grab her. Obviously she doesn’t go in the water without me, but even being right there, it rips out a piece of my heart when it happens. It takes seconds. Seconds! That’s it.
One time last year, we had to leave because I just couldn’t do it anymore. Watching two kids do the things they have to do to LEARN got to be too much and we had to go.
Teaching our children about honesty
I think it stems back to ninth grade. I lied to my mother three separate times about the same thing. She gave me umpteen chances to come clean and I just didn’t take the bait. So I was grounded – for THREE weeks. For a teenager, that is a lifetime. It was torture – no TV, no phone (GASP!), no friends over.
But after that, I stopped lying. It just wasn’t worth it. My mom stressed to me over and over that it’s always better to tell the truth. The punishment will be much less severe and sometimes even non-existent if the truth is told.
I’m trying to instill that in my son right now. At 5 years old, he knows when he’s done something he’s not supposed to and it’s fascinating to watch the dance in his head. I can literally see him contemplating what comes out of his mouth when he’s asked “what were you doing?” and “what happened?”. I want him to know that if he tells the truth, it will be better in the long run.
I worry about my tender-hearted children
Yesterday at the preschool playground I was talking with another mother when the little girl she babysits came up to us and said a boy had hit her. We looked around and the only boy I saw was my own. I was a bit surprised because that’s just not in his personality.
I asked him if he hit her and he slowly shook his head yes and came running at me with tears streaming down his face. I told him to tell what happened and through his sobbing I heard the words “well, she hit me and…” It was then that I noticed the red mark beneath his eye that looked like it had come from a fingernail.
We quickly figured out that the little girl had indeed hit him first. And while I wanted to instill the whole idea that hitting is wrong (we’ll talk about hitting girls at another time), I found myself proud of him for standing up for himself.
Because it’s the first time I’ve seen him do it.
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