A Day For Making Plans

It is a day for making plans and lists. I have decided that just now. When things are going wrong, the best thing to do is try make them better. 

For weeks now, life just hasn't been right. It is never going to be perfect, even through there are perfect days now and again. But lately it hasn't even been particularly good.

 

There are the small things, like the weather being miserable. Not proper Winter and not proper Spring. Snow falling but not sticking. The sun coming out but disappearing before we get our shoes on to go outside. I can't change that. No one can. 

Then there are the bigger things. The worse than usual fights and arguments between the children. The struggles between us and the children. Not just the ordinary ones, like having to ask five times before they put their shoes on. I mean the struggles where you as a parent come across as the bad guy ALL the time and there seems to no logical explanation. 

The sulking kids, the crying, whingeing, complaining and storming off. The door slamming. The "I hate you" s and "You don't even like me" s. The "I'm not eating that" and the "I won't do what you tell me. I am the boss of me". 

It is tiring and draining and hurtful. I know they don't mean it to be. But it gets to you, you know?. 

So today is a day for plans and lists. We're looking at what we need to change to be happy again. A list for each of us and a family list. I'm hoping that there will be some easy fixes and I know there will be some big things too. 

Number One is getting older and more independent. He needs to feel he can choose things for himself and we have to find ways to let him do that. We are not prepared to push out the boundaries as far as he wants us too but hopefully we can compromise.

Number Two has grown so much so quickly that we easily forget he is only five. We expect too much of him and that has to change too. He still needs us a lot. He needs individual attention and more focus on him and what he wants.

Number Three is galloping towards little boyhood at an astounding rate. A Christmas he was still a baby. A walking, climbing, babbling baby, but a baby nonetheless. Now, turning 18 months old next week, he is most definitely a toddler, demanding attention, shouting out words and taking only one nap a day. We have to adapt to his changing needs also.

So, wallowing in self-pity is banned and positive, life-changing plans are getting made. Will they work? Who knows. Is it worth a try? Yes.

The Importance of Time

Recently Number One got a black mark from his teacher. Nothing unusual about that. It happens regularly for talking in class, dawdling with his exercises and all the usual misbehaviour of a bored six year old. Generally he doesn't take offence. But this time he was angry about it. 

Number One has a very strong sense of justice and if he feels he has been unjustly treated, he can get quite irate. The black mark he had been given was for leaving the classroom to look for his teacher. She hadn't come back to class after the bell rang at the end of lunchtime. He didn't see why that warranted a black mark.

My initial reaction was to defend the teacher. "You can't just go wandering round the school. The teacher will come back when she's ready".

Over the next week or so my mind kept returning to that conversation. The more I thought about it, the more I agreed with what my son had done. If it had been my son who didn't return to the classroom after the bell had rung, there would have been trouble. The teacher would have gone to look for him and would have reminded him that when the bell rings, class resumes. He'd have got a black mark for that too. Why, I asked myself, should there be one rule for the teachers and another for the students? Isn't a child's time as valuable as a teacher's?

We are all familiar with bosses who think their time is worth more than ours or queue skippers who feel that for some reason or other the queing system doesn't apply to them. Most of us hate that behaviour, so why do we persist in treating our children's time as less important than ours? How often have you told your child to hurry up or to stop playing because you have something to do or somewhere to go?  I know I do it more often than I'd like to. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that we as parents take our children's precious time and use it whatever way we like and that's not really fair.

In a post I wrote back in February, I mentioned how I was reminded how easy it is say "yes" instead of "not now". The situation with Number One and his teacher has given me another jolt and made me think twice before telling my children we don't have time for whatever it is they want to do. Quite often we could make a bit of time. 

So the other morning when Number One wanted to listen to his Famous Five CD before school, I held back on saying "We don't have time for that before school". Instead I let him eat his cereal at the coffee table and listen to his CD. He listened as he ate and when the time came to switch it off, he didn't complain. He put on his shoes, jacket and schoolbag and went off to school happily, having used his pre-school half hour they way he wanted to.