“No, No! DON’T. TAKE. MY. BOOK!!!!” she cried, running over and yanking the book out of his hands.
He had recently learned to crawl, and his new life goal was to put every object into his mouth.
“THAT’S MINE.”
You’d think it was her favorite treasured book, but really it was just one of many books that she enjoyed reading. That’s just how it is though, isn’t it? When someone else wants it, its specialness suddenly spikes and we feel extra possessive for it. I’m still like this, even as I try to train my daughter to respond otherwise.
How would you respond in this situation? Make her give it back? Encourage her to share with him? Ignore it? Tell her to take turns with him? Let her keep it and distract him with something else to play with?
Here’s what I do: I remind her to be more gentle, and then I have her practice being more gentle right then and there.
“Sweetie, you need to be more gentle with your little brother. Let’s try that again. This time, gently ask him if you can use the book, and if he’s okay with it, take it away- gently. Let’s see it.”
I place the book back in his hands and watch her try again, this time doing everything with more gentleness and respect.
This is the name of a super cute and simple game that my husband made up to play with my daughter when she had just turned two. It’s great for developing her visual skills, imagination, and fluency with colors. She’s able to get a lot of practice making deductions as well as using words to describe things. Most importantly, it’s fun, easy, and lends to lots of sweet cuddle time!
Here are the materials you need: stuffed animals. If you’re like us, you have dozens of them piled up somewhere. Some of them may be out in the living room for a picnic, while others are sleeping in the cardboard house that Papa built, but right now most of them are having a big sleepover in the guest bedroom. Our girl likes to snuggle up in the middle of them and play this game.
Here’s how it works. Ben goes out of the room and finds a stuffed animal somewhere in the house while she waits in the room. He spots the panda sitting on the couch, picks it up, and comes back to the room hiding it behind his back, and says, “I have a friend who…”
Her eyes light up in anticipation.
“…is black and white!”
“The dog!” she guesses.
“He’s black and white and this small!” he says, gesturing as well as he can with one hand.
“…Zebra!” she tries.
“He’s black and white, this small, and eats bamboo!” he says, sneaking in a fun fact he taught her recently.
“PANDA!” she cries.
“Yeahhhh!! Panda’s here!” he cries, tossing the little panda to her. Then he goes out and finds another friend and repeats.
Easy, right? It’s a fun and brain-stimulating activity that helps tidy up the house to boot! You’d be surprised how many rounds of this your child will enjoy. Once they get the hang of it, you can change roles and have them be the one to “find a friend” and give you hints! That’s a whole different set of great skills for your child to practice! Bonus: You can be the one patiently waiting on the couch while they scurry around the house picking up stuffed animals. Sounds like a GREAT plan to me! 😉
I have a problem. A photo problem. A way-too-many-photos-of-my-kids problem.
It’s seriously overwhelming. First world problem, yes. But still something I have to figure out. Because what am I supposed to DO with all these pictures? Family photo book? Yes. I do that already. I usually make one around the end of each year, but this year, I fell way behind. I’ve always been a crammer, but even I wasn’t able to find the hours to sort through the 10,500 photos from 2015 and turn them into a book.
YES 10,500.
CRAZY RIGHT?
I’ve totally considered paying someone else to do this for me, but really, it’s a job only I can do. No one else can look through my pictures and say, “Oh yes, this moment was a special one. I mean, it may look like she’s just sleeping but actually it was her FIRST NIGHT in her new room! TEARS. SUCH A BIG TRANSITION. It definitely deserves a spot in the yearbook!”
I also considered letting Shutterfly take my selected photos and make the book for me, but… the way they spread their pages, I’m pretty sure it would come out to about 1,000 pages and cost at least as much. Plus, it’s filtering through and selecting photos that takes the longest time. It’s trying to figure out which pictures make the cut and which ones will likely be forgotten forever, because let’s be honest: there is no way I’m going to go through every folder and image from every year… ever. Even when I’m old. I’ll be glad if anyone even takes the time to look at the dozens of photo books we’ll have lying around by that time.
But I want the pictures to be looked at and the memories to be remembered, because one thing motherhood has done very effectively is show me just how human I am and how awful my memory can be. When I look back at photos from just one year ago, I already have moments of, “Huh- I totally don’t remember this!” and “OH MY GOSH THIS IS SO CUTE DID IT REALLY HAPPEN??” and “THANK YOU, JoEllen of yore, for not deleting these photos. Because you were right- those 10 pictures (all taken in the same second) ARE each unique and precious and save-worthy! I LOVE IT.”
I know. I have a problem.
But I jussst might have found a solution.
It’s been a full weekend. It started out with roaring laughter late into the night (morning?) with some of my favorite people, and continued with a family brunch and then a baby shower with some old friends. I’m exhausted and my eyes are burning, but baby shower season (is there such a thing??) is upon us and I really wanted to share this simple but fun baby shower activity that I came up with! Make a game of Memory!
Traditionally, baby showers mean games of baby bingo, smelling “poopy” diapers (actually baby food), or decorating onesies. All cute and fun, but sometimes it’s also nice to just sit around and catch up with friends while coloring some flowers in a collaborative ABC book for baby. I love the idea of making something that the family or baby will actually use and enjoy in the years to come, and I recently came up with a new baby shower activity that I think you’ll love!
The guests of the party get to craft and make a matching pair of tiles for the family to play the game of Memory with! You know, the game where you get to flip over two tiles, see if they match, and keep them if they do.
My friend Christina shared this post on Facebook a couple weeks ago about terminally ill patients living out their final wishes. It’s like the Make-a-Wish Foundation, which grants wishes for sick children, but for older patients.
It’s one of those pieces that gently shakes you up and makes all the silly, petty things disappear for a moment and puts the real, important things in perspective. What kind of things do older people wish for after they have lived for decades and can have one final experience?
To visit the zoo.
To sit in the sun and wind and smell the water.
To enjoy a delicious ice cream cone.
These are all things I literally have on the schedule for this week. Not even kidding. And while I’m generally looking forward to them, it makes my heart feel all sorts of melty, squishy, sad and happy to think that any one of these simple pleasures could be The One Moment I wish I could return to in 50 years.
I’ve heard myself talking about this book so much in the last two months that it’s time I talked about it with you. It’s called You and Me Forever: Marriage in Light of Eternity by Francis Chan:
There are plenty of great reviews of the book online, so I’ll let you peruse those here. A major theme in the reviews is that this is not a typical book full of advice to improve your marriage. It’s a book about getting your perspective on life and focus on God straight. A byproduct of that is an improved marriage. For example, if you really lived life with eternity in mind, you probably wouldn’t get as caught up in the petty, selfish details that can run rampant in a marriage.
Really, he says it A LOT better. Because he’s Francis. It’s in the intro. I recommend reading at least that much!
Instead of a general review, I want to talk about one point in particular that stuck with me: humility. As a Christian, I try to be like Jesus. I try to think and do and love like He does. I fail all the time. I mean, Jesus was everything good (and nothing bad). The expectation isn’t that I’ll ever be 100% like Jesus, but that I keep trying. Still, it’s overwhelming. Where do you even start in an effort to love perfectly? In chapter 3, Francis says:
Both Lisa and I believe that more than any other attribute of Jesus, His humility is the key to a healthy marriage. If two people make it their goal to imitate the humility of Christ, everything else will take care of itself. It really is that simple. Arguments escalate when we want to be right more than we want to be Christ. It is easy to get blinded in the heat of disagreements. Soon, all we want is to win, even if victory requires sin. The one who wins the argument is usually the one who acts less like Christ.
Bear-crawling along the blue line
There is a long line of blue tape that runs across our living room. It looks like a very, very long “I.” It’s only been there for a few days, and I’m already forgetting that it’s a weird look in a house. Blue tape? Across the floor? What’s so weird about that? Doesn’t everybody have a pretend balance beam running across their rug and wooden floor?
Well, as long as it makes sense to my toddler, it’s all good. It’s there because when I started taking her to gymnastics class a few weeks ago, I realized she had some room to improve when it came to things like… walking straight haha. So I set down a blue line and did exercises with her every day, and the following week, she showed tremendous improvement in class! Bonus, it got her as good and tired as a good romp around a playground would have done… without stepping foot outside of the house! This is always a win when you’re holing yourself up at home for the afternoon so the baby can get a good nap in!
Here are some of the exercises we’ve been practicing. If you’ve got a toddler in the house, try ’em out! You can use an existing straight line that goes across the kitchen or put some blue tape down to make it feel official. It’s amazing how many activities you can build around a straight line!
“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” he’d say, not even lifting his head off his pillow to face me.
“…Sure,” I’d say, dejected as I flopped my face away from him.
“You really want to talk about this now?”
“No.”
“It’s fine. Let’s talk.”
I hear him turn his head slightly.
“No. I don’t want to. Night.”
“Are you sure?”
OF COURSE NOT! But I’m not going to be all needy now. Humph.
“Yes. Good night.”
He snores. I simmer and sigh and feel my “love tank” approaching empty.
Well, it’s not like he cares. He’s sleeping.
It’s a lie, I know, but when it’s late at night, those are easy for me to dwell on. This is probably because late at night is not really the best time for anything except sleeping, even for night owls like me.
A couple months after our youngest was born, my mom offered to watch the kids so we could have a date night.
…COOL! DATE NIGHT!
It seemed like a nice idea, so we decided to do it.
Wednesday night found us in the car: baby in the backseat, baggy-eyed parents in the front.
“So I thought we could go on a dessert tour,” Ben began, as he took off his glasses to rub his tired eyes.
That was nice of him. Because I like desserts. He thought of me. Sweet. But I could read his body language loud and clear.
“We don’t have to do this. You should sleep,” I said.
“No, no, it’s okay… it’s DATE NIGHT!” he said, forcing a smile. He had caught a cold and was still recovering, yet was determined to make this happen.
“Really, it’s okay,” I yawned.
“No, let’s go!” he said, squeezing excitement into his voice. So we went.
I have a semi-candid picture of it.
Magnatiles are magnetic tiles. They are one of the hottest STEM toys out there!
Last week, I sat my daughter down with her box of Magnatiles. Then I went to go clean up in the kitchen. A few minutes later, she called out, “See, Mama, see! Don’t destroy it!”
I came to see. It. Was. Spectacular.
I mean, she’s not even 2.5 yet. I’m over 30, and I’m not sure I could make something that cool. Half serious.
To be fair, I don’t think she sat down and thought, Hm, I think I’m going to create an awesome mansion castle building thing. Let me create a solid foundation using a combination of squares and right triangles. Now I will build a spire with these isosceles triangles, and mini decorative towers here with four equilateral triangles… ah. Yes. My vision is complete. Mother, come hither.
I’m pretty sure her thought process was more like, I’m going to build a crib. And when she ran out of squares to build up the sides of the crib, she made some out of right triangles. And when she ran out of those, she started sticking other triangles here and there and then she ran out of tiles and lo and behold… her creation looked cool, and her mouth said, “See, Mama, see! Don’t destroy it!”
If you asked me five months ago if I thought she’d be able to make that, the answer would be a clear, flat, no. Because five months ago, she had just opened this box and could only figure out how to play with it in 2D. I was a little disappointed, because this thing is not cheap and I had been hanging onto it for months in anticipation of the time when she’d be ready for it, and it seemed like she still wasn’t old enough to really make something of it.
But then the teacher in me kicked in, and I decided to give her the tools to do more with it. Of course these are open-ended toys and part of the beauty of it is to not make it too structured and instead allow for open-ended play. There’s a lot to be said for letting her just explore and learn things on her own, too. But I felt like if I didn’t intervene and start giving her some “building blocks” for new ways to use these, she’d lose interest and we’d miss an optimal window of learning and she’d put them aside and forget about them.
Teaching philosophies aside, I figure some of you might have some Magnatiles at home and be thinking, “Okay, my kid’s kind of played out with these. Now what?” So I thought I’d share the steps we took in teaching her ways to play with Magnatiles that led, five months later, to her building this all on her own!
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