Monday, June 16, 2014

Three Times as Many as Men Every Day

This blog post will probably prove a fact my husband told me about the other morning.   Apparently women use almost three times as many of something than men do, and they do this almost every day.  It's not toilet tissue squares and it's not gallons of water in the shower.   To give you a hint, women on average use 20,000 and men use around 7,000.

Words.  And I believe it.  So with that in mind, I'm going to do my rambling best to make sure I use my quota of words for the day here (not that any of us were worried about my word count).

Social Focus versus Self-focus:  My daughter is very socially focused.  She likes to engage other children or adults and likes to work together to get something done.  My son is more self-focused.  He's three, so that's not an insult--he's just busy doing his own thing and he doesn't want to get another person involved, even if it would be helpful, because he's workin' it out on his own.

Never Say Goodbye:   This is something my husband and I started doing way back when our children were too young to even roll over.  With all the things we got wrong or just didn't get right, I think this is one we did well on.  We've never made a thing of saying goodbye.   We just walk out the door and we're gone, and we do it whenever it suits us schedule-wise.  As a result, my children don't seem to care or sometimes even notice when we leave, even if they're left with a sitter they've never met before.   This weekend as we left for my parent's surprise party we got on the elevator to leave and asked the children to shut the door for us, leaving them with a sitter they'd met for all of five minutes.   As the door shut I heard my son say, "oh no, where did they go?"  I had to laugh because he wasn't upset that we'd left, he just wanted to know how we'd disappeared.

Backyard Containment:   We can let the children play outside without direct supervision now.  We can't leave them for long, but we can leave them for bits of time, checking on them by looking out the window to see what they're up to.  This only works in the backyard though because they don't wander off.  In the front yard they realize they have friends only houses away and they head off into the street and down the road.

We walked around the block:  We did, and we made it without having to pick up my son's balance bike or plastic motorcycle because he got tired of pushing it along.   It's about a half-mile, so not too bad for him, especially in temperatures over ninety degrees.

The Airplane Safety Knot:  We went to Tweetsie Railroad this weekend.  My children are just old enough to enjoy some of the activities.   They rode Thomas the Train (the Tweetsie train that had Thomas visiting on the front).  They also road by themselves on these airplane and helicoptor rides.  The parents walked in and put the children in the ride, securing the child in by tying a rope into a knot.   Then, the ride went up and down, around and around, secured only by that rope and the knotting skills of the parent.   My daughter was barely in her helicopter.  Fortunately, she didn't know how to pull the lever and make it rise to the ten-foot maximum height.

Planting the Buzzy seeds:  Aunt A and Aunt B sent my children some fun summer activities recently.  There were two tiny flower pots with tomato and carrot seeds and my children wanted to plant them every day.  They would ask about them and I would tell them that as soon as school was out, we were going to plant their seeds.   Today with scissors, a glue stick and some tape we decorated the outsides of their pots and they planted the seeds with the included "growing medium".   We put the little pots in daddy's herb garden and plan to water them every day.   On the humorous side, both children wanted to "plant" carrots into the carrot one.  They got carrots out of the refrigerator and brought them outside to our work area.   Unfortunately, the carrots never made it into the pots because my children got hungry and ate them.

The Big Boy Update:  In addition to the fun written above, my son has been having fun with clothing lately.  He's wanted to wear his Halloween Spiderman costume a lot lately.   Last week he put it on and immediately announced, "my name is Peter Pan".  Yesterday he wanted to go outside wearing his winter jacket, rain boots one mitten and one glove...in eighty-five degree weather.   Today, in ninety-degree weather he wore that same mitten and glove around the block.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   As well as the antics written about in the main post above, she was thinking about her visit with Thomas the Train this weekend on the ride home.   She said in the car,  "Thomas is gone … he says, 'chugga chugga chugga chugga.(and on and on)'"

Fitness Update:  It's one of those weigh-in Monday's again.  They keep happening.  I went to the gym this morning but I suspect I need to get back on the running again too to stay in the shape I'd like to be in.

No comments:

Post a Comment