Squeezie Hug

The Big Boy Update:   This post is going to be mostly about my son, so I'm starting straight off with his section.

"Boys will be boys."  What does that mean?  To me it means rough and rowdy.   Girls don't listen just as much as boys don't listen, (in my experience).  It seems to me that both boys and girls can make a big mess, poor decisions and be louder than you imagined they could be.   But there is something about boys that says, "hello testosterone" making the "boys" part in, "boys will be boys" make sense.

My son likes to be rough.  At first I thought this was bad.  I tried to squash it because mostly, but not always, his sister hated it.  Then I talked to many people who had lots of experience with children.   It appears that boys sometimes do want to be aggressive and that's okay.    So we've been trying to find ways to help him out when he gets in these moods.

Today, he wanted to tackle, grab, pull, push, poke and carry his sister around.   She was in one of those moods (she told me she was "grumpy" and needed bedicine (medicine) to feel less grumpy).  We separated them and I played with my son and we found other things for them to do.

At dinner, my son sat at his seat and was unhappy because his pasta wasn't cooling off quickly enough.  Suddenly he turned to me and said, "mommy, I want a squeeze hug."   This is something I came up with a while back that seems to help.  He wants to be physical and he needs aggressive physical touch, so I pick him up and squeeze him really tight and hug him.  Sometimes we roll around on the floor and squeeze each other.  There are tiger hugs, bear hugs, tickle hugs and many other kinds of hugs, but it usually starts with the squeezie hug.

I told him to come over and I would give him a great big hug.  I carried him to the sofa and all he wanted to do was sit together on my lap and look at something on television.   We sat there for a good while, him telling me about whatever was happening on the television and me hugging him.

I'm not sure what he needed, but that level of physical contact helped.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She's been dressing herself every morning of late.  Today after the pool, she came out of our bedroom with a new outfit on.  I couldn't place this dress she was putting onthat seemed to be missing one arm hole.   Ah, it was my exercise skirt with the liner pants.   It was lovely pink and orange and turned inside-out and upside-down, it looked very cute on my daughter, one shoulder bare.   I am glad she found the clean laundry basket though...

Fitness Update:  With five minutes to go at the gym, I made the mistake of telling our trainer I'd be out for the rest of the week.   "Tell Eleanor to stop right now, we're going to do something else", he said.   Oh dear, I just caused Don to give us a, "finisher" for the last five minutes.   It was so tough, it took us ten minutes to do.