Something happened this weekend that hasn't happened before: my husband and I were able to sit at a table and have an entire meal while talking to our friends. Well, okay, it's happened before, but not in this particular way. It's happened lots before children and it happened a good bit when the children were small enough to nap or go to sleep early, but for a number of years the children have needed a lot of, "management" during meals.
Management involves helping them eat, telling them they have to eat, telling them they can't have candy for dinner, explaining that they can have more french fries as soon as they finish the broccoli, getting a towel to clean up the spill, stopping them from touching the other child's food, explaining that we eat with forks, not our hands, agreeing that chocolate milk would be wonderful but that we're having regular milk tonight, etc., etc.
My children don't have eating problems. By that I mean they eat when they're hungry and stop eating when they're full. Some meals they eat a lot and some meals they hardly eat at all. It balances out and they have flat abs but are well-muscled and I'm almost jealous of their tiny little physiques. As they've gotten older they've gotten better at feeding themselves without much help. They're good at putting their plates up on the counter when they're done so the dog won't get on the chair and eat their food and they're competent at wiping their hands and face when they're done.
So this Saturday at Practice Thanksgiving dinner we put out their plates and beverages and we sat down with our friends to have a nice meal and conversation. I forgot about my children. So did my husband who was at the other table. We had friends of my children there and all my children wanted to do was play with their friends. When everyone was done eating they all romped upstairs to play. The sounds of running feet and laughter meant things were all okay, so we kept eating.
It wasn't until the dessert course when both of my children were getting tired and cranky that we had to intervene and get them ready for bed. I thought back on the night and remembered myself as a small child at friends and family gatherings. I remember my parents sitting at tables long after the meal was done, talking about all sorts of, "boring adult stuff" and drinking wine or scotch. I didn't understand why they would want to just sit there, but I was glad they did because that meant I got to play with my friends for longer.
Now I'm the parent who wants to sit at the table and have that boring adult conversation with our friends while drinking a glass of wine. I'm still in no particular hurry for the night to end though.
The Big Boy Update: He knows the story. I've heard that children will learn a story you read to them and then will be able to read it back to you even before they can read because they've memorized the story. I found out my son can do this last night. My daughter was having a hard time settling down so I told them I was turning off the light and I was going to tell them the last story in the dark. It was a pretty easy story and I thought I remembered the general gist. As I started telling them the story my son would cry out, "not yet. She falls on her cotton stuffed bottom first." And he was right, I had forgotten that part. I let him help me through the story in the dark and was very surprised by not only his knowledge of the order the story was told in, but also the exact phrasing used in the book.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Butt medicine. My daughter says her butt hurts her. We're not sure if it's itchy or painful but on two occasions now she has decided to self-medicate her butt. She goes into the drawer with the children's medication and gets something and puts carefully on her finger and then applies it to her butt. The first time it was a hydrocortisone cream and the second time it was a bacitracin ointment. The second time I found out about because our cleaning lady came out and said, "Is it okay that she's putting medicine on her butt?" We had a conversation about asking for help if you needed medicine because an adult would know which medicine is the best to help. This morning she was looking in the drawer again, pulling out each tube and asking, "is this butt medicine?" I'm not certain anything is wrong, but her annual wellness appointment is tomorrow so we'll have the doctor take a look just to be sure.
Fitness Update: I went to the gym this morning. I haven't been much or very regularly of late. I've been looking at the clock to see how long we have left and I haven't been doing my best workouts. Today for the first time in a while I think I was glad to be there and in no particular hurry to leave. I know a lot of it's pain-related but some of it must be motivational as well. Regardless of the past, today was a great day at the gym.
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