There’s a Miley Cyrus song, “Wrecking Ball” my children are fond of hearing. We listen to it in the car and they ask Alexa to play it in our kitchen. One day I think they asked Alexa to play it ten times in a row. I could hear my daughter belting out the chorus from all the way downstairs as I sat at my computer. While the song is catchy, it also has a second meaning to me as a mother of young children: children are little wrecking balls.
They don’t mean to be, they just are. They don’t have a need for a tidy house (unlike some blog posters I won’t mention). They like to play with toys and when they do, they like to take them places such as around the house, the yard, the neighborhood and to friends houses. Getting things back to their original places is an exercise which feels fairly sisyphean most days.
We have an expectation out children clean up after themselves, which includes putting toys and other things back in their places, but that expectation has to be tempered by an understanding that children need to play with toys to have fun. After several years of working with them, they almost always help clean up without complaint and sometimes clean up without being asked or reminded.
And yet, “wrecking ball” is still a good description of what it feels like’s happened at the house some days. Today we have our two children, two visiting children from out of town, two neighbor children to our left, two neighbor children to the right and four neighborhood children who have all been in our house at one point or another. That’s lots of little mess makers and for some reason, with more children the mess doesn’t increase linearly, it increases by a factor of about 1.47 per child, this being a number I just made up.
Today a house/fort was made with eight large cardboard boxes. Duct tape was employed, stickers were applied, drawing was done, paper was taped onto the walls and much merriment was had by all. There was not one speck of mess made during the entire process…not.
But children need to make a mess to have fun and today they had fun, all of my little wrecking ball friends together. Also, I can’t get the “Wrecking Ball” song out of my head, but that’s another issue.
The Big Boy Update: My son was having a hard time connecting socially today. He was doing it in all the wrong ways such as trying to take Nana’s shirt off, wanting to talk about “boobs”, yelling loudly to get attention and getting into people’s personal spaces when they clearly didn’t want to. Throughout all of this he was told no again and again. What was the message? It was that he was behaving poorly, but he was trying, he just didn’t know how. I forced him to sit on my lap until he calmed down; when he was more relaxed he offered (as opposed to shoved) me a potato chip and said he wanted to feed me. I happily accepted with a smile. He then went around our entire table and offered chips to the other people, moving on when they said they didn’t want a chip. It was a positive and successful interaction for him which I hope helped his low self-esteem as opposed to the earlier behavior when he was only being told he was not behaving appropriately. The mental change in him was remarkable to see.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter likes to cry and cry loudly about things. Some times the crying is because she’s injured, but mostly it’s because she’s upset at some injustice—possibly something she’s brought on herself by her actions towards her brother. We’ve been careful to not over react just because the volume and intensity of her crying makes us think something big, awful or terrible has happened to her.
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