Conditioned Behaviors

I’ve written over 2500 posts on this blog.   Excepting when I’m out of town or there are extenuating circumstances, I go downstairs at the end of every day, usually when the children are in bed, and write something or other about the day or whatever I’ve been thinking about lately.   Sometimes I have something funny to put up that one or the other child said and sometimes I try and remember what they did of note that day to document their lives, a few sentences at a time.

So yesterday, while my husband was upstairs reading the children a story, I went to the basement and wrote a blog post.   After I pressed the Publish button I realized I’d already written a post earlier in the day.  

I tried to figure out if I cared—if I was caring that I’d done double duty for the day—or if I was fine having a particularly productive day of writing for a Thursday.   Did I want to forward date the post to today and have a day free of writing today.   In the end I decided that come about this time today, towards the end of the day, I’d be ready to write another post.  

It was work, writing these posts at the beginning.   Now it’s more cathartic, dumping my thoughts into an external repository so I can free up storage in my mental filing structure and fill it with whatever happens tomorrow.

The Big Boy Update:  Two days in a row my son has come home with his daily work plan showing not only that he completed all his assigned work, but that he did extra as well.   He’s proud of how well he’s done.  I’m hoping he can keep it up.   He has the intelligence to do the work—it’s all well within his skill level, but he needs to want to do the work and then stay on task.   Wanting to do the work is something we all struggle with.   Not everything we all do is fun and preferred, but we do it.   Staying on task is the part that’s mentally hard for him.   But it sounds like he’s trying very hard these last two days.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I went on a walk with the dog this evening.   We didn’t go far because the dog has now gotten accustomed to the leash but wants to pull—and I can’t let her do that.   She’s not the leader of the walk, she doesn’t get to decide where, how or when we go places so it was a particularly frustrating walk for her.   We didn’t move forward until she was calm and not pulling.   My daughter didn’t mind much because we were looking at the Christmas decorations at our neighbors houses.   She kissed a lot of the inflatables in neighboring yards.   She likes kissing things.   She has a very gentle kiss.   It’s a way for her to connect with something physically since she can barely see things, even the bright Christmas lights in the dark.