Always Questioning

I think as a parent I'm always questioning if I'm doing a good job.   Some days I feel like I do fairly well.  Other days I worry I'm not present enough in my children's lives and they'll be grown before I know it.   And then some days I have a sinking feeling I'm failing miserably. 

Tonight, despite my best intentions, went south in a very direct and rapid way.   The children are in bed, possibly asleep, but I don't think it was a good end to the day.   My husband is upstairs, still talking to my son, hopefully getting some insight into his thoughts.   I tried but I was getting nowhere.

The Bathtub Unwrinkling:  My children still like to take baths together and play.   They haven't hit puberty so it's innocent fun for them.   I came in to hear my daughter saying, "I bet you can't get the wrinkles out!"  She was bent over sideways, causing wrinkles to appear in her skin between her ribs and hip.  My son was trying to spread out the skin on her side while she tried to bend over even more to happy cries of, "I got it", "no you don't!"  "Yes, I do!"

When Did I Change?

There are times in life when something happens that your brain isn't ready to accept yet.   I remember going into the halls of my high school and not feeling at all like a high school student.   It wasn't long before the thought of being a mere junior high schooler was far beneath my mental age and maturity.  

Later, the same thing happened when I went to college.   I think the difference from being single to being married was a much bigger one.   All the preparation of the wedding made no difference on the impact that was one day being single when the following day I was a "Mrs." with a husband.   I marveled over that simple change the entire honeymoon and it wasn't until probably a full year that my mental image in all ways was of someone who was married.   

Now I can't imagine being single I'm so ensconced in my mental image of someone who is married.   Parenting was another one that took a bit to get into, but not long.  You're so busy being a parent it happens pretty quick in your mind. 

What took a long time to become one with thought was being the parent of a blind child.   There was the complication that we had a child that was first plagued with a serious eye injury.   Her vision declined gradually even with heroic measures but we remained hopeful it was a temporary thing.    Eventually, when it was clear she would never regain her vision, it wasn't suddenly a single incident that classed us as parents of a blind child.   It was, rather, a lot of little things.

There are a lot of things that happen in life that we're not prepared for.   Many of them we're not equipped to handle.   But we're learning, adapting creatures and like countless other people on the planet, I muddled through it until I figured out enough to get by.  

Then at some point, suddenly I was.   Suddenly having a blind child, being a parent, being a wife and sometimes, on occasion, even acting like an adult, was just who I was.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son asked if he could have the iPad or my phone or something the other day, long enough to create and update some playlists of songs for playing on the outdoor speakers while they're outside playing.   He's got a good sense of music.   He reminds me of his cousin, Kyle. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was frightfully upset that she wasn't allowed to leave the table after yelling at us, using angry words, complaining and wishing she could just go fold her laundry so she could go back outside.  I told her she wasn't going anywhere until we had polite conversation at the table for dinner.   She sulked until she realized I was serious.  Then, suddenly, her mood changed. 

Naps

Am I getting so old that I need a nap every day?   I don't know.   Maybe?   Sometimes I think it's because I'm up early from just waking up and I've gone to sleep late so I'm low on sleep.  Sometimes it's because I'm just in pain and lying down helps.   I always seem to fall asleep so I think that must mean I'm tired.   I don't really know though.   I used to not need naps.  

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Sleepover Quandry:   My daughter wants to have sleepovers a lot.   She and her brother talk about them and ask and we say no if it's a school night and they're both disappointed.  On the weekends, they ask to sleepover in either the bonus room or the living room.   

Last weekend, they planned to sleep in the bonus room, getting their baby crib mattresses from the back closet and putting them along with blankets, pillows, and sleeping bags into the bonus room.   And then my son backed out on his sister.   He's done this several times, and I'm not sure why.  

Tonight was the same thing.   My daughter was ready with all her things but when my son disappeared into his room, he would only come down to have a sleepover if she did certain things for him.   I told her I thought he was putting her in a situation where she couldn't meet his demands, and even if she did, he was going to back out for another reason.

She thought going to ask him might be a good idea, so she went into his room and I heard him yelling at her.  He called her names, was terribly rude to her because she had touched him and he had fallen asleep just before, which she didn't know.   He is going to have to apologize to her tomorrow because the things he said were not okay. 

My son has bunk beds.   If he is more comfortable in his room, she could sleep in the top bunk, something she'd be willing to do.   I asked her about that tonight as I went to check on her.  She was lying in her sleeping bag right outside her bedroom in the hall.  My heart went out to her.   She said he told her she'd stink up his room.   

I said that wasn't true and he knew it, it was just an excuse.   I told her when COVID-19 is over, she can have sleepovers with her friends again.   I reminded her how jealous he was when she had sleepovers.   I talked to her about when she grew up and all the things that were going to happen to her in the future and how I looked forward to seeing all the things she'd do.   She seemed happy as she fell to sleep with me lying beside her in the hall.  I'm glad,  I didn't want her to go to sleep sad. 

Illness or Allergy

Here's the rundown and where we got to where we are now.   Yesterday, my daughter said she had a sore throat.   Her ear(s?) were also itchy, so much so that she'd scratched them(it?) raw.   When asked, she would downplay and minimize everything but mid-morning we decided to go get yet another COVID-19 test for her.  

Last night, the tests for her, my husband and me, all came in negative.   Today, her symptoms are worse and she's afraid we're not going to go get to see Nana and Papa for spring break (nine days away).  We decided to keep the children home tomorrow out of an abundance of caution.   Even though we're fairly certain it's something other than COVID-19.

It's starting to be a false spring with the recent clement weather we've been having.  I've started getting some fierce allergies which include itchy eyes, throat, and ears.   I also have some drainage, but not to the extent my daughter has been having. 

My daughter's voice has gotten raspier and raspier as the day has worn on, while also complaining of lots of drainage down the back of her throat—something that can cause hoarseness.   Is it allergies?  She has never had a single allergy, one of the good things she has going for her medically.   

If her symptoms aren't better in the morning, we may take her to the pediatrician to see if it could possibly be anything else.   

The Big Boy Update:  My son told me tonight he couldn't possibly get his book read by our trip, which means he won't have screens at all while we're there.   I told him he possibly could, that it's been a month since he lost screens.   Four-and-a-half weeks, he corrected me. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  In preparation for going to visit Nana and Papa my daughter and I got pedicures today.   She got olive green that sparkled,  "because Nana loves green," she said.

Crystal Game

My son still is resisting reading that one book he needs to read in order to get screens back.   He had said at the beginning of all this that he was never going to do screens again.  He can be very dramatic, like all children when they're upset and not getting their way.   But as time goes on, he's not even trying, and while that's odd, it's not been a bad thing at home. 

He has taken a renewed interest in drawing and his skills are increasing every week.   After school, if his friend Rayan can't play in the yard, he goes to the bonus room, turns on an audiobook, and gets to work on something intricate or game-related.   There are a lot of game-based drawings he's been doing.  

Tonight, when I found him after dinner, he had been working on drawing up a game layout he had created on the floor with the crystal pendants he, his sister, and two friends got from Amazon for an astoundingly reasonable price.   These crystals have been the source of many hours of play.  Tonight, they were each the next step in the game, room in the dungeon, level to pass, spell to learn (he was non-specific when I asked but I think it's along some or all of those lines).  

Here's what he laid out, nicely organized by color.   He created and then precisely cut one square sections from his graph paper and laid out all the spaces.   The LEGO pieces mean something as well.   He told me you start at one and then showed me how, if you got to one of the end sections, you'd be able to take shortcuts.   He was going to work on that next, but he had it all in his mind. 

The thing that made me sad was he had to clean it up because his sister has class at home tomorrow and she was going to inadvertently step all over it.   He understood and then copied everything down on another sheet before going to bed.   

The Big Boy Update:  My son was interested in showing me the game he was planning after school.  I asked if there was anything I might have that I could contribute to the game.  He wasn't sure but when I reminded him of the crystals I had kept in a tiny drawer in the craft room, he said he would like them.   I'm glad I mentioned them because he created an impressive layout and game plan with them.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  One of the students in my daughter's class has COVID-19.  Her teacher and all students who sat near him have been sent home for two weeks or until after track out.  We're fortunate in that my daughter was at home after the headache incident last week while all this was happening.  Still, to be safe, we got another COVID-19 test today.   That's three tests in a week for my daughter.  One that was the wrong kind and would not be accepted by her school, the second that was and then today's in the case for any reason she was exposed the last day the other student was at school but she wasn't positive when tested. 

Scratch and Mess

I was working on a package I'm mailing tomorrow to a friend a short while before bed tonight in the craft room.   My children were in the next room over, working on something you scratch on to make a picture.   I thought I knew what they were doing as I heard my son tell my daughter she needed to scratch more that it wasn't showing a picture yet so I offered some verbal assistance from the other room. 

There are these sheets or booklets that have a rainbow patterned, silver, or gold-colored underside that's been covered up by a top layer of black.   You take a stylus and scratch it into the black and make any picture you want.   The underlying color shows through and it looks like you're drawing in silver or rainbow.   So when I heard my son explaining, I said, "you need to do a lot of scratching, so if you draw a circle, you want to scratch in the center of the circle. 

What I found out a bit later when my husband came upstairs was they had some booklet my son had been given a long time ago where every page was like a lottery ticket—a huge lottery ticket—and the children together had been scratching every single bit of it off and onto the table and themselves.   

I thought of the carpet and the little shards burying themselves in the depths, unable to be removed by the vacuum.   I did the, "hold still, don't move!" thing parents do when their child has made a mess and got most of it dumped back onto the table.   They relocated to the dining room table after that which is over the hardwood floor and is much more mess-proof.   

My children are nine and ten now.  Surely at ten and eleven, they'll stop making messes, right?

The Big Boy Update:  My son was angry my daughter didn't want to play a game with him tonight because she didn't feel safe.  I suggested they pick either another game she felt comfortable with or maybe he'd like to put on a blindfold and play the game that way?  He didn't like that suggestion and so he called his sister strange.   She got very upset, crying and saying she was always the strange one.   He realized his mistake and tried to tell her how strange was a good thing, that weird wasn't.   It was a ruse, but he was trying to correct his mistake.   He didn't mean to hurt her feelings, he was just mad. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was having fun scratching to reveal the picture in my son's book tonight.   She told her father, "it's really fun because when you're blind you don't know what the picture is and you can't cheat."  My son was her guide, telling her in great detail what she was uncovering as she scratched the coating off the page.

The Cotton Candy Event

Sunday was cotton candy machine day, my husband told my daughter.   He and I were going to bring out the cotton candy machine she got for Christmas and make some in the driveway in the nice weather and let the children have some with their friends. 

When the time came, suddenly we had three families of children in our driveway.   We gave them social distanced cotton candy.   My daughter loved it.   She was sort of the star, with her present being something everyone could enjoy.

It is national nap day and I didn't get to take a nap, so I'm going to sleep now.   It's not even early but I'm going to pretend I'm napping.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Grandparents Name Discussion:   My children were talking about what we'd be called when we were grandparents.   I said maybe I'd just be Granny.   They thought maybe Cranny would be better to match the first letter of my name, Courtney.  My husband called out, "If she's Cranny, I'll be Nooks."   I laughed.   We had to explain to the children where the phrase "Nooks and Crannys" came from.   They've eaten English muffins for years, but they'd forgotten about the slogan we'd told them about, long ago.