Notes to Self (And Photo of Kids with Santa!)

Note to Self:  Never again install a new computer the first weekend of summer break and expect to be able to sit down to it again before the next school year starts.    Note also that the above applies in triplicate if there is also a new baby in the house.

The new baby thing should not be an issue ever again.  Unless the universe has a really wicked sense of humour and surprises me with triplets in my mid forties.

Note to Universe:  Would not really be funny.

AWW!

Note to Self!  Note to Self!  Note to Self!  Will never ever write great German-American-Australian novel if keep having children every Christmas.

HAPPY NEW YEAR.   

Christmas Memories

I'm on!  New computer installed LAST NIGHT! 

I do also, however, have a campout to prepare for four girls, aged 12 to 15, in our backyard, in honor of Ryan's birthday.  Seems the German taboo against having a party BEFORE the actual date doesn't stick in a country with a higher birthrate.  Honestly, mates, you do it when you CAN!

And a cake to bake.  And the computer telling me it has to do some initial scan before I use it.

Great.  It's telling me what to do already.

So...in the interests of my sanity...really, I go nuts when I don't post.....here are two links to Christmases past. 

For the Aussies who want to know what Christmas is like in a cold Northern winter.  (Highly overrated in my opinion, although I'll be the first to admit that Germany does Christmas well!)


http://twintensity.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2010-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2011-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=50


And for Babette, who liked my spoof on the American Christmas card enough to print it out for her mother two years ago.  My highest honor as a writer so far, Babette.  No matter what I publish in the future I will never forget that moment in your living room with you and Lori, when you whipped out a copy of something I had written from amidst your stack of reading.  Best gift ever. 


http://twintensity.blogspot.com/2010/12/christmas-greetings-american-style.html

I owe Babette and Lori a newer version of an Aussie Christmas card.

And Anita and Liesl and Lynn-Ann an impression of my first REAL Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere. 

Merry Christmas folks, be it German, American, Aussie or other. 

I AM the dummy!

"Does 'dummy' mean, uh, something else here too?"

Damon was assuming - and hoping - that it did.

"Or else everyone around here has taken to calling me an idiot."

Pause.

"And that's your domain."

Like the time in Geneva when an English mum asked me for a nappy and then looked at me like I was out of my mind when I went through my diaper bag - note the term! - pulling out wipes, tissues and towels while at the same time explaining that I didn't have any napkins, but I thought one of those would do just as well. 

Looking back on it now, I don't know why she looked so exasperated when she finally took matters into her own hands and grabbed a diaper.  As if she'd never watched American television.  And hey, I wasn't the one without a nappy!

For the record, they don't call them diaper-bags over here either.  (Carry bags, maybe?)   Or strollers.  (Prams, which somehow always reminds me of heavily-bundled nannies in 1920s London.)  I believe what they call singlets here are what I used to call onesies in the USA.  Neither of which will mean very much to you unless you have had a baby.  I just call them those little tiny shirts that you can button under their legs to avoid confusion.

Back to the dummy, though.

"If the term fits." I replied.  Before explaining that yes, dummy was the term for pacifier. 

Seems that dummies are out here.  (As in dummies are out of fashion not as in there are idiots all around us.)

Which is fine with me, having never considered using one.

The generation - and nationalities - that ask are the ones who used them to keep their babies quiet while they spent time doing other things, the ones who have been taught that children shouldn't be heard (perhaps not even seen in some cultures!) and shouldn't make demands and certainly not as newborns.

There is also the mistaken belief that you should make it as easy on yourself as possible, that the baby should be taught early on to be easy, that you have the right to have time for yourself when you want it and that you are somehow a failure at parenting if you spend too much time doing it.

Problem is, I really wanted this baby.  Really wanted him.

Not so that I can silence his demands on my time but so that I can raise him.

Sure, I'd like to be writing more, I'd like to get that children's book out and submit to more - okay, admit it, ANY magazines.

I'd like to do my yoga.  Or at least 5 -6  minutes of abs.

But sticking a dummy in Ian's mouth is like plopping my other four in front of the television.

It's a poor substitute for my attention.

Let's face it, the little guy is already 8 weeks old.

"The Cat's in the Cradle" and all that.

I deliver meals to the elderly with a friend of mine every so often.  I see the amount of time I will have on my hands later on.  Alone. 

Say what you like.  I'll be the 'dummy' for as long as I have the privilege.

Andrew Sank the Boat

Andrew has this larger-than-life view of cosmic injustice.

Might be a middle-child thing.

Or an only brother to two twin brothers thing. 

I've had a sense Ian was born to bring balance.

Until Ian is older, we have addressed the great cosmic wrong with understanding and a sense of humour.

Andrew is  a very very good kid.  He has a deeply ingrained sense of right and wrong (or of what he sees as right and wrong) and as deep a need to see justice prevail.

You can imagine the trouble that gets him into.

Add to that a witty, precocious sense of humour and his inability to keep his mouth shut.  (He's inherited the latter, at least, that absolute need to share the wonder of his thoughts, from his mother.  Sorry about that, mate!)

So that, although Andrew is almost never the culprit, he is most often the one getting yelled at unjustly.  (Ryan tops the chart for involvement, again making me grateful for my four sons to one daugher ratio.)

His quips, absolutely on the mark, are so well-timed they are ill-timed. 

You would laugh, and do laugh later, but want to throttle him at the same time.

My guess is his teacher at school has the same problem.
We call him the straw that broke the camel's back.

That last flea on the bed.  (On top of the granny, the grandson, the dog, the cat, and the mouse in  the book 'The Napping House' by Audrey and Don Wood.)

The tiny mouse in the mitten. (On top of the bear, the badger, the owl, the rabbit, the fox, the hedgehog and the mole in the Ukrainian folktale 'The Mitten' retold and beautifully illustrated by Jan Brett.)

And lastly, the mouse in the Australian children's book 'Who Sunk The Boat?' by Pamela Allen.  (Was it the cow?  Was is the donkey?  The sheep?  Or the pig?)

So that when the boat is rocking precariously around here we can at least laugh at at the quip that threatens to send it to the bottom.

"Oh Andrew, you just sank the boat again."

And we DO laugh. 

Which beats any alternative that comes to mind!

Positive Reinforcement Gone Wrong

Thanks to Michael things are actually fairly mellow around here.

 http://twintensity.blogspot.com/2011/10/two-men-in-my-mirror-with-pictures-of.html

So mellow, in fact, that I am having some difficulties with the whole positive reinforcement thing.

Good enough for Santa? (Waiting for Santa's arrival at the Strathpine Shoppng Center.)

Positive reinforcement is also the cornerstone of the behavioural program at Lawnton State School.  So much so, that one begins to wonder when too much is too much.  The program is in place mostly for the children with behavioural issues and for those, often the same, who don't get the attention and positive reinforcement at home.  Ryan's teacher quoted some appalling statistic to me about children of university educated parents hearing positive things something like a hundred times a day while children of parents without a university education hear it only twenty.  By the time she got to children of parents with problems like drugs, alcohol and incarceration, the number went down to seven.

Don't quote me.  But you see where I'm going.

But when does the absence of positive reinforcement turn into a punishment in itself?

(Rest assured we never had these problems in the German school system!  There, Andrew's accomplishments were downplayed to make him more like everyone else and Ryan's accomplishments were never good enough to count at all.)

I strongly support the program at Lawnton.  How can I not love a program where the vice-principal comes onto the PA system before break to remind everyone to to be kind?!

But when I mimicked the program at home, I began to run into problems.  The first ten days were great.  We were dealing with minor issues; Matthew throwing a tantrum because Aidan had the chalkboard first, Aidan throwing his truck at Matthew, Ryan tickling Andrew on the back of the neck, Andrew punching Ryan in the face because of it.  All normal kid things really.

Not perfect, but trying.

When I implemented a reward system, counting the days they all behaved, and then celebrating with 'Spiders' after ten 'good' days, the days sped by quickly and we were sipping 'Spiders' almost immediately.  (Spiders are known as ice-cream sodas to the rest of the world.)

And now we can't get past two.

The problem doesn't lie in the kids' behaviour; again, we have some teasing, a bit of punching and throwing, some chatting with Jesus in a less-than-respectful manner. 

It lies in the expectations.

Sure, Aidan has called to Jesus twice in the past week.  But he immediately apologized and then told me that he really likes Jesus and meant no disrespect. 

There have been no other swears.  At all.  For ages and ages.

There IS hitting.  Aidan throws things quite a bit too. Quite a bit as in once every couple of days.  The hitting is almost daily, but it is one of the three boys throwing a quick punch.  Ryan pesters everyone almost constantly but we figure that is a girl thing.  (THANK GOD I HAVE FOUR BOYS!  I'll take a well-placed punch over constant pestering any day.)

Yes, good enough for Santa!  (I realize I have an extra in there; always room for one more, especially when it's Jade!)

Whatever it is, it happens once, is immediately addressed with a time-out, apologies are exchanged and the issue is over.

So that, really, ALL of our days are 'good' days.

And it seems that not labelling them as such under the current system is actually a form of punishment in itself.

I believe my expectations of perfect harmony at ALL TIMES isn't fair.  These are good kids.  They don't actually NEED a reward model as positive reinforcement for good behaviour.

The reward lies in a sense of family and in time spent together as family. 

Something a sticker on the forehead doesn't come close to.

Matthew's Worst Nightmare

Matthew came out of his bedroom yesterday morning looking particularly groggy and extremely concerned.

"I had a bad dream, Mommy." he told me.

Serious Matthew.

Andrew and Aidan are the monsters and scary bad guys men; Andrew sleeps with the twins ever since he started reading ghost and supernatural stories and Aidan occasionally falls out of bed when fighting off particularly gruesome monters in his sleep, but this was a new one coming from Matthew.

He looked so sad.

"Why don't you tell me about it, honey.  Sometimes that makes you feel better."  I told him.

He very earnestly related the following dream:

"Daddy brought home three chocolate Easter bunnies for a treat."

(Uh oh,  three, I thought, alarms immediately going off in my head.)

Slowly, very seriously, Matthew continued:

"And then he gave one to Ryan."

Oh.  The agony of early childhood.

Slower still:  "And then he gave one to Andrew."

A pause, some choked sobs, before he bravely continued.

"And then he gave one to Aidan."

Big breath, looking me squarely in the eye

"And there wasn't any Easter bunny for me."

WORST DREAM EVER!  What do you say to something like that?!

Hard to stand out in this crowd.

If I'd read it in a book I'd say it was too obvious to believe.  But really, I don't make these things up.  I don't have to!

And so I hugged my Easter-bunniless child and made it better. (I reassured him that that would never happen.) An hour later, when I asked him to tell Daddy his dream, he had already forgotten it. 

Damon told him we would have shared the bunnies equally, even if we had to bite their heads off to do it.  THAT, as it turns out, was the right answer, severed bunny heads apparently being immensely reassuring to an insecure five-year-old boy.

Making cookies with Mom!

As I tell Andrew when I kiss him before bed - you'll need something to share with your therapist later on!

My Version of STFUP

The thought has occurred to me that parents spend way too much time taking - and posting - photos of their children in costume.

Look at the joy with which I did it on my last blog.

Ready for entry into a blog I read about recently (and now can't find) called Shut The F#@$ Up Parents or something similar.  Meant to post articles about perfectly mundane things children do that their parents find absolutely fascinating.  The tag line apparently is "You used to be fun.  Now you have a baby." 

I wonder if it is linked to the book going by a similar title:  Go the F#@% To Sleep.  Now coming out in a children's version.  Without THE WORD.

Just when I've given up cursing. 

For the most part.

Another thing we like to do is post pictures of our older children tormenting the latest addition.

So, here goes.  (I gave up being fun YEARS ago.  I'll settle for relatively clean and out of my nursing top by mid-afternoon.)

Aidan explains the deal to Ian:  Pose nicely and she leaves you alone!

That's it!

No really Mom, that was it!

Ryan co-mothering.

With the burp rag.

And the chin-as-third-hand technique!

Who needs a doll when I've got a brother!

Andrew is not as fond of posing.  Ian agrees.

Honestly, Mom!



Matthew prefers the career route.  With family plans.  (Reads:  When I grow up I want to be a fireman.  With my girlfriend.  She will be a firelady.)



But keeps his options open.  (Reads: When I grow up I want to be an ambulance driver.  With my girlfriend.  She will be an ambulance lady.)  He also had a police option going. 



I'm showing this one at his wedding.  (Reads:  When I grow up I want to be a knight.  With my girlfriend.  She will be a princess.)