The Small Family     

I can’t believe how soon Christmas will be here--less than two weeks! Crazy. I need to start baking Christmas cookies, finish up a tiny bit of shopping for Theo and Chris, and wrap things. But it’s been a busy week work-wise, and Theo has been keeping us on our toes with some general feistiness, so I can’t say I’ve accomplished too much! But luckily, my Christmas baking this year should be delightfully easy, thanks to Chris’s and my joint Christmas gift to each other: a Kitchen Aid stand mixer! We’ve been using a cheap, rather crummy hand mixer for years, and I’ve always wanted a nice stand mixer. It just so happens that Kohl’s had them on sale right before Thanksgiving, with nice rebates and “Kohl’s cash” for your purchase, so we bought the basic model plus a veggie slicer/shredder attachment. We’ve used the slicer/shredder to do carrots and cheese so far (SO easy!), but I haven’t yet used the mixer function. But oh, I can’t wait to try it! I’m hoping that Theo will be my sous chef when I start the baking. Since we’re doing a lot of cooking and baking at home now, it seemed like a handy and fun joint present.

So in case you’re curious what Theo’s general feistiness is, it’s more of the same--bad language. Oh yes…ten weeks and counting on that battle. I love these parenting books and websites and forums that say, “If you’re consistent with the child, the habit should clear up within a few days to a week.” Um, yeah. What kind of kids are they talking about? Certainly not the kind we have! On the worst days this week, he cursed upwards of 50 times a day. I tried to go to the mall one day to pick up a new hard drive for my computer, and I had to flee when he started yelling curse words. (Luckily, I had already purchased the drive by the time he started.) And we tried to take him to see Christmas lights at this one neighborhood that has about 40 houses lit up, but we had to flee halfway through when he refused to stop cursing. Sigh…

At first we tried sternly reprimanding Theo for using bad language and punishing him with some chill-out time in his room. That didn’t work, so after a couple weeks we instituted a policy of just ignoring it, hoping he’d lose interest. He didn’t. So now we’re back to punishment, which seems to have no effect at all. But we have to do something, so…I suppose we just keep trying, and eventually he’ll decide he’s bored with it. And actually, Sunday (today) was a much better day--he earned a sticker for each two-hour block he went without swearing, and by the end of the day he earned himself a trip to the frozen yogurt shop for a lovely cup of fruit toppings. He did slip up a couple times today, but he seemed contrite, and it was a VAST improvement over the previous week or so, so we decided a reward was in order.

In all fairness to Theo, I should comment that bad language is pretty much the only behavior issue we have with him right now. He is really, on the whole, a very happy, well-behaved, sociable little boy. The bad language bothers us mainly because there will be parents who won’t want their kids playing with him, lest they pick up those words from him, and we hate to see that happen. And for the record, it’s not as if Chris and I walk around cursing up a storm. I said “shit” when I smacked my toe some months back. Theo heard it, repeated it, got a snicker, and decided that it’s a word he needs to use constantly. Same thing for “crap.” We don’t say it all that often, but he picked it up and hasn’t dropped it. Good heavens. We haven’t cursed in front of him since this all started nearly three months ago, and he’s still at it. He’s nothing if not persistent, that boy of ours….

Lesson learned for Mom and Dad: If we ever have a second child, we shall never utter a single curse word in front of it!

In addition to disciplining for using bad words, we’re throwing some more positive steps into the mix now. I have a theory that Theo may be doing this out of boredom, to some extent. He rarely does it at Little Gym (only once), and he never does it at the gym playcare (or so they tell me). Well, he enjoys both of those places--he’s never bored there. But lately he’s been rather bored around here because it’s been raining so much that we’re stuck inside a lot. And although he has a lot of toys, we’ve hardly bought him any in the past year, so most of what he has are old and perhaps a little young for him. So this weekend, we went to a learning store and brought him some preschool workbooks and activities. My thought is that if we sit down with him for a bit of time each day and work on them, it will occupy his brain a bit and perhaps cut down on the frequency of his swearing. Isn’t there some saying about an idle brain getting into mischief? If there isn’t, there should be….

We’re also working on a chart with short timespans during each day, so that if he goes, say, two hours without using a bad word, he gets a sticker. When he gets a certain number of stickers in a given timespan, he’ll get some sort of reward. So we shall see how this all works out. It took us an entire year to break his habit of hitting us, so I suppose we could be in for many more months of cursing. But it’d sure be nice if he gave up that habit sooner than later!

But with the challenges also come lots of joys and fun, and one really neat recent thing is that Theo is now “reading” us books! Let me say upfront that he’s not technically reading--rather, he has several of his books committed to memory and will read them to us page by page (as much as his vocabulary allows). I managed to catch him reading The Napping House to Chris, so I recorded it and posted it on our More Videos page--scroll down to “Theo Reads The Napping House” to see it. (You may have to turn the volume way up--my Mom said she could barely hear it. Hard to catch clear audio on an iPhone sometimes.)

The surprising thing about this is that the four books he can “read” aren’t ones we’ve read to him any more than any others--and they’re not super-short books, either. My Mom just got him The Napping House on Thanksgiving, and we’ve read it maybe a dozen times since. And he does the same with three Laura Numeroff books (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, etc.)--and he likes those books, but he hasn’t had us read them to him in several weeks. So how he’s suddenly able to “read” them is beyond me--but it’s really very neat!

Another cool thing to watch is Theo's ever-increasing ability to problem-solve. We took him to Wacky Tacky twice this week (I did one day and Chris did one day) so he could burn off some energy on rainy days. Wacky Tacky is a HUGE indoor play area for kids--pretty much a little kid's paradise. There's a huge, very fast slide, a giant play structure with soft walls and floors that they can climb all over and not hurt themselves, a big ball pit, etc. I took Theo about four or five months ago, and he was just a bit too small for it--he enjoyed it, but he wasn't quite tall enough to crawl over all the obstacles and climb everything. Now, he's just about tall enough--and I noticed that even when he's a bit small to tackle something, he'll try several different ways until he accomplishes his goal. When I took him some months ago, I had to go into the play structure to rescue him a couple times when he got stuck or scared. This time, I didn't have to go in at all--he was able to figure out how to get himself wherever he wanted to go, and he had a blast on the giant slide--though I think the ball pit was his favorite. I just love watching him figure things out--he's so proud of himself when he can do it himself! He's definitely gaining independence by the day. 

Oh, in case you’re wondering what the title of this week’s blog refers to, it’s illness. It seems as if everyone is catching this nasty crud that’s been going around for a couple months, and alas, I did not escape it. So far I don’t have it as bad as a lot of people I know, but I still don’t feel great. My sinuses were so sore on Friday that I felt like I had two black eyes--yuck. The worst of that was gone by Saturday, but I’m left with a sore throat and an earache. Just hoping I don’t pass it on to Theo, as it’s not fun being a sick kid at Christmastime!

It hasn’t gotten bad enough to keep me in bed or anything. Rather, we took Theo to the Farmer’s Market in Davis on Saturday, since we finally had a weekend without rain! I actually got some good pictures of him on the playground this time, which made me happy. Lately all I’ve been getting are snapshots, and I was eager to try to get some more “good” pictures.

Saturday night, Grandma Diane babysat Theo so Chris and I could go to his company’s Christmas party. (Yes, she’s doing much better--well enough to babysit active Mr. Theo for several hours, in fact! She’ll probably still have surgery in January or thereabouts, but at least now she feels much more able to handle it.) I have to say, in the five years I’ve been going to the ICF Christmas parties, this one didn’t rank among the greatest. But the venue was neat--the Towe Auto Museum. It was fun to walk around looking at all the classic cars, and our tablemates were nice. The DJ was just woefully bad, Chris didn’t know hardly anyone there, and the environment wasn’t conducive to mingling, so we didn’t talk to much of anyone. But, it was still nice to get an evening out with Chris, even if the party wasn’t exactly hopping!

We laid low on Sunday, since I wasn’t feeling well, but I did manage to get all our Christmas cards stuffed, addressed, and mailed, so that’s progress. Oh, and we made the aforementioned trip to the frozen yogurt shop to reward Theo’s choice of using “nice words” for the majority of the day. :-)

Hope you all have a wonderful week!