Thursday, February 28, 2008
Single Mom
This isn't going to be as much of a blog as it is a venting session, but Kurt's been gone and I need to complain. Taking care of a 7-year old is harder than you'd think! Especially when the 7-year old is sneaky and practicing to be a teenager (I sound like my Mom). Micaela and I have our routine down and we manage to do pretty well getting the basics taken care of while Kurt is away - breakfast, feed the dogs, go to school/work, come home, eat dinner, do homework, do chores, shower, tv, bed. Often we run out of time and don't get to watch tv or we just skip the chores, but it works. The tiring part comes in right at the dinner and homework part. I really hope Jonathan likes to eat, because Micaela doesn't (except McDonalds, fruit rollups, and chips). Kurt's philosophy is to send her to bed hungry, but the flaw is that she's okay with that, and she'll get even skinnier than she already is. If I sit there with her and hound her to eat all her dinner, she'll eat it, but it's exhausting for me. You might think that it has something to do with my cooking, but no, it's her just being difficult. Today I packed in her lunch a PB sandwich, apple slices, goldfish, doritos and a drink (all things she likes). Guess what she ate... the doritos. That's it, that's all she ate. Maybe I just need to be more mean and threatening. The next tricky part comes when it is homework time. It must be inherited, she knows all the ways to get around doing her homework. This week her assignment is to read for 15 minutes a night and she is good about wasting those minutes. Last night I finally got fed up and I made her sit on my bed and she wasn't allowed to blow her nose, get a drink, tell me her predictions, go to the bathroom, or anything else besides read for 15 minutes straight. It was torture for her. On a good note, her reading and writing skills are very much improved. So, all this time that Mari thinks I have now that Kurt is gone is really spent giving extra time to Micaela ensuring that she is doing the right things. It's exhausting some days, but she's a really good kid despite the sneakiness which I do believe is inherited, so I don't mind being tired enough to go to bed at 8pm. Okay, she should be done with dinner now, so I'm off to finish up the rest of our to-do list... wish me luck!
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4 comments:
Ok, time for a "Uncle Doug's Child Care" Minute.
Item #1: Coming from someone who's been in the real working world, as opposed to someone who went say straight from college into a slacker government job, time based tasks don't guarantee progress.
Requiring Micaela to read for 15 minutes only ensures you'll have her squirm until the timer is up.
A better method of insuring progress is to look at what she's supposed to read ahead of time, and tell her this.
"You don't have to read for 15 minutes tonight, you have to read XX pages." She'll go, "Great!" sit down for 5 minutes, flip a bunch of pages & tell you she's done. Now here's where you get sneaky, be sure to have read the pages she was supposed to read & have her tell you what it was about. If she doesn't hit the major plot points, you send her back until she can.
Item #2 - Getting a kid to eat.
First, look at what you gave her.
PB sandwich & apple slices
don't get eaten in the same meal as goldfish & Doritos!
Would you put Doritos in your PB sandwich? No.
Want to make her eat, assemble the various items that you deem to make up a good lunch into several groups.
Group 1
Sandwiches - PB, Tuna, Ham & Cheese
Fruit - Apple, Banana, Peach
Salty - Chips, Pretzels,
Drink - Juice, milk, etc.
Let her pick & choose from each group to assemble the lunch, but tell her she has to eat what she picks. If she doesn't, you kill a puppy. Kidding, don't kill a puppy, but come up with some horrible consequence like "No TV for the night, or worse yet, she has to read 5 more pages."
I've got a suggestion on the food front. Recently Isaac decided that he didn't want to eat an awesome PB&J wrap that Shellie had made.
He didn't taste it, he just decided that it was gross. This decision led him down a bad path at school, which I'm sure you heard about.
So, because he didn't eat the wrap for lunch, he got a wrap for dinner. He still refused to eat it. We gave him a time limit of 5min to start eating before he went to bed without dinner.
Stubborn little twerp, went to bed and didn't complain about being hungry until the following morning when . . .
He was served the wrap yet again. This time he finally got it and realized that he would be served nothing besides this wrap until he ate it.
Don't worry about her dying. She will get hungry and she will eat. I suspect that Micaela has some friends at school who are helping her subsidize her diet.
Try it out on a Friday night, this way you have control of what she is eating over the weekend. Give her dinner, if she doesn't eat, send her to bed. Serve her the same dinner at breakfast. Don't let her go anywhere until she has eaten the meal. She will learn. I promise you.
I'm so proud of you boys! You actually learned something from me. Listen to your brothers Liz. They have it right!
I laughed out loud at the "slacker government job" part.
I also am very impressed at the parenting advice given. Maybe my first call will be to Doug when Caroline starts acting up.
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