Heehee! I had such a fun day today. I spent the entire day at a seminar on search engine optimization. Gotta tell you, I’m a bit distressed that this actually sounded interesting to me; but it was full of all kinds of fascinating information. So cool!
Anyway, hope you guys had a nice weekend. Anika’s croup went away and she promptly acquired an ear infection while at her other Grandmother’s house, so we got a call at 2am and Anika was returned to us by George’s sister (who was on her way to work) at 7am.
Apparently Anika decided that it wasn’t enough to make her Auntie detour first thing in the morning, she also needed to add her own special design touch to her Aunt’s Volvo by barfing all over it on the drive home. Delightful! I got a somewhat distressed email from the Auntie later that morning asking if I had any advice for getting vomit smell out of a car. This is something we’ve had more experience with than I really care to think about, so we had a few suggestions. Anika seems much better now, but Kyra’s been quite weird.
Kyra got in monster trouble for biting her sister (she’s never been a biter), scooping out most of a jar of peanut butter with her fingers and eating it (I was upstairs for about three minutes!), and then getting into the fridge to get an egg for Faith who promptly broke it all over the floor and then swam in it (ha! At least that one wasn’t on my watch). That was all Monday within about five hours.
She further honed her grief upon grief routine yesterday, and I am beginning to weary of sitting on her for things like flipping out when I tell her to go down the stairs, carefully pouring a cup of milk out onto the table as a form of entertainment, and toothpaste fingerpainting on the upstairs bathroom mirror (actually, she practices this one regularly and has so far proved difficult to deter). Those were all yesterday.
All in all, she’s such a troublemaker that her behavior would be shocking to me if it weren’t for the fact that this is actually the second child in our cache to exhibit such tenacity in the cantankerous department. Georgie (our oldest, now age 8 ) was equally single-minded in his demolition-oriented tendencies.
However, after a solid three years of the extremely terrible and misleadingly labeled “two’s” (that lasted from eighteen months until age four and a half), preceded by nine months of increasingly willful behavior, I remember exactly when it occurred to me that all this stubbornness might at some point parlay into more positive character qualities.
Georgie was in the back yard trying to swing across the monkey bars, which he so far had not managed to master. He missed one of the rungs and landed smack on his back, knocking the wind out of himself. At four years old, he scared himself pretty good and came running over to me on the porch. I looked him in the eyes and talked him through it, explaining that he just startled his lungs when he fell and they were flipping out a little bit which is why he felt like he couldn’t breathe.
I kept eye contact and continued on telling him that this happens sometimes with falls like his and not to be scared because his lungs would remember their job in a few seconds. They did, of course, and he recovered just fine. I assumed that such a scare would mark the end of his monkey bar endeavors.
Not wanting him to give up entirely, I told him that when you first start learning things they are always hard, but not to get discouraged because when you have trouble doing something it just means that you need to practice until you can do it. His eyebrows jumped up, he exclaimed, “oh! Practice!” and then he immediately scampered off to the monkey bars again to do just that. By the end of the week he could go all the way across.
This was the first application of this strong character to a constructive use (overcoming fear and finishing something he started) instead of to decidedly less endearing uses such as taking the forbidden DVD’s (that would be all of them at his age at the time) off the rack ten times every day despite all correctionary measures or grabbing from his cousin every single time they got together for three years in a row.
Georgie is now developing into a fine young man. He still retains that force of will, but has learned and continues to improve at pouring that into productive projects. By age five, he could do fifty piece puzzles. He had a slow start at reading but he keeps plugging away at practicing, and this year his reading has finally sped up and improved dramatically. He builds ridiculously elaborate bionicles from the thirty pages of detailed instructions he prints off the lego.com website and is generally very difficult to sway once he’s made his mind up on something. He is interested in virtually everything, is humongously helpful, and is almost always a happy guy.
So yes Kyra is a gigantic stinker pants, but I know that if I keep after her she’ll settle down into a happy, energetic, determined girl when she gets a little bit bigger. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway….. Hehe. In the meantime, she’s got a really sweet little smile and is pretty cuddly (when her eyes aren’t busy betraying her sneaky plots), so I guess I’ll put in all that work for a couple more years until she calms down a bit. Maybe Faith will be easy like Trinity. Actually, if current behavior is any indicator (and it’s usually a pretty good one at age one), she’s probably going to be a real handful in another year or so herself. Argh!
Rachel
Fiendish friend for effusive fun!
