… is because reason #27 worked so well yesterday I thought I’d try the same theory today.
If you give a girl (or two) a pile of flour, you can make a chicken pot pie for dinner…
…but when she leaves the kitchen, it’s another twenty minutes of clean up!
…because a good mud puddle will earn Mom twenty minutes of time to finish her own project.
Granted this disaster of a girl needed twenty minutes of cleanup when I was done, but hey I checked one more “to do” off the list!
Today Ivy, Clara and I spent 4 1/2 hours in the car.
Today I heard somone say “MOM” from the backseat for the 5 millionth time.
Today I said “What Ivy?” for the 6 trillionth time.
Today I had no response.
Today I looked in the back seat and saw Ivy was sleeping.
Today Clara said “MOM” 37 times.
Today I think Clara was imitating her older sister…but it’s got me worried about tommorow!
After hearing glowing reviews from friends who offered their kids “choices” I thought I’d try it with Ivy. Not to be mistaken for choices, “choices” are more like this:
You can keep eating or you can leave the room.
You can help me or you can play by yourself.
You can pick up your room now or you can go straight to bed.
I phrase the “choices” above in a friendlier manner and try to involve the word choose, amazingly Ivy thinks she’s getting to decide what happens and responds well to it. Hopefully it will take her awhile to figure out that it is just her manipulative mother calling the shots! Of course there are days when she makes poor choices, I try to go with it and cross my fingers that she’s learning something.
Today was one of those days. Today the choice was: we could go for a walk or get ready for our afternoon rest.
Ivy’s choice: Walk
Ivy being the helpful girl that she often is went and got both of us shoes for our walk. She returned with my flip flops and Johns flip flops. Now I can go anywhere in flip flops, and Ivy has been a good understudy but Ivy in her Dads flip flops is a different story. So it was “you can wear those but I will not carry you, or you can go get your own shoes”
Ivy’s choice: Wear Dad’s flip flops
So off we walked, and it all went swimmingly, if very slowly,there is not much speed to be had in over sized flip flops. Then we left the pasture and there were *gasp* BURRS and PRICKERS!!! Do you want to keep going though the burrs and prickles to the corn field or head home for a rest?
Ivy’s choice: Keep going
Keep going, and crying and screaming.
“MOM, there are prickles!”
“Owie!… Owie!… Owie!”
“MOM THERE ARE BURRS ON MY DRESS!!!”
Clearly a major problem was that I had not realized her dress was actually an extension of her body and therefore burrs caught in her dress would be causing Ivy pain. This was true even if the burrs were wrapped and tangled in the dress so as not to be touching her skin in anyway. Sadly this is not a new phenomenon, her pink blanket has the same attribute. In the car if Piper sits on the end of the blanket it’s all “OWIE! MOM, PIPER IS SITTING ON MY PINK BLANKET! OWIE!” so I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised, but it was a bit disappointing. A pink blanket that feels pain is inconvenient, a dress that has the same problem is downright ridiculous!
Ivy then decided the best thing would be to take off her dress.
“MOM THE SKEETOS ARE GETTIN’ ME!”
Soon after that she got burrs in her hair, and thought flailing around her head and messing up her hair would somehow help. Then just after we reached the corn field (the burr and pricker free cornfield) she decided it was time to turn around and go back home. All the way back through the 12 yards or so of burrs and prickers I heard pathetic comments like:
“MOM I HAVE BURRS IN MY UNDERWEAR!”
“OWIE!”
“MOM THE SKEETOS ARE GETTIN’ MY BUTT!”
Once we hit the relative “safety” of the pasture things improved until we got home.
Choice: Sleep with burrs in your hair or let me comb them out.
Ivy’s choice: comb them out
“OWIE” — – “Ivy I haven’t touched it yet.” —“BUT IT”S GONNA HURT!” — “Should we leave them in?” —” NO GET THEM OUT!”
Ten minutes later she was deburred, mostly naked, full of mosquito bites, tears, snot and on her way to bed.
While it seems that I may have spent an hour torturing my kid I was hoping she learned something from it, but I wasn’t convinced. When Ivy got up from her nap she came smiling down the stairs in new clothes and said:
“Look Mom I’m wearin’ my long sleeve clothes to keep the prickers off me!”
Then a few minutes later she showed up with some barrettes and said:
“Mom, you put these in my hair so I don’t get burrs in my hair?”
While I’m not counting it a true success until we head out on another walk it looks like perhaps something sank in!
The one thing I will say for Ivy is through all of her crying about burrs and prickly things, she never once asked me to carry her, even when her flip flops were falling off. I like to think this was because she knew that was the choice she made at the beginning of our walk. Unfortunately it also could have been because she was too busy saying “Owie!” Just picture a little girl with pink Care Bear underwear full of burrs walking determinedly, if very vocally though the woods, now tell me that doesn’t bring a smile to your face. I’ll keep giving Ivy “choices” and while I watch her figure things out for herself I’ll try to keep my giggling under control!
Piper makes a great babysitter, she’s part of the reason we were able to finish the workshop roof last night.
Good as she is Piper draws the line at being a carousel horse.
You know, the ones that bounce up and down…
Ivy’s recent quotable Dad comments:
“I don’t ask you nicely and politely I only ask dad nicely and politely”
“You don’t love me, DAD loves me.”
“I’m not your kid. I’m Dad’s kid, Clara is your kid.”
Now I like to think that I take all the snotty three year old comments in stride. I don’t let them get to me, sometimes I think she’s funny, and most of all I’m very glad that Ivy loves her Dad so much. Nor do I feel unloved by my girls. Clearly since I am the one required to read bedtime stories, rock girls to sleep, kiss hurt fingers and wipe dirty butts I am dear to them as well.
But sometimes…
When every night when John gets home he is trampled at the door by the dogs and kids, and the only way for me to get my own kiss hello is to wade in pushing everyone else out of the way.
When Clara lights up when she hears him talk, and Ivy can go from problem child to angle at the drop of her hat on hearing his voice.
When unknowingly John will ask Ivy to do something that I had been waiting her out on, and she’ll jump up and go do it.
When Ivy asks where her Dad is ten times a day.
…it starts to get a bit grating in a you-rotten-kids-do-you-forget-who-spends-the-whole-freakin-day-with-you sort of way.
So when I was the only one home when the girls came back from spending a night at Grandma and Grandpa’s I basked in my two minutes of fame. I loved the lit up faces, the hugs hello, and hearing how much Ivy missed me…
…right up until I heard, “Where’s Dad?”and Clara threw up on me.
I hear absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I’m planning my next vacation!
Watch out!
The Clara monster is coming…
…she’ll tower over you…
… and if you make her grumpy…
…she’ll eat you. 
Clara is walking! Sort of, in a three steps at a time kind of way, but you’ve got to start somewhere!
Please admire my blue eyed baby who is almost eleven months old (How did that happen?). To do so you may have to ignore her dirt and food stains, (She’s much cleaner than when I caught her playing in Ivy’s poop earlier in the day!) and ignore the fact that she has no pants and her onesie isn’t even snapped (As near as I can remember that was outfit number four of the day). Also it’s not that I don’t mow my lawn, it’s that she’s in the pasture, (Which we were in becuase my 15 min. tractor job had at this point taken almost two hours and I had run out of gas and the sky in the background isn’t just to match Clara’s eyes it was a major storm on it’s way in that soaked me while I tried to get the tractor restarted and finish my job. It’s still not done.) while you can tell from her expression that she’s not super confident with the walking yet, she sure is trying!
If Clara can figure out how to learn to walk I’m sure I can figure out how to cope with one rotten dog and two poopy kids.
Today we were pretty shaky on our feet, I’m betting tomorrow we’ll both be better!
Since Ivy was born I have been a big fan of the theory that everyone should sleep where everyone in the house gets the most sleep.
I became a fan of this theory when we co-slept with Ivy the first night she was born. I hadn’t been specifically planning on co-sleeping, but we did it and it worked great. Why mess with a good thing? Ivy shared a bed with us for a few months before moving into her crib in a separate room. We also co-slept with Clara up until she started the dreaded “sleep crawling.” Now Clara has also moved out into her own room and crib across the hall from Ivy’s room where she now sleeps in a regular bed.
Or should I say where Ivy slept in a regular bed. We have now entered a new phase of sleeping arrangements that I did not foresee.
It started when Ivy kept showing up in our bed in the middle of the night. Going with my theory if she was actually sleeping when she showed up, I probably would have left her there. Ivy is not fun to sleep with, first she spends far to long, talking, whispering, wiggling and touching my face, then when she does fall asleep she turns into a dead weight that is impossible to move off your pillow and is only revived when it involves wiggling and flailing around to take up more of the bed. Ivy in our bed is not a plan where everyone gets the most sleep.
Here is how it would go:
Ivy would come into our bed.
I would try to ignore her.
It wouldn’t work because she would do really awful things to me (like set paper snowflakes on my eyelids, and if that doesn’t sound awful then clearly you’ve never been subjected to it!)
I would get up and put her crying back into her bed.
She would want to snuggle with someone.
Depending on my level of kindness (directly related to amount of face touching I had endured in the last few minuets) and time of night, I might lay down with her for a few minutes.
I would get back up and go back to bed. Or if John returned her to her bed he would fall asleep there and I would never see him again.
Ivy would show back up…
If you add into that the fact that Clara still wakes up in the night you have the recipe for one grumpy sleep deprived family!
One memorable night recently I put her back in bed three times only to find that when John got out of bed in the morning she had been sleeping on the other side of him! Something had to change.
A few daytime discussions about how we all sleep in our own beds was getting me nowhere. Ivy’s room was “Not for sleepin’ in”, she was lonely, her room was dark and before we knew it she would be back in our bed poking at my face. Then Ivy told me she wanted to sleep with Clara. I said, “Nnnn…. ummm…. OK.” And we tried it. Thank goodness I was able to curb the automatic “No.” that almost slipped out!
Clara goes to sleep about an hour before Ivy, Ivy goes through her night time routine then slips into Clara’s room and sleeps on the bed we’ve made for her on the floor in there.
Since sleeping with Clara, she has not: come into our bed,woken Clara up, been woken by Clara (how, I have no idea, I think the girl could sleep through WWIII),or been woken by John or I (she has been stepped on at least once with no reaction).
Then in the morning Ivy likes to tell me that I can’t come in when they wake up because they are playing. Really could life get any better?! I have been able to laze in bed for an extra half hour or so while I listen to them play- I have nothing but good things to say about our current arrangement!
I’ll admit it’s a little odd, I never thought I’d have a three year old who would want to sleep on the floor in her baby sisters room. I also never thought that when I said “OK. Great!” when I was informed by that same three year old that she was peeing in the bathroom that I should inquire if she was using the toilet… clearly there is quite a bit of this parenting gig I haven’t thought of yet.
Ivy went along on the trip with John to Michigan. Talking to her you’d never guess that they were there for Storms surgery, nope, clearly in Ivy’s world the trip to Michigan was all about the pony ride.
It comes up in conversation (or out of the blue) like this:
-“MOM GUESS WHAT? … I got to ride a pony!”
-“MOM you know what I did? … I rode a pony with Uncle Jim!”
-“MOM you know what feel you better? … Riding a pony!”
-“MOM I rode a pony with Uncle Jim like at the fair. …. It was better than the fair.”
-“MOM we go to Michigan again and I ride a pony?”
Clearly the pony ride was a big hit!
Only two things can compete with the pony ride.
The stuffed pink poodle that she got as a gift that she actually threw(? lost? dropped?) out the window on the drive home. Lucky for Ivy Dad was the hero and went back for it.
“Mom, my puppy flew out the window, and you know who turned around and got it? DAD! And it wasn’t even dirty!”
Since it’s rescue it has accompanied her everywhere and has been called either Grandma Mary or Finley, she might not be sure of the name but it’s not getting let go of long enough to fall out a window again that’s for sure!
And my favorite, her story about the kitten:
“Mom you know what I did?”
“I held a tiny kitty, I held it like this” – mimed cupping hands against chest
“It was soo tiny and so black Mom, it was so black”
“And, and it’s eyes were closed!”
-I asked how big it was-
“It was NOT big Mom it was TINY!”
After our conversation I saw the picture, she was right it was tiny!
Behind the Willows 