Preschool Update

Posted by Michelle on Jan 20, 2012 in Parenting | 1 comment

I recently attended my first Parent-Teacher conference at TLE’s preschool. I’ve been to other Parent-Teacher conferences at TLE’s other school so this isn’t a new experience. Neither, it seems, is the report. Gross motor and fine motor skills are either age appropriate or above though she still only scribbles and doesn’t really draw anything recognizable yet. And her self-help skills and math skills seem to be age appropriate as well.

Speech continues to be an issue. She talks a lot but her speech is hard for others to understand and she is prone to meltdowns if she thinks no one can understand her. The director of the school asked if I was okay with bringing in a school district observer, which I am. I am hoping that the school district may have some suggestions but for now, keeping her in a typical preschool seems to be helping her a lot.

She’s continuing to develop socially. She tends to play alone and still doesn’t initiate play with other children though she will join in on invitation. Her teachers mentioned that she’s shown a lot of progress from when she initially started school in the summer to when she started going again full-time in December after that partial hiatus.

Overall, the conference was what I expected, including the same issues of attention and willfulness that her other school observed over a year ago. She’s better about it now than she used to be but still won’t do things like sit still for story time and directing her to do something can take some time. Hopefully we’ll find some ways wrangle her to be more compliant in the coming months.

My Reminder

Posted by Michelle on Jan 16, 2012 in Parenting | 0 comments

All smiles

It’s alarming to realize how is easy it is to lose sight of what’s important. Try as I might to balance motherhood and building my writing business, I can’t help but feel that I am failing in both. More than once, I have entertained the idea of returning to the corporate world, trying to convince myself that this was for the better.With more money, we’ll be less stressed out. We can take her on vacations, buy her more toys.

And then, TLE will do something. She’ll smile. Or laugh. Or tell me how much she loves the playdough I just made for her. Or we’ll nap together on a whim after preschool. Or I’ll look at a photo I took of her just a few months ago, how different she looks now, and wonder to myself, Where did the time go?

And all at once I’m reminded about what’s important, all the things that I swore that I’d never take for granted.

A 3 year old’s Christmas

Posted by Michelle on Jan 9, 2012 in Family | 0 comments

Christmas 2012

Every year since we purchased our home, I promised myself that I would do our house up big for the holidays. Three years later, I dragged our tree and assorted decor out of garage storage sometime around mid-December but actually didn’t decorate it (or the house). In the end, it was our housemate who ended up putting up the decor the day before she left to spend the holidays with her family in the South Bay.

While being sick certainly had something to do with it — down with bronchitis pretty much the entirety of December — it just didn’t feel like Christmas this year. Every year, I tell myself that I’ll do more for Christmas and somehow, I end up doing less. I know part of it is economic circumstances which doesn’t help my holiday mood any. It makes me feel bad, especially since I want to make the holidays as magical for TLE as they were for me. And I feel like I’m failing her because I just can’t deliver.

There weren’t a lot of presents under the tree this year. But then I look at photos like this, her excitement as she climbed into her “big girl” car for the first time, and am reminded, not for the first time, that the presents — neither quality nor quantity of them — really mattered.

All that she really cared about on Christmas morning, as she  cuddled the stuffed cat that was all that she had really asked Santa for, was that she had Mommy and Daddy to cuddle her on our laps while she was watched Christmas cartoons and ate candy canes.

There may come a time when she’s older, when TV and the Internet will tell her about the fancy decorated houses and the mounds of Christmas gifts that define the holidays in other households. And I harbor a hope to deliver that to her, someday. But my deepest wish is that she remembers — and will continue to remind me — the best Christmas gift of all for her when she was three years old: to be loved and warm and cuddled by Mommy and Daddy.

Untempered Schism

Posted by Michelle on Nov 12, 2011 in Parenting | 1 comment

TLE is quite the chatterbox these days! It seems that she’s making up for whatever lost time she had while she was speech delayed by talking up a storm. From the moment she wakes up in the morning to the moment she conks out at night, she’s just one big, chattering ball of energy, consuming absolutely everything in her path.

Her sentences are becoming ever more complex and she’s able to really get her point across. I love listening to her as she narrates little stories while playing with her toys. So cute!!

A downside with her talking more is that we’re getting a lot of back talk these days. There’s a lot of “I don’t want to” and boy, she does NOT hesitate to lay on the guilt trip when I put her in time out for being sassy. After time out, I always make it a point to give her a hug and a kiss, and we talk about why she got a time out.

“Mommy,” she pleaded with me this afternoon, hanging her head and looking up at me through that impossibly long fringe of eyelash. (This child will NEVER need mascara as an adult. I am so jealous.) “I don’t like it when you put me in time out. It makes me so sad.”

Ouch. Heartstrings. Pulling. I’m trying to find a non-punitive discipline solution that doesn’t involve time outs but redirection just does. not. work. with her. *sigh* So much of trying to wrangle TLE is to channel her boundless energy and enthusiasm into positives but sometimes, it feels like trying to control a hurricane.

The Only Empress

Posted by Michelle on Oct 23, 2011 in Family | 2 comments

TLE has begun to notice that several of her classmates have siblings and every so often, asks why she doesn’t have a baby brother or sister. I also can’t help but notice that several of my mom friends with kids similar in age tend to have more than one child.

Since our friend Rainbow Dash now lives with us (RD’s kind of like our benign version of Jason Mewes) TLE has several adults to ping-pong off of but I know she does crave peer interaction. Otherwise, she’s very dependent on us for her socialization and now with her going to school less, she’s become even clingier when she’s at home.

We have our reasons for being a one child family but I do get sad thinking about TLE being lonely, especially when I read about other moms talking about how their kids have built in playmates in their siblings. On bad days, TLE come to me and cry that she wants someone to play with.

Changing our perspective

Posted by Michelle on Oct 22, 2011 in Family, Life, Parenting | 0 comments

It’s been a period of readjusting here at home since TLE’s school was cut down from 5 days a week to 2 days a week. Our eventual hope is to up it back up to 3 days a week but with the holidays coming up, it seems sort of silly to pay for 3 days a week when we won’t really be getting our money’s worth.

It was a pretty drastic change to our routine and neither TLE nor I do very well with routine changes. She cried and whined a lot during the first week, saying she was bored and that she wanted to go to preschool. At one point, she even told me she hated me (!!) which earned her a time out while I quietly lost my shit in another room. The battle of the wills continued until it got so bad that I reviewed my resume and posted it online, convinced that I’m just a failure as a stay at home mom.

Things have gotten better since then, with a bit of an attitude adjustment on both of our parts. Being in school so much sort of made me forget how much interaction TLE really craves. It makes working from home pretty much impossible while she’s around so I’ve taken to working late nights to make up for it.

I’ve found that she doesn’t do well with total “free form” days as she likes routines but hates predetermined schedules. So keeping an open, predictable routine seems to have been best. For us that means lots of “free form” play time where she determines what she wants to do.

I’m the first to admit that I’m not very good at knowing how to play with her which sounds horrible but it’s the truth. It’s taking a lot of conscious effort on my part to let her lead and follow up with information rather than lead her with information, if that makes any sense.

In many ways, I have to let her lead while I support. I’m finding that I’m having to shove aside any prejudices I may have had about unschooling because this is what is really working best for her at this stage in her life and with her personality. In our case, sometimes teaching her means letting go a little.

TLE the Preschool Revolutionist

Posted by Michelle on Sep 20, 2011 in Parenting | 0 comments

The Little Empress

(If you’re wondering what in the world TLE is doing, she’s impersonating a Weeping Angel who, according to her, are the scariest baddies in Doctor Who. I’m just sort of amazed that I’ve managed to turn her into a Whovian at the age of three. This has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of this entry, of course.)

Thanks to an eleventh hour deal, The Little Empress’s full-time preschool is still covered until the end of the month which gives us some breathing room. Unfortunately, we’ve been having some behavioral problems at school lately.

I now live in constant fear that TLE will spark a naptime uprising at school. She’s never been a great napper at home but has generally been good about napping at school until a week or two ago. There have been days were she will not nap at all and she’s had to go spend some “quiet time” in the office with the preschool administrator to keep from disturbing the other children.

The teachers are remarkably understanding about it at first, figuring that it is just a phase, but it has been getting worse. She either doesn’t nap or her naps have been getting shorter. I’m worried that she’s going to lead a naptime revolt, which of course NO ONE wants.

*sigh* Someday, I may be able to convince TLE that sleep is GOOD and that she should get more of it but I guess to her, there are far more interesting things to do.