A week in the hospital can throw anyone’s blog a little off-kilter - at least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. So on with it!
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November 2007 has been a a post-filled blog here on Krississippi (dot) com. Hadn’t noticed had you? I’m proud that I accomplished my goal: to write at least one post per day for NaBloPoMo (even if some of my posts were a bit obscure, password-protected, or only contained photos of my dog, my kid and some Florida foliage).
One of the major themes for my posts this month has been sharing my feelings about adoption, specifically on celebrating National Adoption Month and my son’s adoption day, how I feel about adoption search/reunion, why I think adoption is about family, and finally realizing that its ok to not blog exclusively about only one part of my life.
I also wrote a lot about my recent adventures in parenting, including why my son makes me laugh, cry, and scratch my head in frustration, how he’s constantly teaching me amusing things about myself and challenging me to employ creative parenting techniques - all while continuing to make me so proud of his accomplishments and be very hopeful for his future.
I took the time to write a few lighter posts, about the upcoming major events in my love-life, how plugging-in makes my life easier, and why I like it when the weather changes to Florida’s second season, “Not Quite Summer”. I even talked about nothing important after no one else was writing about anything interesting, either.
I was also given the opportunity to read and review a nostalgic book for The Parent Bloggers Network that reminded me of my beloved grandmother. In addition, learned from a late night radio program that for the sake of hard science, I should let Bigfoot eat me, should we ever come face-to-face (which I hope we don’t!) And finally, I certainly couldn’t forget to plug this month’s more risqué posts containing details about my hoo-hoo and Oprah’s Vajayjay… ah, who wouldn’t be amused by Ron Jeremy miraculously appearing in the MRI scans of my hoo-hoo? All joking aside, this month’s actual hoo-hoo issues have been emotionally draining and sometimes frightening.
I hope you’ve enjoyed at least a few of my November 2007 blog posts… but if you need just one more post to ease your mind, you’ll have to go with the turkeys.
NaBloPoMo Post 30 - November 30, 2007
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Something that has bugged me and nagged at my “mommy instinct” for a long time (since ATK was about 3ish?) is the fact that he can never answer the question “why?”. He can tell you “when” or “where” or “what”, but never “why”. This also includes the question “how?” because “why/how” are pretty much the same thing (in a general sense).
For a long time I’ve dismissed this thinking that sometimes the question “why” is so abstract that maybe its a difficult concept for a kid to explain. I mean, a lot of times we don’t know “why” something is, it just is. It really does take some complex thinking to explain some things, right? Makes sense to me.
But now this not understanding of the “why” concept is having an impact on his homework. For example, today he had to read a short paragraph about the history of baseball and answer 9 questions. The last two questions were sentence-writing questions (instead of multiple choice). The question he had to answer was
How did baseball begin?
He tried a variety of answers, all of which I marked wrong and asked him to erase/rewrite. His answers included “Baseball is a sport,” “Baseball is a game Americans like,” and then in a desperate attempt to correctly answer, “How baseball began was it was a game”. I finally had to talk him through the critical thinking, until I coaxed him into the answer, “Baseball began in England and it was called rounders. Then New York renamed it baseball because the rules changed.”
OK, so still not a perfect answer, but IMHO it’s a decent attempt to answer the question and it contains details that support his answer that came from the original paragraph he read.
Then we had the question
Why do you think the major-league baseball teams were formed?
His answers included “Major-leagues are part of baseball,” and “In the 1850’s they were formed,” and then “The Cincinnati Red Stockings were the first baseball team”. Finally after going round and round between the two of us, he came up with the more-correct answer “So they could have more teams and people could watch more baseball.” Again, still not perfect, but an answer that I feel is acceptable.
Not including homework, ATK has never been able to answer the question “Why?/How?” for anything. It could be for the most benign thing or for something that is important - “WHY do you want a piece of candy, ATK?” and he will answer, “Why I want a piece of candy is because I want it.” Again, a somewhat abstract question… but then ask something that really doesn’t have an abstract answer - like, “Why didn’t you do what I asked you?” ends up with the answer “Because I wasn’t doing what you asked me.”
I’m starting to wonder if this inability to understand/describe/answer a “Why?/How?” question is not as ‘normal’ as I’d thought. He didn’t go through a very big “why? Why? WHY?” phase as a toddler, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. Now I’m wondering, did we skip something that is now becoming a problem?
Anyone else noticed this problem of understanding “WHY?”
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I am forever having to come up with creative “punishments” for my son (refer to the Pink Backpack post). Thank goodness he doesn’t really get himself into ‘big trouble’ very often, but when he does, the usual taking away of privileges, being grounded and so on, doesn’t really work. I still use those things in addition to a punishment, though.
Because of what happened yesterday, I invented (on the fly, thankyouverymuch!) a new twist on a timeless punishment, some version of which I probably had to do, myself, as a kid: I’m making him write “I will not spit on other people” over and over in a notebook. I’ve used this “write such-and-such, X number of times” as a punishment in the past, but since he was maybe 5, it’s been more of a ‘challenge’ to see how fast he could do it, instead of a “punishment”. So, today when I announced what he’d be doing after school, he gave me that look that said “I could honestly care less”… that was, until, I told him he had to write it until the notebook filled up. THEN he got upset. THEN I got the look of horror and realization in his eyes, and the ‘OHMYGODSHESACTUALLYSERIOUS’ reaction, (THEN I got the tantrum, which I ignored.)
I don’t know if I will actually make him fill up the whole notebook, but I have every intention of making him write it so many times (and for at least the next three days after school) that he is bored out of his mind.
Boredom is really the only “punishment” that works semi-effectively with him. Nonetheless, it still makes me feel like an awful parent person when I have to enforce it.
*SIGH* I really don’t like this part of parenting.
NaBloPoMo Post 27 - November 27, 2007
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