My kids and notes 8.11
January 17, 2024
Life with JB
We have this conversation every quarter when the Scholastic book catalog comes home. No, you can’t have another journal or cute thing, you have a large bin full of them!
Also, we just had Christmas and other presents in the past few weeks, most of which still don’t have a home.
I’m not doing this to be mean but even if I didn’t have bag lady syndrome, we have near hoarders in the family. We see them once or twice a year and their homes give me the heebies. There’s almost no place to walk or sit, because of their need to buy their kids everything they wanted as a child but couldn’t have back then. I know I wanted to order from the Scholastic catalog SO BADLY too but JB is not me. They own a bookshelf full of books. They get HUGE stacks of gifts each year and they get to shop at Comic Con when/if we go. They are not deprived, in any sense, of material things.
Life with Smol Acrobat
We’d taken Sera out for a walk together, the morning after their fever broke. On the way out, Sera’s sweater snagged on the bike, so I had to unhook her before we could leave. I didn’t think Smol Acrobat noticed but when we returned, they rushed ahead of us to push the bag that snagged her away and held it so she could pass! They have never been that thoughtful before!
They have been talking a whole lot more now. Stringing together sentences, and then stringing together thoughts to tell me little stories about what happened. They are ALSO using it to rat out JB (they still can’t say JB’s name yet, their close approximation is Wee) a lot. “Don’t kick at birds, that’s not ok.” Retort: “Wee does it!”
Oh yeah. We have a three year old now! That passed with so little fanfare here I forgot to record it. They only recently made a friend and it didn’t seem like it was worth doing a whole party thing when that’s not so much their thing right now. We had my cousin over, we enjoyed some cake. They refused to have candles on the cake because “fire is scary”. Low key was good for all of us.
Pupdate
Sera is sick. We’ve run a slew of diagnostics and still don’t know for sure what it is but we’re trying out a treatment plan to see if she responds.
Precious Moments
JB: Smol Acrobat, come here!
Smol Acrobat: No, I cannot, I have to change my diaper! I be a minute!
To me with a self-satisfied grin: I said I be a minute. I adult.
PiC muttered, “what did you eat last night, squirrel??” while I was changing an especially stinky poop diaper.
Smol Acrobat replies very seriously: no, I didn’ eat a squirrel.
JB has been convincing them to come along and leave me alone by offering “kitty snacks”.
One morning as I usher them out to breakfast: Tan Wee make me a meow meow kitty snack?
I really miss the days when Scholastic only had books for sale.
Was about about 30+ years ago? I don’t remember seeing fun things in the catalog instead of books.
I think it’s the nature of kids to want All the Fun Things. My own kid is like this, and I remember feeling the exact same way at her age. I’m not worried about it being a hoarder thing– I think of it as being more tied to their developmental stage. I know that I believed marketing hype, and I wanted anything that presented as cute/fun– I think younger kids’ brains aren’t very far along the path of parsing “but is it really that great?” or “do I really need it? Right now?” They do get there, of course, but it’s pretty natural for them to draw a straight line between looks-good-want.
I also think that part of parenting is giving kids “yeses,” but also helping them experience a “no” or a “not yet” as an expected part of life. I want my daughter to grow up into someone who gives herself no/not yet/yes in reasonable ways. Part of doing that, I think, is giving her the experience of all three during the age at which she would yes-to-all if it was up to her. Can’t blame her for wanting yes-to-all– there are things I would yes-to-all myself even now if I let myself. But: adult brain says no.
Thanks for the perspective! It’s hard to figure out what’s more baseline normal when we live in an area where it feels like over-consumption is the norm. It’s not super conspicuous all the time yet, the kids are still young enough that it feels almost within the realm of reason, but …. actually even as I type that I think my brain’s already been poisoned. I remember JB coming home from a classmate’s party laden with more take-home snacks and toys than I had sent as a gift to the birthday kid! The party itself was over the top with multiple snack times and ten different snack bins. This all feels like just so much.
We most definitely (ok, I) spend a lot of time giving JB and Smol Acrobat “no” experiences. We explain them! We share our thoughts on prioritizing. I know it won’t take away the sting of the instant gratification they aren’t getting. But I hope it takes hold over time, which I know is hard because we are surrounded by so many people whose priority is over-consumption.
I did buy all the books from Scholastic (just books though, not the other cute stuff). And then have been handing them down/donating as they grow out of them. I also buy all the food (but am pretty good at not wasting food). Otherwise I think we’ve been pretty good about limiting gifts to holidays. We can’t do just Christmas and Birthdays because DC1 has a Christmas birthday, so Easter is a bit gifty so we can spread things out a bit.
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The cute stuff is JB’s Achilles heel! And actually you have inadvertently identified why I am an adamant “No” all the time instead of “sometimes” right now – they always gravitate to the cute stuff. And I get it! I love cute stuff too. But I refuse to live like that. I also refuse to live with seeing the money spent and just tossed aside (because they will absolutely forget that they have it in 2 weeks).
I like picking specific points to spread things out a bit more. Why didn’t I (sarcasm) aim for more summer birthdays?
Fire IS scary! I don’t much like candles 😅
Alllll those quotes are so adorable I can’t pick my fav. And how heartwarming to see them noticing things and trying to proactively help.
I don’t think I realized how scary candles could seem until they pointed it out! I always thought of them as fire hazards. I hope they grow more in the way of being considerate!