We have had Grandma and Grandpa in town and it has been lovely. I love having lots of family around! Grandma gave me sewing lessons and supervised the creation of a new pair of snail pants for Sarah. These new pants will not fall apart every time they go through the wash. Sarah helped with the pin cushion each time, handing us pins when we needed them.
One evening, Amy was singing a made-up song about the animals that began with each letter of the alphabet as she completed an alphabet puzzle. Then she moved on to singing the alphabet straight through. Grandma started accompanying her on the piano and Amy kept singing. It was adorable.
There was one day that started at 4am. For part of the early time, Sarah was in the bathroom looking at books by herself. It was hard to stay mad when I could hear her belting out the words to a song from The Banza by Diane Wolkstein, singing about eating tigers raw.
There is so much that Amy does that I marvel at with loving wonder, because, in part, it seems to be evidence of brilliance or creativity. What if I had the same loving wonder towards Sarah’s yelling or any of her isms (stims)? I trust Amy to thrive and be in charge of when she wants to learn new things. What if I trusted Sarah the same way? Trusting but still offering encouragement and assistance? I mostly do, especially in the SR room, but there are certainly places where I don’t trust Sarah’s interests to lead where I want her to go. Hmm. In The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, there is a page where the mom says if the baby bunny becomes a boat to sail away from her, then she will become the wind and blow him where she wants him to go. Bless my mom’s heart, she rewrote our copy to have the mother bunny say she will blow him where he wants to go. What a difference a word can make. With Amy I am essentially wanting to blow her where she wants to go. With Sarah I think there is sometimes (probably when I am judging myself harshly) an under-layer of, “I’ll blow you where you want to go but first you have to be the way I want you to be.”
Sometimes it feels like being tripped by a low rope when I have certain thoughts in the midst of things seeming to go so well overall. For example, sometimes when Sarah says her customary “making a milkshake” or something similar that isn’t quite a full sentence, instead of reveling in her amazing clear speech, I trip over the thought that I can’t believe we are still here working on complete sentences and wondering how long it will take and feeling like she is stupid and I will never get us where I want us to be. When I was in first grade I was walking to the playground at school and I forgot that one of the entrance paths was blocked by a thin rope and we were supposed to go a different way. I was walking along and suddenly I was flat on my back. That is sort of how I feel when I suddenly have such ugly thoughts about Sarah or her abilities. Ouch.
A small ode to Sonia… She helps me stay sane and keep me on an even keel. She is there to be wonderful with my kids when I have no space for anything but snippishness. She is there to help me not freak out too much about home schooling and to bring more organization to the parts of home schooling that need it. She helps keep my house from being a dump. She gives our cat some love when he would otherwise be a bit more neglected. She helps me think about food and parenting. She helps me think about almost everything.
This week, Sonia led the kids in a science project of planting cat grass seeds in plastic cups. The girls loved filling the cups with dirt and sprinkling the seeds in. Then I poured the extra water into the extra dirt and they enjoyed playing in the mud. Then we added the mud to the water table.
There are many times when I don’t have the space for the girls’ upsets, but sometimes I do and it often helps to do a time-in. I just park myself and let them be upset and then we snuggle and talk. Perhaps I need more time-ins for myself when I am feeling upset. Yesterday had lots and lots of upsets. I’m hoping today has fewer. Yesterday when I would tell the girls to do something and they wouldn’t do it, then I felt depressed because it seems like my life is full of issuing requests that are ignored or rejected loudly. I am intending that today I will stay more present with each moment as its own moment instead of lumping it with all of the past. If they don’t listen to me, it means they don’t want to do this one particular thing. It doesn’t mean it will be this way forever. It also doesn’t actually mean that this is how all of my minutes are spent. In fact, yesterday had two wonderful snuggly times of reading with the girls on the sofa. As I think about needing to get the girls dressed this morning I feel my intention flagging into despair. Argh. Into the breach! Into the breeches!
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