Evening Observations
Heather was a little dramatic this evening. She lost a race to the door and became upset with the fact that she lost.
I tried having her look at the bright side, so I pointed out that the race must have been fun. Of course, since she lost, it wasn't fun at all and trying to tell her that having fun was more important then winning was shot down in an instant with a pouty scowl.
I think she'll understand the concept much easier through experience rather then words.
So after she was done pouting she had us put on Scooby Doo for her and she watched that for a bit. While I was getting it to play for her I remember this problem we had about a year ago with the Sooby Doo movie. It was when she was still having learning to communicate more clearly.
It would basically start out with her saying that she wanted to watch Scooby Doo. So we would put on the movie for her. First would come the dvd menu where it had this short little skit. As soon as I hit play the movie would start and she would start getting upset. "I want to watch Scooby Doo!!", she would whine.
There is nothing like experiencing the rising panic caused by trying to defuse a little girl's temper when you have no idea what the heck she's getting upset about.
It took a couple tries but I finally realized she just wanted to watch the menu intro over and over and over. Because it was just the funniest thing to her.
So Heather watched about 20 mins of Scooby Doo. I was afraid she was going to watch the whole thing and have no time for family time. I guess we switched roles temporarily. It gave Kyndra some time to cook and me some time to relax and watch the bitty man.
Its kind of interesting to me, because a typical evening is 'look at me look at me' from both Braeden and Heather, but for that time period the kids had their own little zone they were in and it allowed me to observe a little.
It also was a perfect atmosphere for Kyndra and I to talk so we chatted a bit about misc. things.
When Heather tired of her movie she came into the room we were in and played with her brother a bit. He just adores her and she loves the attention.
After about 7 mins she got herself so amped up she was literally running around him in cricles and I had to ask her to stop after she fell down and tried going at it again.
For some reason I blocked out until now that she never really stopped. She sat down for about a minute and then started up again, just walking around Braeden (who was in his walker) and putting together a strew of words that sounded better then her gibberish songs she was singing a few months ago, but they still didn't make any sense (the other day she put in 'if you want me to be your girl' into one of her songs... that should NOT be coming out of a 4 year olds mouth).
She loves to sing. The fact that she's starting to use lyrics is a little existing. Before it was her own language.
Dinner was a bit of a drama. I don't know exactly what is going on, but some how Heather is making herself too full for dinner or she is just that picky. We had this hamburger helper dish which she really had nothing to complain about. I mean it had CHEESE! What child cannot resist the power of CHEESE? ...apparently my daughter.
I also told her that if she eat her dinner she would get a treat. It looked like she wanted the candy, but not enough to eat her dinner. After spending some time trying to get her to eat we finally gave up. Kyndra put the food away and we finished our dinner. At some point Heather was hit with the reality that she wasn't getting a second chance this time, and started whining again. I don't know exactly how this one started but she went from "I don't want to eat" to "but I'm hung-gary!" in less then a minute.
Kyndra is going to talk to one of the teachers tomorrow, who happens to be someone she knows outside of the school, and see if we can pinpoint this mystery.
Due to the dinner drama she had a small timeout. I snuck into her bedroom after a few minutes and just waited for her to notice me. It took a while. She was counting the strands of beads that belong to her bead curtain. 1.. 2.. 3.. 4... 7.. 8.. 9.. 10.. 11.. 14..15.. 16.. 17.. 18.. 16.. 14.. 15.. 16.. 70...
She loves spitting out numbers. If I ask myself out loud 'what time is it?' or 'the time is...' she'll blurt out "THIRTY FOUR 'O SEVEN!!!" and I'll say 'Not quiet sweetie" and she'll reply "TWENTY-TWO SIXTEEN!". I have learned that I need to give her the correct time or she will continue to keep guessing. There must be a part of the brain that develops as you mature that tells you to stop doing something. I can picture an image of the brain right now with a octangular outlined chunk labeled with some type of scientific mumbo jumbo that roughly translated means 'control of when to know when to stop' (some individuals must develop this part of the brain much later then others).
This perked my interest so I did some googling. I think the part of the brain I'm thinking of is the frontal lobe.
Anyway, this part of the brain I'm talking about has not developed yet and Heather just doesn't know when to stop. I think most of the time she's just being persistant to see how we will react (as kids do).
Anyway, she eventually noticed I was there and we talked a little and decided to watch some online cartoons. Atomfilms has some nice short films which are perfect for her. Unfortunately when she's tired she gets really bossy and it shows when we're doing activities like this. When she gets a choice in the matter she take the opportunity to excercise her royal powers. "I said luke warm not room temperature! Take it back slave!"
Regardless we had fun. Watched a few funny animation skits and played a couple games.
I was actually really surprised how well she did with the ('Sponge Bob') puzzle games. There was this one where you click on blocks that have 3 or more touching each other. She got pretty far in that. We moved onto another Sponge Bob game, which she did pretty good at too. It required her to move Sponge Bob around different boards. The boards were basically narrow path ways and it was pretty easy to fall off. We were able to play that together or maybe I should say she allowed us to play that together.
Every time Sponge Bob fell off the board she would scream. I think my ears are still ringing from that.
"Super Granny" was an entirely different story, and that was the last game we played. Towards level three I think she just didn't know what to do with herself (tired, but having too much fun to go to bed). She had completed one of the levels and she just needed to go into the exit to go onto the next stage but she would not have it. Instead she wanted
And that pretty much was my night. I'm now finishing this off to the music of Yasushi Ishii, from the Hellsing soundtrack (disc II). It's pretty calming.