Our newly inaugurated President Obama suggested that we observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a day of service. I heard about the suggestion kind of late, but since I deinitely do want to pass all the kindness lessons I can onto Little Bear and Pufferfish, I scrambled to come up with a service project we could do at the last minute. So I went to two websites that lists the names and mailing addresses of children with serious illnesses. The girls (Sarah and Little Bear, basically, since Pufferfish didn't really get what we were doing) and I picked names off of the sites, and spent the day making watercolor pictures to send to some of the children on the sites.
Little Bear picked a two-year-old girl named Hailey. We read that Hailey likes Winnie the Pooh, and Mickey Mouse, so Little Bear painted a bunch of pictures of Winnie the Pooh, Tigger and Mickey Mouse. I kept on telling her that this was something President Obama had asked us to do (causing Sarah to joke that President Obama had called us on the phone this morning to personally order us to make watercolor paintings) and I asked Little Bear how it felt to know that her paintings would make Hailey smile. Maybe the most important thing to Little Bear was that she enjoyed painting, but it was a big thing for her to agree to send all of her paintings to someone she didn't know. So I'd like to think a little bit of the kindness lesson sunk in for her!
Here's a picture she painted of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger standing under a tree!
Meanwhile, Monkeyboy has still been driving me completely crazy! Its especially frustrating because in his mind he truly believes that I am torturing him and neglecting him and being just plain mean.
For nstance... this afternoon while Monkeyboy was still at his friend's house, I decided I was going to take the kids to the McDonald's Playland. I called up Monkeyboy and said, would he rather we waited for him to get home, so he could go too? Monkeyboy replied, "No, just go without me." So I took the girls to McDonalds, they had a late lunch, Little Bear and Pufferfish played, etc, etc, etc.
shortly after we got home, Monkeyboy walked into the kitchen and asked if I would drive to McDonalds and get him some dinner. I told him I didn't want to go back out, but that there was plenty of food to eat for dinner in the house. I suggested he make a sandwich. He said, "The sandwich will be too small, and I'll just want to eat another and another and another and I won't get full!" I offered to make him something. I said I'd make him frozen lasagna, macaroni and cheese, Spaghetti-O's... (yeah we eat a lot of pasta in this house!!!) But in the middle of my digging through the cabinets and fridge to come up with ideas for what he could eat, Monkeyboy turned and stormed off to his room. Later, he returned glumly to the kitchen, got a loaf of bread and a jar of peanutbutter, and announced that he was just going to eat bread and peanutbutter in his room!
When the little girls saw Monkeyboy eating peanutbutter, they wanted some too, so I made them each a piece of bread with peanutbutter. Shortly thereafter I heard Monkeyboy screaming at Pufferfish, "Get out, Pufferfish! Get out!" I went to see what was wrong, and to tell Monkeyboy not to shout at the baby like that. The big problem? He didn't want her eating peanutbutter in his room.
They may seem like little things, but its like everything is a constant battle with Monkeyboy! He is so angry about everything. He percieves that the world is out to get him. When his Ipod stops working, it is my fault because I don't know how to fix it. When he is tired, he is upset with me because he doesn't want to have to do any chores. When I do not want to give him and his friends a ride somewhere because I have a house full of small children, I am being horribly unfair to him. He feels he owns certain foods, such as orange juice or cereal, and gets angry at me when he thinks any of the other kids touched his groceries. When I try to discipline Little Bear for anything, he steps in and tries to comfort her, tries to take her out of Time Out, tries to tell me that I am not being fair.
I don't have a lot of experience with adolescents, so can anyone give me any advice? It is heartbreaking to me that he is so angry at me all the time now and that I have to fight him on everything. After all, he was my first baby... the first one whose diapers I changed, who I gave baths to, who I fed, who I laid next to and read stories to at night as I tried to coax him to sleep. For the first eight years of his life, he was my little buddy... and then it started to go downhill. I do not know how to relate with this new, large, angry version o my little Monkeyboy!
On a lighter note, here is a quick picture of Little Bear and Pufferfish with one of their dogs, at their grandma's house yesterday. What a cute trio they make, huh?
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