My older daughter is now in pre-school, and based on her excitement whenever it's a school day, she really loves it. It's hard to be completely sure, though, because she has a strong tendency to be negative. Every time she comes home from school, I ask her how her day was and if she had fun. Here are a few of her typical responses.
I'm getting my work day started very early today, very early indeed. I was awake with the baby at five-thirty in the morning. My breakfast was finished by six-thirty, and I started working by seven. Before the clock hits the number ten, I fully expect to be done for the day. Considering that I normally don't finish up until around five pm, this is nothing short of remarkable. But there's a very simple reason for it.
Is it proper to go to work when you're sick (thus demonstrating a masochistic level of loyalty to the company) or is it worse than staying home because it leads to your coworkers getting sick from contact with you?
One thing that's really cool about kids is that they have no real sense of the plausible and the implausible, and they don't really know how the world works. The result of this is that their games can sometimes be amazingly surrealistic.
Yesterday I was having a really hard time getting any work done because the baby was just not settling down. So what I had to do was to keep her in a cradle in the kitchen because it has a little dog toy in it with a button that makes it bark, laugh, play music and display flashing lights, all of which is just insanely entertaining to a two-month-old. Every time she fell asleep for a little while I would run into the living room, grab my laptop, and do a little work until she started fussing again.
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My oldest daughter discovered lying recently. I'm not sure how it happened exactly- whether she learned it by example from the kids at her preschool, or whether she developed it all on her own out of a simple desire to avoid getting a time-out.
But either way, she's definitely started doing it. If I tell her to stop fussing about not getting a lollipop, she'll keep right on fussing but she'll change the official reason for it. So instead of saying “I want a lollipop, I want a lollipop,” she'll start telling me she misses her friends or that she's cold. And then if I ask her what would make it better, can you guess what the answer is? That's right- a lollipop!
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This baby is not asleep.
Getting the baby to go to sleep at night. It ought to be easy, right? Just feed her something and she drifts off naturally, smiling that angelic little infant smile.
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I don't like video games, and I never really have. To be honest, I did used to play Pac Man when I was a kid, and Nintendo Duck Hunt was pretty fun. I used to be pretty good at Pole Position. But I've never put anything like the hours into video gaming that a lot of other people do. Actually, even my mother spends much more time playing video games than I do.
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It seems odd now to think that just a short time ago, it was considered so intrinsically funny to have the man stay at home and watch the kids while the woman went out to work that they used that as the premise for a sitcom.
Just think about that. The mere idea was considered to be so funny that it would make a good basis for an entire show. Not a very good show maybe, but still. Now things in the USA have changed so much that it's not uncommon to see huge some muscle-bound guy with gang tattoos pushing a stroller down the street, and not looking the slightest bit self-conscious about it.
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So, which makes more sense when one parent telecommutes and the other works out of the house- to have the telecommuting parent try to work and watch the kids at the same time, or to have him or her start working after the other parent gets home?
Parents will tell you that their kids pick up things from places that they themselves can’t even remember. There are things my daughter knew—from various animal habitats, predators versus prey, and so many other concepts—way before we ever discussed them together. The latest thing that I’ve noticed in my six-year-old, however, is her using the Scientific Method through crafting. Read more about Crafting with the Scientific Method