THE FROG-ACADEMY

Dilemmas & Decisions..!
This post was published to The Wellyboots Tribe at 23:35:34 09/07/2006

It’s been a good weekend. I was at a minister’s wives conference Friday night and all day Saturday. It was really good – refreshing, challenging and good to meet a few new faces. Elim is a fairly small ‘denomination’ compared to most and it is also a pretty close knit community. There were twenty of us at the conference and I was able to eat meals with the wives of Elim’s national leaders. Now that all sounds very grand, but it really wasn’t. It was just plain fun (. I guess over the years I will become a familiar face amongst them, even if at the moment I am one of the babies in the camp! Not that I was made to feel that way at all.

Abbie has her pre-primary ballet exam next weekend and we are practicing hard for that. She has to do a whole 30 minutes routine (21 mini dances) and it’s a lot to remember, but she is getting some lovely poise and it certainly seems to be helping her pigeon toed-ness. I’m sure she will pass (. She’d better had – I’ve already bought her blue dress for the next class (Phoebe needs the next size pink one now)!
Today has been pretty quiet. Both boys managed to invite themselves to friend’s for the afternoon (a common occurrence on a Sunday) and the girls stayed home and played various games together – as well as practicing ballet. But even so they all seemed to have managed to make a nice mess in their rooms in the couple of hours before church this morning and that meant the boys especially needed to tidy before they could watch the final tonight. BUT did they do it? – NO – not even with that incentive and a 10 minute extension given to the 7.00 deadline (by me, not the match) – so they went to bed in tears because I disallowed them to watch it. They’d missed almost half of it by the time they’d done the job anyway and Jacob went to bed in a rage – as is all too familiar still with him. He cannot seem to see that it is his own choice that prevents his pleasure… when will he learn? He and I had a long ‘chat’ about it all just last night – in the hope from me that he might be able to consciously work on his attitude, if only for a couple of days before the next reminder, but nothing changes! And of course, Joel gets the brunt of it when Jacob calls him nasty names (out his own frustration I know but still), whilst Joel is simply lying in bed sad, but understanding of the consequences. Jacob even recognises the fact that we are at a loss to know how to discipline him – “nothing works on me…punishments don’t work, smacks don’t work, losing stuff doesn’t work…nothing works.” I said to him that one thing that might work would be if he DECIDED to make a change and work hard at being different. I know that list from him is all negative, but don’t be fooled – that’s the way he sees it. We have tried all the positive rewards for good behaviour too, but he is not motivated by them either. His motivation is purely in the moment – he doesn’t look ahead further than the immediate ‘now’ to see either a positive or a negative that might be in store for him. If the motivation doesn’t come from within himself (which it seldom does) it simply will not be there!! He is not an actively disobedient child, he is a neglectfully disobedient child. It’s not so much about what he does do, but all about what he doesn’t do… which means he is not meaningfully naughty, but angers me all the same. It really is a tough one!

Anyway – ‘nough said about that now. He’s really is not that bad a kid and I told him the other day how I think he is ‘Ace’ – he has so many fantastic qualities (and I listed a few off to him to build him up some), but sadly they are all too often overshadowed by the ones that are not so good and get him into trouble more than he should – his temper and his tongue being two major ones.

Now to change the subject!

Decisions.
This week I have made a couple of decisions and these are those! :

1. I am going to ask more people who I don’t know from church around for coffee. I feel that my social network is a little narrow atm and there are a couple of mums that I chat to up at playgroup that I’d love to get to know better. So look out mums – here I come!


2. I am going to dance to the beat of a different drum next academic year! Instead of 8 on, 1 off (sticking to school half terms), I am going to split the terms into quarters and take a break each quarter, but still coincide the half with the school half because of playgroup and Jacob. That way the Wellyboots HS gets an extra two/three week hols each term and I get a ‘catch up on house work’ week, because, Flylady or no, I simply can’t do it all and teach at the same time and my energy is sapped by 3pm. By 4.00 I need to start tea and I can’t do much upstairs once the kids are in bed and that’s the bit that gets done least. I either need to find some way of roping the kids in more, but they are so young still and I feel they do enough already really, or I need a catch up week at least every 4! I plan to call it an ‘activities’ week for the kids sake, not a week off, otherwise Joel will consider it an excuse for playing on the PS2 to excess (something I allow a little more in the breaks). My plan is that they should use the time to play lots of games together, do lots of free-arts & crafts, do gardening, play outside lots, have more time to play on the schooly PC games more (as I really feel they benefit enormously from these), that kind of thing. We might also use the time to assemble already-completed projects – not so that they are doing more work, but so that they are getting to ‘stick it all together’ – which is the most satisfying and fun part after all! We’ll probably go out places too that week, even if it’s just to feed the ducks! That’s something that our normal weeks lack much of.


3. I am going to sort out my relationship with my Mum more – over the summer and continuing when she gets back (she’s down south for the summer break already). Reminds me – must ring her tomorrow!