A life lesson learned from kids being mean...

Yesterday my son came home from school and had his first bad experience from other kids not being so nice. Who am I kidding, “not so nice”, these were a couple of brats being mean. Now look who isn't being nice. LOL These are two boys who he has been friends with since they were all two in preschool together.

He tells me they didn’t want to play with him at recess so they kept running away from him. He told me they were being really mean and made him cry.

This just breaks my heart because this is his first experience with this. He hasn’t made any new friends in kindergarten yet and has been holding onto his well known friends. While he is telling me this sad story I am thinking to my self, “I need to be on that play ground so I can straighten these boys out.” Ok my thoughts were a little meaner than that but I am not going to say what I was really thinking. If you can’t tell I have gone into overprotective mom mode.

Now I take this time to teach my son a lesson from this very bad experience he has had. I explain to him that kids can be very mean and he is going to have this happen over and over again in his life. Heck who am I kidding; adults are just as bad sometimes.

Anyway, I go onto explain to him that they were not being nice and this is not how he should ever treat someone. I told him it isn’t nice to be mean to someone and he should remember this moment if he ever chooses to be mean and exclude someone at recess.

He told me he was going to yell at them if they did it again. I told him, he needs to make some new friends and just ignore them when they treat him this way. I let him know that if he just ignores them when they want to be mean this will be easier on him and he won’t end up crying and he can go off and play with some new friends. I did however remind him that if they want to play he needs to be nice and not exclude them as they did to him.

Honestly, I don’t know if this all went over his little head or not but I tried. I just hate hearing about him having a bad day and crying at school.

I know I had a tough time growing up, especially in my teen years because girls are so mean. I just want to shelter my son from all these bad experiences that I know he is going to have.

I want to raise my kids to be nice to others and to not treat people the way they wouldn’t want to be treated. I would like to believe that in the end the nice person will win out every time.

Raising our kids equally...haha

How different we are with our kids. I know we all have every intention of raising are kids the exact same way and in some respects we defiantly do. I however have already discovered how different I am with my second child verses how I was with the first.

1st child….
House is baby proofed to the hilt. We had every possible baby proofing gimmick and gadget. Nothing is going to cause harm to this baby.
2nd child…
Throw some outlet covers on, add a gate to the stairs and we are good to go. If he is playing in the toilet he can be washed...

1st child…
Confined to the living room by the baby gate. He will not be out of my site for a second.
2nd child…
Where is that child of mine? He just won’t stay in the room I am in. Last night he moved into the dinning room where he was pulling the knob on the water cooler and pouring water all over the floor. Lovely! Yet, I am to lazy to get the gate that is in the garage collecting dust.

1st child…
Eats everything according to the pediatrician’s guidelines. He didn’t have his first sweet snack (junk food) until he was 2. I was so strict.
2nd child…
Eating solids at 8 months old. Loves ice cream; I can’t sit down with a bowl with out sharing it with him. Yesterday I was eating a cookie and he had half of it. He is 10 months old….I am a little to relaxed with this one.

1st child….
Very structured nap schedule.
2nd child…
Oh he is getting grumpy; I guess he needs a nap.

I could go on and on about how much different I am with child number 2 than I was with child number 1. I don’t know if I am just a little more relaxed, a little busier or child one broke me down and it is easier to give in to child number 2. My first one is 5; the second one is 10 months old. Am I going to continue to smoother my first and let the second have his way as they continue to grow?

I want to know, how different are you with each of your children? If I had a third would I be even worse?

His Crazy Obsession for Perfection

Today I am going to pick on my husband who is an engineer. I think his brain is wired very differently because he is an engineer and he can drive me crazy with his neurotic obsessions with perfection in every task that he does around the house.

Back in May he bought more bricks to build a flower bed in our front yard. Now the moment he brought these home I was mad because on the opposite side of the drive way is a brick flowerbed that has not been finished.

He built it with the bricks 2 years ago but never filled it with dirt for me. Instead of a pretty flowerbed we grow pretty weeds and grass in an empty flowerbed. I wanted to fill this flowerbed long ago but he wouldn’t let me because he wanted to do something with the bricks. Last summer came and I couldn’t fill it because I was pregnant and just couldn’t manage moving all that dirt to fill it. This summer I have a baby on the go and there is no easy way to get out into the yard and fill it in either (to close to the road).

Now back to today’s flowerbed. In May he bought bricks to make a second flowerbed (or weed bed as I would call them). I was not happy but he said he would build it that weekend and finish them both. Haha, I said, no way and was I ever right. I don’t want to be right but he takes forever to do anything.

He has worked on this flowerbed every weekend since May and he just finished the first row of bricks. I blame this on the fact that he is an engineer who obsesses over all the wrong things. Picture this… he is out their with his tools, level, laser level and everything else to make sure that each brick is at the perfect height and they are nice and level. Anyone else would have built this in one day but not my husband. Oh no, he uses three different levels, adjusts each brick just so, so and drives me crazy the entire time.

What drives me the craziest about his need to perfectly engineer the bricks is the fact that the end product can be unfinished and look awful but that doesn’t matter because each brick has been perfectly positioned? I could just scream….All I want is a nice place to plant a few flowers!

He is this way with every project he does. I remember when we laid ceramic tile in our bathroom a few years ago and he was worse with the leveling on this project. The poor glue was setting faster than he could put down a tile. I am sure I drive him nuts because I am the exact opposite and will eye-ball everything and say looks good.

Does anyone else have an engineer for a husband who does these types of crazy things? OK he doesn’t have to be an engineer but does your husband obsess over tasks or never finish projects? I need to know I am not alone on this one…..

P.S. If my camera battery isn't dead tonight I will add a picture of my current weed bed for everyone to see. :)

Laundry here, laundry there, laundry everywhere...

Laundry is the one chore I hate the most. Of course it has to be the chore that takes the most time, and it never ends. I have tried many different ways to simplify the laundry load but I just can’t do it.

The worst part, I do all this laundry and I have the smallest amount of dirty cloths of all of us. It is the others in my house that produce the massive amounts of laundry.

First there is the baby…. He goes through at minimum two outfits a day if not three. You put him into a high chair he trashes everything he is wearing. He is such an independent baby. He does not want anyone feeding him. He wants to do it himself and when he does it himself he also wears it. He ends up head to toe in food. Ah yes and of course what goes in must come out. He is notorious for pooping right out of his diapers. I have tried every diaper size, type etc… it doesn’t matter he is a super pooper. LOL.

Second is the five year old. I call him the king of stains. His shirt gets everything rubbed onto it. It is his towel, so to speak. His sleeves and shoulders are always used to wipe his face clean. I don’t care how much I preach about not doing this, still happens. Then I love “I didn’t do that mommy” and the evidence is on the sleeve. He now has a new habit of chewing on the collar of the shirt and stretching it out. If anything is on his hands the sides of the shirt are also destroyed. I buy oxy clean by the boat load and I still can’t get his cloths clean half the time. I soak, scrub and launder and we still have stains. Their wont be many hand-me downs for his little brother.

Finally there is my husband, the biggest contributor of them all. He dresses for the office during the day and works out at the gym every day at lunchtime. He comes home each day with a backpack full of smelly sweaty gym cloths. Then when he gets home he has to change into something more comfortable. Now he has gone threw three outfits in one day. I try to get him to reuse stuff that hasn’t been on long and really isn’t dirty. This is pointless because he lays it at the end of the bed where the dog gets hair all over it. I ask him to hang it all back up but that is an even bigger joke.

The boys go through cloths also but at least their stuff is still small. Lord help me when they get bigger.

I recently tried to set a new rule for myself and do just one load of laundry every day so that when the weekend comes I don’t spend an entire day doing laundry. This is a great thought but I have yet to successfully put it into practice.

My mom uses a laundry service and it cost her $10 a week for her and my dads cloths. They don’t have much laundry so this is great for them. This service would probably cost me $100 and unless they are coming to my house and putting it all away that isn’t much help to me either.
Is there a trick to making this never ending task just a little less daunting? I want to know what are your secrets to making laundry easier?