Do Not Exasperate Your Children...

Ephesians 6:4  Fathers, do not exasperate your children, instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the LORD.


I firmly believe that children need to learn the meaning of the word 'no', and I believe that the sooner they learn it, the easier it will be on them, on the family, and on the community as a whole.  I believe that many parents have given up on trying to teach their children 'no' and rather go for 'no, ok?'  But to be effective, 'no' can't be framed as a question.  It is no because it is no.  It is not 'no' only if you want to agree with me.

I also do not believe that children should be allowed to run the house.  They should be taught that certain things are not ok and are off limits, especially for the youngest members of the family. Don't touch the computer, for example, or don't drink mommy's coffee Gabriel, or don't put your feet on the table at dinner time, or don't pull the cat's tail or try to take his food from his mouth while he's eating...you know, the things that not only protect the valuables in your house from being wantonly broken, but also to be sure that your children remain relatively safe in their home environment and it is an enjoyable experience for all involved.

But even though the word 'no' is used liberally around our house, I also believe that it is our duty a parents to set up areas where it's easy to follow the rules.  That way, things are more evened out.  You may get more 'no's' at the dinner table, for example, but the living room and your play place is pretty much free game, within reason.

Along those lines, when I see a problem area, I try to figure out if this is an area that needs a 'no' taught, or is this an area that needs to be rethought and redesigned with the kids in mind.

Our 'dining room', if you want to call it that, is actually the room that used to be the tiny kitchen before an addition was added to the house and the kitchen was moved back there.  To get to this 'new' kitchen, you must walk through the 'old' kitchen.  It is quite narrow and a little bit long, and has pretty narrow entrances to it on both ends.  In this small small space, we have a dining table pushed up against the wall with 5 chairs and a highchair crammed around it and 3 tall bookcases.  That means that if someone is sitting in a chair eating and you want to walk past them, they must push their chair all the way up to the table to their chest is touching the table so that you can get past behind their chair.

The bookcases hold most of the books that we have in our house.  The reason that they are there is because there really is no other place to put them.  We have a gate that we can close off so we can keep the littles either in or out of the dining room/kitchen area and away from the books.  But, of course, Jesse's favorite past time is to pull all of the books off the second shelf from the bottom and watch them hit the floor.  They make a wonderful slapping sound on the stone tiles we have in that room, and the pages flutter so wonderfully, it's easy to see how he just can't resist.  However, as much fun as he has pulling them off, it is not fun putting them back up, and it's not even like we can leave them down for the day and just collect them once a day because if we do that, they we can't walk back and forth to the kitchen.

I decided that this was not a place where I wanted to try to teach a 'no' so Elizabeth and I decided to take all the books off that shelf and leave that shelf empty.  Actually, to be honest, it was my idea and she was roped into helping.

This is what we started with (this was after they had been picked up and somewhat neatly placed back on the shelf):

...and this is what we ended up with:

There is something in front of the other shelf so that Jesse can't pull those books off right now.  You see, the problem is that we have too many books!  There is no way to empty those two shelves and still have all the books out.

So now I have come to a dilemma:

Do I put the extra books away to be taken back out who knows when?

or

Do I get rid of some of the books that we don't use as much and just figure that we can get them back out at the library if we ever want them?

Is it ethical to get rid of books?!?!?!?!?!?

It seems kind of pointless to put the books away.  I mean, if they are packed away, when am I ever going to say, "Wow!  We really have a lot of extra space here!  Let's pull out those old books that we haven't seen in years and stack them up right here!"

But on the other hand, it's really hard to get rid of books!

It does seem more practical to have a carefully chosen library of really awesome books so that they aren't lost in the mediocre ones, I guess, it's just hard to part with books.

Does anyone out there know what I mean?

On The Bookshelf: Fact and Fiction

I am still making my way through my The Princes of Ireland book, but curiosity got the best of me at the library the other day and I picked up The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog--What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing by Bruce D Perry, MD, PhD and Maia Szalavitz.


I seriously could not put this book down.  It was an amazing combination of stories of the children that Dr Perry had worked with as well as pretty detailed explanations of the brain, and when, why and how it develops.  It was absolutely eye opening and made me want to go and just hug on the kids.  It was pretty incredible to see how different children were either able or not able to cope with their circumstances based on how they were treated when they were infants.  Although I do not often buy books for myself, this is one that I would actually consider purchasing just to be able to read and digest it more.  I definitely recommend it as a good read to understand the brain and its development a bit more.

Also while at the library, I happened upon this book:

 

Oh. My. Goodness.  This is the cutest book I have seen since Skippy John Jones!  It is about a cat named Pete who has buttons on his shirt and as you turn the pages, one by one they pop off.  But does Pete cry?  Goodness no!  Buttons come and buttons go.  He just sings his song about his groovy buttons.  (Ask Gabriel, he can sing it for you.)  Then, at the end, when there are no more buttons on his shirt, he looks down and sees...you guessed it!  His BELLY BUTTON!  It is so cute!  It is a great learning tool.  Each of the buttons is a different color, they have the written math problems on each page as you count down as well as a large numeral to see and trace with your finger if you'd like.  But I think that the best best part for me is that in the end, when Pete has no more buttons, he is sitting on top of a surf board on top of a red VW Bug! AHHHH!!!!  That is what Elizabeth and I rode around in when we lived in Hawaii!  And we strapped our boards to the top!  Perfect book!  I am definitely going to have to add this one to the collection!  I haven't gone online yet to hear the free song, and I'm not sure that I really want to because I think that we have come up with a very good version of it ourselves, but I may go check it out.

Another Visit to the Bookshelf

So here's another peak at what I've been reading lately.  Once again, it is a smattering of random stuff, but it sure beats reading the back of the cereal box...again!


Plastics A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel was a great read.  I actually read this one a while ago, but it didn't make it on my last list.  This was not an easy read.  It had a lot of chemical names and compounds that you kind of had to pay attention to and me somewhat familiar with to make it through the book.  The author did explain the words she was using, but to make it easier to follow along, it was nice to already have a background in the jargon.  This book was a real eye opener.  I think that one of the biggest things that I hadn't thought of was the whole plastic pollution issue.  The thing is, or so I learned in this book, is that it is not the bags and bottles that are the biggest plastic pollution issue.  It is that these things never compost, but rather break down into little micro-sized pieces that are now in our oceans.  It is impossible to remove these micro pieces because if a net were used, it would also remove the tiny organisms that are important to our ecosystem.  Another aspect that I had not thought of was how the tubing that is used in the hospitals is all plastic and that is used in babies in the NICU.  That means that sometimes in healing our babies, we are also infecting them with plastic 'runoff' from the tubing and therefore causing complications down the road.  Never thought of that.


The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon was an incredible read.  It took a minute to get into it, but once I did, I really couldn't put it down.  It is the fascinating true story of a girl who lived in Afghanistan during the Taliban rule.   It is written by a reporter, and I could feel this in the way that it read.  I can't quite put my finger on it, but it was not written in a way to entertain, but rather to inform one of details.  But it was not dry at all.  I was captivated.  One day, while I was shopping at Safeway, I saw a woman in full chadir (the one where the whole person is covered with only a little net rectangle over the eyes to see out) and it really made me think about the huge differences in our cultures.  But this book does not focus on the culture so much, but rather on one girl's life and how she moved purposefully through her life constantly striving to help her family and her community against what seemed to be insurmountable odds.  After reading this book, I wondered what exactly is it that I am doing for the good of my community and if I would have had the ability and perseverance to do what she did.  



Miss Spider's Tea Party by David Kirk
For some reason, this has been Gabriel's book of choice for the last few weeks, so I have read this one about one million times.  Well, actually, what happened was that he was into Miss Spider's New Car



which anyone who knows Gabriel will know that this one is more up to his speed, but he misplaced the book and so he had to settle for the tea party one.  It's still cute with lots of bugs in it.  He likes to read the same book every day at nap time for a while then he will just up and pick a new one.



I just finished reading The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner with Jo and Gabriel, so they have spent the last week or so playing boxcar children in the backyard or under the table in the dining room in inclement weather.  It's a cute story about a group of children who are on their own and find an abondoned boxcar to live in.  They are running away from their grandfather, who they think is mean, but it turns out that really he was looking for them and is very nice and rich, too.  I think that part was kind of lost on the kids, but they liked the part about the kids making their own home in the boxcar.  Honestly, that's all I really remember about the book from when I read it when I was little, too.  Cute read.


The Enclave by Anne Aguirre was also a good read.  It is another one of those books that takes place in the future (the not so distant future, it would seem with all this crazy weather we are having!).  It is about a girl who lives below the ground in what was the subway system and then is sent away from her clan to live above the ground.  She realizes that there is indeed life above ground and she and her friend, who was cast out with her, try to survive above the ground.  There is a sequel to this, and I will read that one, too, but it seems like an awful lot of the new literature is about the future, and sometimes I get tired of reading about everything getting blown up, taken over and/or enclosed and ruled and teenagers trying to figure out how to live.  Maybe because it's kinda scary to think about?  Or maybe because it's not the literature I grew up on, or maybe it's just because I like to vary my reading (as is made obvious by what I end up burying my nose in!)

On another note...

A neighbor called and asked if we have power.  We do.  They asked if they could run an extension cord from here to there.  I told them that they could but that the part of the house that is closest to them is an addition, and is not wired well and the fuse can't take much before it blows.  It blows on us all the time with just the fridge and the microwave.  I told them that they could use the power, but mainly just to run a lamp or charge a phone or something small but not like a TV and lights and a computer and everything.  They said they would call me back.  They never did.  It just seems like two things:  1.  This storm did not spring suddenly upon us.  If you know that you will probably lose power, you should prepare at least somewhat so that you have some sort of lighting and a plan of what to do when you can't turn on the TV, and 2.  If you want to borrow electricity from your neighbor, you should not be expecting to power your whole house with it in an attempt to act as if the power is not off.   Anyway, that's just my opinion, but then again, I am the one sitting here with full power.  If my lights were off, maybe I would think differently.

I hope everyone is safe and I plan to go to bed now and hopefully sleep through what's left of the storm and wake up with at least some of the shingle still on my roof!

On My Bookshelf...

So people are always saying what they are reading, and upon thinking about what I have read and been reading this year, I realize that it is quite an eclectic selection of books.

Here are a few of them, in no particular order:

The Guinea Pig Diaries by AJ Jacobs

 

This was a pretty fun, easy read about the author who decides to do a series of life experiments on himself like living for a month being completely honest with everyone about everything, saying yes to everything his wife asks him to do for another month, outsourcing his life to India for another one and so on.  But what I found interesting, and what I found  made the book more credible, is that he actually does research and looks into himself and humanity in general throughout the experiments.  He is very witty and some of his insights are actually pretty interesting.  I just picked this one off the shelf because it had the words 'guinea pig' in the title and then when I saw what it was about, it pricked my interest.

The Sleep Lady's Good Night, Sleep Tight by Kim West


I picked this one up to try to help us figure out Gabriel's sleep issues.  While it didn't solve anything, there are some really good points in this book that helped me develop a sleep routine for him and also helped me to develop a sleep 'schedule' for Jesse.  Jesse is an excellent sleeper, but Kim West just put into words what we had been doing anyway, and she reminded me that it's OK to put Jesse down for a bona fide nap just a short 2 hours after he wakes up in the morning.  Her book is very well organized and is divided by age.

1-2-3 Magic for Christian Parents by Thomas W Phelan and Chris Webb



A friend gave me this book, again to address Gabriel's sleep issues.  But I found that it helped in dealing with Jo's breakdowns, too.  It is a very clearly defined discipline method that is gentle but firm and consistent.  It worked well for Jo, but not so much for Gabriel.  It says that you can start young with the 1-2-3 method, but Gabriel just didn't respond to it.  Maybe I will try again in a few months.

Peace Child by Don Richardson



I finally got my hands on this illusive book.  It is actually part of Elizabeth's curriculum, but after having such a hard time finding it, I figured I wanted to read it and find out what the fuss was all about.  I could totally write a whole post about this book.  It absolutely amazing.  Don Richardson is a missionary who goes with his wife to witness to a cannibalistic tribe in New Guinea.  As he is trying to reach these people who are so totally different than anything that we can even imagine, he sees how God has been laying the groundwork for His Word to be spread there.  The book is a bit graphic in its cannibalistic violence, but that description, I believe, is necessary so that the reader can truly understand what God has done in these tribes.  The part that shocked me the most was that this all took place within the last 70 years or so.  This was an incredible read, one that I would recommend for both the mission field significance as well as just the interest of the book itself.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green


So this is one that I really didn't have much interest in reading.  My friend lent it to my daughter to read, but I told her that she was not allowed to read it until she was caught up on her school reading, but then when a group of the girls went to the book festival last weekend in DC, they were all raving about John Green, so I figured I would read the book to see what all the fuss was about.  It was a good read.  I don't know.  I mean, it was good, but it didn't move me like Peace Child did.  But then, I guess this really wasn't that type of book.  It is about these teenagers who all have cancer, and it is about how they live (and die) and deal with it (living and dying).  I read the book in about 2 days, and I realized that while I was reading it, I was irritable and moody (so maybe it moved me more than I am admitting).  But I found it to be a little too raw for me right now.  With not knowing what if happening with Jo, and with my mind and imagination running wild with the possibilities, this book on cancer and children being terminally ill may not have been the best choice for me.  Or maybe it was.  I don't know.  It was a gripping book, one you don't want to put down, and it raises a lot of questions, at least it did for me.  Do the 'rules' change if you are terminally ill?  I don't know the answer to that one.

Ok, so that's a few of my recent reads.  I will put up more as I remember them and have time.  Sorry for the lousy reviews.  It's late and I'm not a very good review writer unlike her, who is incredible.  In fact, don't go there and read her reviews, because it will make mine look even worse.