Before I FINALLY get to the Christmas DAY post I wanted to tell about what new things Eric and I have been dealing with.
Wyatt drinks apple juice non stop, if he had it his way he would drink all day in place of eating any food. We water down his juice a lot, like we put maybe less than 1/4 cup in his sippie. Anyway he was asking for it at night and at first it was once a night, then it led to every couple of hours. Most times we would go in and give him his pacifier and tell him we would get juice but really just go back to bed and he would fall asleep waiting for it. Then we switched to just water at night and he's been up more, throwing fits, screaming, asking for that tiny bit of juice we put in his sippie. Ugh. I haven't given in, I've wanted to. It's been 4 nights.
I don't know if this next issue has anything to do with the juice deprivations but he's all of a sudden noticed he's alone in his room with "strange" pictures on the wall and toys around him. He tells me, "I wanna sleep with you" "I wanna watch a show downstairs." Any excuse not to go to bed in his room. He screams loud, and I can tell he's really scared when I go check on him because he almost jumps out of his bunk bed to me and wraps his legs around me tight. Poor guy. Last night I asked him what was scaring him, he said, "the book" (the wocket in my pocket). Also the curtains were scaring him but those weren't going anywhere. Then a picture on the wall of Jesus was scaring him, on and on. His walls are pretty much bare now. I offered to leave his door open but he doesn't like that, he likes it shut. We didn't have this problem with Bianca because we were always lying with her in her bed, and then we moved to the floor until she fell asleep. So we were always in her room. I made sure from the start that Wyatt fell asleep on his own in his own room by himself. So that is what is going on with Wyatt. Aside from that he is happy to play with his balloons all day, I'll have to make a separate post about that. And right now his favorite movie is "Yellow Submarine". Wait a minute, maybe that's where these scaries are coming from, hmm, who knows, I think it's just his age.
Bianca has been a little bit of a challenge for me lately in that she demands constant attention. She's a sweet girl and she just likes to play and I like to play princesses or whatever she wants to play for a while but it's started to be to the point where I find myself unable to get to my daily tasks like laundry, dishes, ect. And that's not an excuse, as much as I'd like to use it as one. (: Her and Wyatt play side by side well or when she's telling him what to do and he does it they get along but other than that they pretty much fight when I ask them to play together. What to do..
Something had to be done so I decided to make a To Do list. Which Bianca promptly copied right next to me. This is what was on the list: Clean one room of the house, one load of laundry, call this person, email this person back, read scriptures, make dinner. I told her that as the Mommy it's my "job" to take care of the house and to feed everyone. She understood and so at first she helped me do my jobs a little. Then she just decided to play on her own when she got bored of helping me, which happened in about 5 minutes.
My thing is I want to make sure I'm giving her the attention she needs. But I also need to keep things in balance and take care of my usual responsibilities. So now, I'll do like a load of laundry then I'll tell her I'll play with her for about an hour. Then I'll do something else, then play with her again. I've found when I give her my undivided attention during playtime, instead of say unloading the dishwasher while I'm talking to her, she is much happier to let me go do what I need to do. This has been a transition. I hope it doesn't last forever but then again I'm sure soon enough she will be at school all the time and I'll miss when she wanted to play with me. So again, trying to keep the right perspective and balance.
The other part of this new situation comes back to the scaries again. If I ever go upstairs without telling my children, and they look for me and don't find me, they run upstairs screaming and crying saying they are scared. And vice versa with downstairs. So I'm pretty much with them or very near them 24/7, which has caused me to not get a lot done, especially in the way of phone calls. And aside from these new circumstances Bianca is doing well in preschool and starting to read. She sounds things out and is able to recognize words.
A couple cute things she has said lately that I want to remember: I asked her to put her clothes away and she told me, "No thanks" to which I responded, "Is that choosing the right?" (She recently learned about choosing the right in her church class) She said, "No Mommy, I'm choosing the left!" hmpf! That made me laugh outloud.
Another one: While looking through her baby book she found a lock of her hair. She asked why I had it in there and I told her so that I could remember her when she gets big and moves away. She went to get some scissors and came back and said she needed to cut some of my hair so she could remember me too." (: She's my little sweetie.
It says "I thought we can do party play in our sleeping bags together. Love Bianca, to our family."