"Why?"

I love watching my children develop.  One of the most fascinating aspects to me is the universal language development.

Adina's first two words (way back when she only knew 2 of them...) were "Hi" and "Yea."  That is her personality.  It's amazing how early that came out.

Two of Ze'ev's first two words were, "No" and "Mine."  Now I am not saying these two words are his personality per say.  I believe that having a 2 1/2 year old sister at the time that he was learning how to talk influenced his word choice a bit.  Just this week, he started also responding with "Ya."  Joy to my ears!  For a very long time all I heard was, "No no no no no."  He is very cute when he says it, but "Ya" is nice to hear too.

The real thing that has fascinated me this past week is Adina's perfectly timed development.  What do all the textbooks say is a 3 year-old's favorite word?
"Why?"

Well, one week before Adina's third birthday, the "Why"'s began.  I was giving her a bath one day, and I said, "Please lean your head back."
"Why?"
"So the water doesn't get in your eyes."
"Why?"
"Because you don't like water in your eyes."
"Why?"
"I don't know.  Why don't you like it?"
"I don't know.  Why?"

At this point I just laughed.

How classic.

And we've been having conversations like this multiple times a day ever since.

Do three year olds really want their "Why"'s answered, or do they just really like asking it?

Temptation to Indulge

By the title of this post, you might think that I am writing about the temptation a parent feels to indulge themselves.  It is so easy to justify, "I had a really long day with the kids.  I need 6 scoops of ice cream tonight."  True, this temptation exists.  Except I don't necessarily disagree with this temptation and I go right on and indulge.  Maybe that'll change someday, but right now I am where I am.

This month, what I've really been thinking about is indulging children.  Ze'ev is still too little to understand the concepts of not having, acquiring, or wanting beyond the immediate moment.  Adina, however, has definitely reached an age of having long-term wants, anticipation, and understanding whether or not each and every one of those desires is fulfilled.

Instinctively, I am not one to overindulge my children.  In my natural, uninfluenced mode of parenting, I offer something special (brand new activity book, special icecream outing, etc.) once every few weeks.  Since these experiences do not take place on a daily basis, Adina's excitement in those moments has always been priceless.  Her eyes lit up, her grin spread from ear to ear, and sometimes she even started jumping because she just couldn't contain her excitement.

The past month, however, she has had a birthday, 8 days of Chanukkah and a week with grandparents and cousins.  At least once a day, the opportunity arose for me to allow one of those "special treats."  Because I see how much she enjoys those moments, I thought, "Ok, so she'll have a whole month of excitement!"  and I allowed a lot more than she's used to.

Unfortunately, this did not result in the immense excitement that I expected.  Instead, a very sad thing resulted.  She became desensitized to receiving special gifts and getting special treats.  In a very short amount of time, she acquired a feeling of entitlement.  If I don't give her something special, it results in protests.

She has a few more birthday presents coming this week, and after that we are going back to "lockdown mode" for a bit in an attempt to de-program this expectation for "special" every day.  I don't want anyone to think I am going to deprive my child.  She will not live a joyless life for a month.  She will still get to play with all of her toys, have play dates with her friends, eat cake on Shabbat, and all of those things.  I am just going to remind her that ice cream every time we do errands and presents to open every time the mail man comes are not expectations that are acceptable in our family.

I hope the "re-conditioning" happens fairly quickly, because I love seeing her get so excited over simple joys when they are special and rare.

Chanukkah with cousins and life :)

Wow, it has been almost a month since I last made a blog entry!  Sometimes, this amount of time elapses between entries because I experience a bit of writer's block.  This month, however, that was not the case at all.  Actually I had a LOT of ideas to write about.  The problem was finding time to write.  Thank G-d, I have recently acquired a lot of new students and now have a pretty full tutoring schedule during nap time and post-bed time.  Given that I usually caught up on housework and wrote during those times, I now find myself with barely enough time to catch up on housework!  And then after two weeks, I found all of the ideas looming over my head to write to be a deja vous from middle school.  I used to only write in my journal every 6 months because I felt like I had to capture every aspect of my life in my journal.  If too many days went by without writing, the thought of capturing every aspect of all of the days passed was way too overwhelming, so I just didn't write at all.

When I found a half hour of time to write, I had two blog ideas!  Which one would I write first?  I'll just wait, I decided, until I have enough time to write everything I want.
Well the ideas piled up and the time never came, so I decided that I will slowly start catching up on some of the ideas I had wanted to write about.

Before that though, a little update on our Chanukkah.  We went down to Dallas a couple weeks ago to spend some time with Yoni's family.  We were there for the first three nights of Chanukkah and the kids absolutely loved the time with family and cousins.

Adina and cousin Yael playing piano together

Ze'ev and cousin Gavi as pilots :)

The three girls in matching outfits playing in a wading pool

A picture I took of Adina and Ze'ev today... Adina just got earrings for her 3rd birthday. :)

Now we are back to normal life for a few weeks.  Especially normal, because Yoni's actually going on a trip for the first time in two months... we've gotten quite spoiled with him home so much!  But I guess it is time for me to remember how to function on my own again, at least for a week.