A Happy Day
Today was the "trial" day at preschool and I am happy to say that we were indeed invited back. Juliana is invited back for the group we were in today, and Andy is invited back for an other day that has older kids. We all agree that he is a bit old for today's group. We are also looking into one-day-a-week kindergarten for him.
The preschool is FOUR minutes from our home at the local community Baptist church and meets on Tuesday and Thursday mornings for Juliana and Friday mornings for Andy. Juliana didn't actually make any friends, but she and two other little girls moved en masse from play station to play station today: sort of a side-by-side group play dynamic.
In other happy news, the children seem to have absorbed the relationship between being very quiet in the morning and having a jolly good-natured Mom. Yesterday I only heard one loud plonk and a loud SHHHHHHH; today I heard nothing. Their clock radio goes on at 8:00 and that is the cue for coming downstairs and making noise. In addition to me getting my much needed last hour of sleep, Juliana also gets a bit more, as Andy wakes up around 7 and had been in the habit of waking her up too.
In even more happy news, we found the Russian word for "obey" and were able to have a long conversation about children's jobs (obeying) and parent's jobs (earning money and buying grapes, according to Andy). Today my parents did the second half of pre-school trial and then brought the children home; they were happy to be able to report that the children obeyed. This has not always been the case. I am feeling hopeful again.
I found a useful website that has some good advice about sensible parenting, specifically about training in obedience and then most of the other training is done. While reading the website, I realized that has been my worry: if we can't instill obedience, there is no end to the troubles and anxieties ahead. When we get obedience in place, we can enjoy more and fret less.
3 comments:
And so your new life begins ... how exciting is that !!!
Which announcement did you pick???
I think you are so wise to start with obedience. There is a trust and a respect that comes from and is offered by obeying. In my classroom we say often "obey, right away". (We're trying to nip that delayed obedience which is really willfulness...obeying when you feel like it is not really obedience.) We also talk about cheerfully obeying; having a "happy heart". So the long version of the obedience chant goes, "Obey, right away, every day, in a cheerful way".
I'm off to bookmark your sensible parenting site.
I remember saying of my bio kids when they were littler, "Oh, if they would only learn to obey life would be good." We have one child who is implicitly "good." He does what he is told when he is told and has seldom had to be disciplined. Our daughter, on the other hand, is the total opposite. With issues of safety we often had to think about whether we should give a verbal warning because we knew that would be like waving a red flag in her face. Perhaps if she wasn't doing it already she hadn't thought about it and wouldn't. If we mentioned the possibility she was bound to do it anyway.
The catalyst to our adoption was a little Russian child who arrived in my preschool last February at the tender age of 3 1/2. She was not a behaviour problem at all and coped soooo well despite knowing very little English. (Her mother was Russian, English/Dutch father.) I fell in love with the way everything was new and special to her. She laughed in secret happiness about everything from the toy cash register bleeping to sticker crafts. I look forward to seeing our future adopted daughter gleefully experience all those firsts herself.
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