The Same, but Different

It really and truly irks me when parents say they love their children the same. They may love their children equally but I think it does injustice to say they love them the same. All children are different and need to be loved in different ways. The love doesn't even have to be really equal, as long as the child gets what they need emotionally.

As for my children there is no way to love them the same. On the personality spectrum they could not be further apart. LaLa is a highly emotional and sensitive child, she needs constant attention and approval. KiKi could care less. She is independent and headstrong. The challenges of parenting these two personalities are complex.

My oldest LaLa is the sweetest little girl. She is very loving and she carries her heart on her sleeve. She is also very cautious, high strung, ADHD, and anxious. Sometimes I can look at her and see the energy flowing in her just waiting to burst out. It is like a dam holding back a swollen river. My job as a parent is to funnel that energy into something that is productive. If not, I have a kid bouncing from sofa to sofa, doing forward rolls all over the living room floor or pulling out ALL my DVDs and lining them up in a perfect line across the living room floor. I also have to watch my tone and wording with her. The slightest raise of my voice, even if I am not angry, can make her burst into tears. I have perfected the low authoritative voice because yelling does me not an ounce of good if it is counteracted by hysterics and a complete emotional meltdown on her part. She craves structure and I am the most unstructured person in the world. I have to force myself to plan ahead for her benefit. This complex individual is wrapped up in a beautiful willowy body, with her fathers dainty facial features. She is an exquisite child and I love her so much. She love me too. Sometimes when I am laying on the couch, she will just come up to me and wrap her arms around me and say "I love you, Momma!" and that means the world to me.

KiKi is a mirror of myself. I can't believe how similar our personalities are. Laid back is an understatement. Unlike LaLa, I "get" KiKi. I understand what she is thinking. I can read her without much effort. She is rambunctious, loud, fun loving, and stubborn. Oh Lord is she stubborn! Try to get this kid to do something she doesn't want to do. I dare you. I double dog dare you. My husband call her "the mean one", which in truth she probably is. She picks on LaLa because she has figured out she can. You can see a little glint of mischief in her eyes when she smiles. It is fabulous. She does have a strong sense of wrong and right even at age 2. Even when she does wrong, she understands when I make her apologize and put her in timeout. I rarely get much resistance from her when it comes to her punishment. She needs me, but not too much. She values her independence. She makes me want to be a kid all over again.

I love my kids differently but equally. I see their good and their bad. I see the trials that they are going to have in the future and it scares me equally. I fear that LaLa is going to be taken advantage of. I fear that KiKi is going to be emotionally hard like I am. The best I can do is to prepare them for the future and explain that it is o.k to be themselves. They do not have to fit the mold of the perfect child, they just have to be their own perfect.

Can't Do it Myself-itis

For the last year Can't Do it Myselfitis has been running rampant in my household. The worst case is my 4 year old daughter LaLa. She knows how to do things like put her shoes on, get dressed, get a drink of water, but she insists upon help. It is maddening. We can be running 15 min late, I am telling her that we are going to be late, she knows the consequences of being late and she will still insist that I help her put her shoes on. Now lets say I refuse. The first symptom of Can't Do it Myselfitis is the whine. "But Mommaaaaa I neeeeed heeeelp." Which is then followed by a feeble attempt. I am sure you have all seen this. LaLa's favorite feeble attempt would be pretending that she is trying to shove her foot into her shoe with absolutely no force behind the actual push. This is the one thing that irritates me beyond anything. Self restraint isn't always my forte' and this is one of the things that can send me over the edge. I could deal with it if she was actually trying and couldn't get a shoe on, but faking it....grrrrrr. Finally she realizes that I am not going to help and she is going to have to get the shoe on herself. She cries and does what she needs to do to get the job accomplished, but she doesn't like it and is going to let me know.

Thankfully KiKi is fiercely independent. I try to help her put on shoes, and she tells me no. I try to help open a juice box, and she doesn't want help (but I help anyways because I don't want to clean up a resulting mess). I wonder if when she hit 4 years old I am going to have another case of Can't Do it Myselfitis on my hands.

Saturday Fun-aka. What happens when the Internet goes down.

So halfway through Friday my internet service went out. Actually the entire base here lost their internet connection (well except for vital base buildings I am sure). It was quite a pain in the rear end because this was my last week of actual classes for school. It was down until Sunday morning, which left me with plenty of time to do some fun things Saturday.

My best friend is back from England visiting her mom who lives about 45 min away from base. The Internet outage left me plenty of time to go down to her mom's house for her 9 year old daughters birthday party. It was sure to be a good time in the middle of nowhere. No really. The "town" has a population of 63. Yes. 63. So you can imagine what the area around the town looks like. Farms, woods, country roads, and thats about it. There is actually a little Amish community that we have to pass through to get to her mom's house that is quite beautiful. You do have to watch out and be careful not to hit any Amish who drive their horse and carts down the roads.

So Saturday morning I packed up LaLa, KiKi and "The Man" and went to McDonald's for breakfast (cause I wasn't in the mood to cook). Then I realized I forgot my damn military ID at home. Which means I can't get back on base. So after breakfast we drive back to base, my husband leaves me at the visitor center to gab with the cops who work in there, and he goes and gets my ID. I swear he got lost on the way back to the house cause it took him like 20 min. Our base isn't THAT big. I was joking with the cops "I bet he got to the house, started poking around, and is taking his sweet time to punish me." Anyways crisis averted. Then we leave for our journey out to nowhere.

Once we got there, we spent the next 12 hours running after kids, cooking burgers, hotdogs and ribs, meeting the best friends extended family, watching the kids in the pool, watching the kids fish in the pond in the backyard (her step father is a professional fisherman), listening to embarrassing stories about my best friend (most of them I had actually heard from her), playing with the 3 new kittens, kids chasing the other cats, KiKi telling the yellow lab "No, buddy!", singing happy birthday, eating cupcakes, and drinking enough coke to float myself home. It was a great time. The kids had a blast. "The Man" became fast friends with my best friends brother and they spent the day doing what they do best, gabbing like two 12 year old little girls.

We left that evening around 10pm for a long drive, in the dark, in the middle of the country, with no cell phone service. I almost hit a possum and I swear I heard banjos playing* in the distance. The kids slept the whole way home which was nice. ID in hand I got back on base, drove home, got the kids in bed, and then crashed into my own bed**.

*This coming from the girl who grew up 5 hours away from the river they filmed "Deliverance" on.

** After checking to see if the Internet was working yet.

Reading Material Needed

I devour books. No seriously give me a book and it will be read by the end of the day. In the past 26 hours I have read 2 books. The final two books of the Twilight series (and they were oh so delectable), and now I am completely out of fresh reading material. This leaves me in a bit of a quandary. I don't know what I should read next. I am kind of on a fantasy kick: vampires, witches, werewolves, dragons. I guess I will have to get on Barnes and Noble's site tomorrow and find my next victim, I mean book.

Update on "The Man"-
"The Man" is doing well and fairly unscathed. He doesn't remember a thing from the procedure because of the medications (or as he calls them the "date rape drugs") they gave him. I of course can't help but make ass jokes here and there. Overall I am just glad that he is according to the doctor "healthy".

Day Off- Sorta

My best friend is in town visiting her parents. She lives in England now at the same base that we are going to be stationed at. So she and I are going to get together today and go get my girls some hair cuts. Then we are going to this cute little Amish furniture store down the road and pick out new mattresses and maybe a new bed for LaLa (depending on price, ya know). It should be a fun day to be had by all :)

Tomorrow "The Man" is having a colonoscopy. He is only 29, but his mother died of colon cancer when he was 12, so they want to start screening him early to prevent this horrible disease from ever rearing its ugly head again. I am sure he is going to be a big baby about the whole procedure, but he is a man and something is going to be shoved up his butt, so it is completely understandable. I of course have taken a couple of pot shots at him the past couple of days. Today however I was being completely serious when I said "I hope you can walk afterwards, cause I can't carry you", then he said "Well I don't think they are shoving anything EXTREMELY enormous up there, I am sure I will be able to walk". I started laughing my ass off cause I wasn't even thinking about that. "No honey, they are going to sedate you. There is no way I can lift your 230 lb, 6'6" body to the car if you are still doped up". Gotta love that man.

House Hunting

This morning I have spent my time looking at different rentals available near the Air Force Base that we are moving to in England. I have fallen in love with one of the homes available and I am hoping that it is still available when we get there is November. Isn't it cute? The thing I am most excited about is that it is completely detached, which means no sharing walls. For the last 4 years my walls have always been attached to someone else's. I have heard more fights, vacuums, children screaming, and loud televisions than I care to list. I am sure I am not a treat to live next to either though, so I guess we're even.

Here is another reason I looooove this house:
Big backyard that is fully fenced. I can let my dog out and not worry about her wandering, not that she does, just in case. Wouldn't a little bench be perfect out there? Sorry I am trying not to make plans with this backyard but I can't help it! Oh and look at the kitchen!
The bad part you ask? I don't have a picture of the bedrooms! I bet they are tiny. It would be my luck.

Exhausted!

It was a really long weekend. I am sooo glad it is over and "The Man" is back to full strength. This weekend he spent the entire time in bed getting over the pneumonia, which made for chaos in my house. I just now got the house back into working order: downstairs clean, dishes totally done, laundry washing, floors mopped. Now when I say my house is chaos when my husband is sick I really mean chaos. First of all he is the most whiny sicko ever. Second when he is sick, my kids somehow know it is time to do everything in their power to drive me absolutely batty. Third, my house never gets cleaned because of all the other things I have on my list of things to do that weekend.

A few things I found myself saying over and over this weekend were:
1. I swear to God if you don't stop (insert bad act here), you are going to time out.
2. No.
3. Because I said so! (I swore when I had kids I would never say this)
4. Quit climbing on the back of the couch.
5. Don't scream in the house.
6. Mommy is writing her essay, go watch T.V. ( I hate using the T.V. as a babysitter, but sometimes it can't be avoided).
7. KiKi, put your diaper back on!

Since I spent most of the weekend doing school work, taking care of "Mr Sicko", and entertaining the girls, I am taking the day off. No school work. I plan on laying on the couch and totally vegging out. Maybe a vodka cranberry tonight....

P.S.
I got Elizabeast groomed this morning and she looks absolutely adorable. I need to take a picture and share with everyone. I love that dog. I swear she is the only one who listens to me around this house.