Jamie and Liam Chew's Blog: 2009-10-07

2009-10-07 22:45 (Kristen) Life, I think, needs a reboot. Jamie was up around 7:30, and seemed all right at first. However, he was pretty tired and it began to show when it was time to go to school. Liam, in the meantime, woke up just as I was getting Jamie dressed and out the door, and was sleepy enough not to protest when I left him behind to take Jamie to school (John was at home, btw). Liam and I had a quiet morning, punctuated with some numbers and the ABC song, before John brought Jamie home for lunch. The kids ate well, and were all right, and there was only pro forma grumbling from Jamie when it was time to go back to school and leave his DS behind. Liam and John did some DS before it was time for us to go to skating (which I had spaced, d'oh). Liam did much better this week than last week. This week he cried while hanging on to a glider, instead of lying on the ice and crying. Progress... I had prepped Liam with talks about what was going to happen when he was on the ice: to shuffle, not walk normally; that he was going to fall, but everyone did and that was OK; that he was going to have a glider, and he should hang on to that. He certainly hung on to his glider. Eventually, he did get the hang of it enough that he skated, slowly, from the blue line to the door, crying, but with only 15 minutes left in the lesson when he came off the ice. Yay! Progress! I was happy about that, and Liam was very cheerful, while telling me "I cried." We got a ride back to the school, grabbed Jamie, then headed home as the weather was cold and windy and overcast. Brr. Jamie was pretty good about doing his homework when we got home, but we didn't get to his reading until after dinner. This is never good, because Jamie is just shredded after dinner and it's always hard going then. He had picked out another difficult book, and was utterly unengaged from the process. Eventually, after distraction/interruption number 15, I lost my temper and snapped. The exercise lost its fun, and we eventually had to abandon it and agree to complete it tomorrow. Jamie was upset too, and told me that he didn't like reading at all because it was "boring." There was nothing that he liked to read, and it was just a stab through the heart. I was a bad mother; I was pushing him too hard, he was pushing himself too hard; it was my fault for letting him watch too much television and play too many video games; and it went on from there in my inner monologue. However, I reminded myself that he was wickedly tired, and so was I, so we wrapped up the evening with a game of Ladybirds (Jamie's suggestion), and went to bed early. The boys were in bed at 8:50, and we read Jellaby, which both boys enjoyed. So, Jamie still enjoys being read *to*, at least. Lights out at 9:15, and Jamie was asleep by 9:30. Liam held out for another 15 minutes, flipping, flopping, and keeping up a sotto voce running commentary before finally being overwhelmed by sleep.