What's Up

Ugh turns out I'm such a schedule person. Getting Lincoln off to school, the house tidied up, and off to the Y and I'm feeling so good. Back to normal after that long weekend.

Lincoln has been a handful lately. I feel like we need a parenting refresher course. I'm telling you, we had age five down. Pro level. But now at six and going off to school. He comes home and everything is different. Not all in a bad way, but we haven't spent all day together so our relationship is different. I'm learning what he needs when he gets home and what not. But we need to crack down on him, I'm talking about obedience and doing things right away and not "forgetting". It's hard to know the best way to do that.

For example, we're driving down to Duluth, and I brought a juice cup for Louisa. Well, she doesn't want it and the boys are dying of thirst. So I let the boys have some. Lincoln drinks first, I tell him to save some for Asa. I forget to double check on him and he hands Asa the cup and there's like a centimeter left. What do I do? I won't yell at him. Talking sternly doesn't seem to do the trick. We're like an hour away from stopping... And he says "I forgoaaaaat" So it's not like black and white disobedience. More like duncy, absentmindedness. But he still did what I told him not to do, so somethings gotta happen. Do I turn off the movie in the van to punish him? But then I'd also be punishing Asa who would then have no juice AND no movie... Do I somehow discipline him when we get home, eight hours later? I know I need to do something and I need to be consistent. But more and more often I've found myself frozen like uhhhhhh... So yeah, dilemmas.

It's really neat to see Louisa and Asa so close. They are such good friends now. Louisa follows him everywhere and Asa talks to her. We're having a slight problem with Asa's sleeping. Or lack of. He's three and a half and he takes a nap. We dropped Lincoln's nap completely when he turned four and he's probably napped like twice since. I'd really like for Asa to make it to four (I'm not ready to give up my quite time/work time!!!!) but I'm not sure if that's going to happen. Plus he's randomly been getting up in the middle of the night. I KNOW! Ugh, and Louisa is teething and we don't hear a peep from her. But Asa... up three, four times a night for the past week. "I want someone to snuggle with. I want someone to sleep with. I need to go potty. Ect." What do I do? I've decided (I thought of this at about 3:30 this morning) that every morning he will get five M&M's. If he gets out of bed, cries, etc. I will take away one M&M. So this morning, he got two. We'll see if it works. I've also been messing with him possibly just having a quiet time in his room with books in his bed for 45 minutes or so instead of napping. I tried that yesterday but it didn't yield immediate results because he was still up twice last night. Is there something I'm missing? I've read multiple blogs and google search results... I know it can't last forever, but how do I make it stop?

I'm hosting Thanksgiving for both our families at our house this year. This has definitely never been done before. How can I spell definitely so badly that my spell check doesn't even recognize it!? Come on Grammarly. Anyways, we're on a pretty strict cleaning/decluttering schedule tonight and tomorrow before everyone shows up. And I'm actually super excited for it (having everyone over) in a slightly overwhelmed way.

Well, I've got a boatload of work to do, I'm supposed to be working on a magazine. Thanks for listening. Peace out.