made of dreams & bones

I am absolutely useless with an etch-a-sketch. My kids? Wizards.

The fish N got for his birthday died this week. It was never a very lively fish. It made bubble nests so we assume it was reasonably content (and my husband’s special interest is fish tank maintenance so we know the fish was well cared for) but it just didn’t like to eat or swim. It just kind of sat around. We tried so many different types of food. MANY times we thought it was dead. I think we just bought a dud. We got a new one today. N gave it the same name as the old one and wants to pretend it’s the same fish. The new one seems way more active which is a good sign.

Today G wanted to use his hour of screen time to watch Bob Ross instead of use his iPad, and I was only too happy to oblige. He painted the picture on the right with acrylics, N insisted on using watercolors and it didn’t turn out the way he hoped but I still like it.

“I had gloves on, it didn’t break the skin”

One hour after we passed through Peabody on 95N, there was a crazy accident there and a woman was impaled 😱 by a tire iron 😱 that flew off a truck.

Because the kids like to spend their iPad hour playing Minecraft TOGETHER, they are working together and communicating well and problem solving as a team during that hour, and those cooperation skills have carried over into the rest of the day. It’s not perfect and there’s still a lot of bickering and chaos, but there’s also been a lot more peaceful, happy playing together. They’ve been turning the living room into a Lego village all week and I don’t even care that there are legos literally on every surface in the room because they’ve just been having such a nice time.

Instead of tv every afternoon and iPads on Fridays for two hours only, they’ve elected for 1 hour of screen time per day. They can choose whether that hour is spent on the iPad or watching tv. And they each have to do one chore, selected by mom, before it can begin.

What has happened as a result is that my house is cleaner. Because now that they’re doing more chores, they’re more aware of what needs to be done and are getting better at preventing messes from happening (wiping their feet before they come in and putting their shoes away neatly, rinsing their toothpaste down the sink instead of leaving globs, putting toys and books in their correct places instead of shoving them in a cabinet to deal with later).

AND there’s not as much nagging and begging for screens. AND they tend to spend their hour per day playing Minecraft together rather than mindless junk games full of ads. AND they’re getting better at turning them off when the timer goes off. AND they’re reading or listening to audiobooks in the afternoon instead of watching tv. TV is SO dysregulating for N and affects his mood really dramatically, but he generally will choose the iPad instead so my TV has not even been turned on in five days.

I had originally assumed black walnut because there’s a massive one nearby, but when we cut it down last year the stump respawned so much and so quickly that I feared I had made an error and unleashed a tree of heaven beast. But no! The gardening pro at the library told me how to tell definitively and it looks like I just need to be more aggressive about cutting it back (which is the opposite of what you want with tree of heaven)