We would do anything we could to calm the kids while driving. Cari would ride next to me and would often find herself facing backwards in the front seat tending to the kids in the back. Either that or we would take turns attempting to rock the carseat to calm him/her down. Or we would sing to them. But thinking back, maybe we were just singing in an attempt to drown out the screaming. I think it was all an effort to help us pass the time and keep some sense of sanity. Now, instead of singing to calm the kids I sing with them (well at least one of them and that’s when she allows me to sing). We play the same cd’s over and over and we’ve memorized many of the songs. She’ll tell me that this song is a girl song or this song is a boy song and she lets me know when it’s okay to sing or sing along with her. From time to time I find myself driving in the car for minutes/miles without the kids yet still have those cd’s playing on the radio…yikes! Anyways, she sings to some of the songs and sometimes asks me to sing along. Most of the songs, by the way, refer to mommy. What’s up with that??? Cari and I never used to sing with the songs. We would just sing songs like old mcdonald, row row row your boat, itsy bitsy spider, etc. There’s one song I CANNOT bring myself to sing, the wheels on the bus. It’s silly. It’s just a song. But Cari and I would make a game out of it in an effort to just get through those tense times in the car with screaming kids. It was one of those times where it was just the two of us. It was us doing what we had to to make each other laugh just to get through a few difficult minutes.
My darling princess is beginning to profess her independence. She’s challenging my parenting skills; skills that I’m pretty much making up as I go. I love her unconditionally though. I cannot expect things to always be easy, I just wish they were. Tonight I read her one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. The book is at least 10 pages too long. I would usually read the whole thing to her but then later complain about how long it was. One day I learned that Cari would skip half the pages. Some of those books are way too long and it takes a lot of patience to get through those reads. Usually it was my job, at the request of our daughter, to read her books before bed. We would sit in her rocking chair and read two or three. The rocking chair has since moved to my brothers house and a full size bed now takes up about half her room. So tonight, and most other nights, we lay in her bed and I read some books to her. Tonight she wanted to ask questions about the crazy characters in that book. So not only do I have to read the whole thing, because she often knows when I skip a page, but now I have to answer questions?!?!?! So that made me think of Cari and how she would skip a good portion of those types of books. How would she handle answering questions about it too? She probably would have put me in charge of reading.
Oh, and there’s this fly in the room that I cannot kill and it’s driving me insane. The thing keeps buzzing around and won’t sit still for a second.