Evie Update

Bad Dad

/ Shane / 2 Comments

The monitor volume button must have gotten bumped last night, so this morning the volume was completely off. Therefore, I missed my usual wakeup call at 6:42 when Evie starts hollering that the butterfly lights are on. I was snoozing blissfully until 7:30. I woke up and blinked sleepily at the clock. “Why is it 7:30?” I asked Sara. Puzzled, I picked up the monitor and discovered the sound was off. When I turned the volume up, I heard Evie mournfully sobing, “Please come soon, it’s been a long time!”

Oh man. I tell you, I felt about as bad as I have ever felt. This poor girl had been calling for me for about 45 minutes and I wasn’t coming. The butterfly lights had already been on and then turned off by the time I got down there. I don’t think I’ve ever not come before, so she was probably very worried and confused. I asked her several times why she didn’t come upstairs and wake me up (she has done this on other occasions), but she said she was afraid to come out of her room. Double guilt trip! Nothing gets to me more than when Evie says she’s afraid of the hallway or the monsters in the laundry room, etc.

I tried to make up for it with extra hugs and stuff, but tonight when I was putting her to bed, she said, “Don’t forget to come when the butterfly lights are on!” making me feel awful all over again. She also kept repeating, “I didn’t forget to call you when the lights are on, I won’t wait until they are off.” She’s obviously very worried that I will forget again tomorrow.

It’s funny how such a small thing can make you feel so bad!

Don’t smooch the baby!

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I’ve never had two kids before. That is to say that I really didn’t know how they would act around each other (although I do have siblings of my own, but I don’t really remember that far back). Most, if not all, books and movies tell me that the older sibling would occasionally feel a little jealous or angry at the new baby. This sort of makes sense, at least to an adult, so it seemed reasonable. However, most people I know with a couple of kids said that the older one pretty much ignores the infant.

I don’t know if our situation is unique or what, but Evie had a totally different reaction altogether: an unceasing love so strong, that it threatens to smother Oliver!

Evie is constantly kissing and whispering sweet nothings to him. Every night she hugs him and says, “I love you Oliver!” in the most reverent tones. She gets so upset when he cries and always tries to make him feel better. She just can’t help it; if she sees him, she just *has* to smooch him. We are often telling her, “Okay, back up!”, “Give him some air!”, or “Okay honey, but he’s sleeping right now!” If I had a dime for every time she’s woken up or upset him when he was doing perfectly well on his own, I’d be able to hire a nanny to keep her at bay 24/7.

The thing is, you feel bad telling her to stop loving her brother so much. You feel a little silly when you realize you’ve been angrily yelling, “Evie, stop smooching him! He’s sleeping! I’ll tell you when you can kiss him!” On the other hand, she does occasionally attempt to literally smother him with love.

One time we were reading a “now you’re a big sister” book and there was a section about how sometimes you might get mad or jealous of the baby. I asked her if she ever felt that way. She looked at me as if I were speaking another language. I asked her again and told her it was okay if she felt that way. She looked like maybe she would cry that I would even ask her that. I quickly changed the subject. No need to put thoughts in her head that clearly weren’t there!

So anyway, if we have any problem in this family, it’s too much love. I don’t know how long it will last, but, since we’re approaching the 2 month mark, it looks like it is here for a little while at least. There are worse problems to have.

Bad Influence

/ Shane / 4 Comments

So, there is a flip side to the social butterfly coin.

We had a situation the other day. We were at the garden, and there was a little girl from the neighborhood who didn’t have a plot in the garden there. This little girl…hoo boy. Words escape me. She was the worst kid I have ever seen. She wouldn’t listen to anything. No matter how many times Sara said not to touch people’s gardens, or touch our things, or leave this or that alone, she just kept doing it. And the worst part was, she was convincing Evie to do it. She pulled out every trick in the book, telling Evie that her parents said it was okay to do things, telling us that Evie wanted her bike helmet, even though it was just a ploy to get the bike helmet we said she shouldn’t touch, etc. It was even worse than that, she had such sass on her. For example, she was trying to convince Evie to take off her shoes:

Sara: “Evie, don’t take off your shoes”
Girl, in her sassiest tone: “They’re not shoes, they’re boots.”

If we stopped watching them for even a second, the girl talked Evie into some compromising position; taking off her boots, practically strangling her trying to take off her helmet, getting her to take off her clothes so they could “shave” with sharp sticks. At one point I looked up and she had Evie by the hair and was getting ready to smash her face into the ground. She was, “washing [Evie’s] hair”. She never once called Evie by the right name, and even got into an argument with me about what Evie’s name was. Talk about oppositional defiant.

Did I mention this girl was 3 years old?

Poor, sweet Evie was completely unprepared for this. All of her interactions with other kids has been more or less adorable. Sometimes kids are bossy, but Evie’s okay with that. But we’ve never prepared her to resist being really taken advantage of or manipulated. It was actually quite startling.

It wasn’t all bad though. I was particularly proud to hear Evie say, “Remember what my mommy said…” a couple of times to the girl. It was like Evie was trying to do what was right, but she was totally overwhelmed by this other girl.

So here was the horrifying part. Evie wants to make friends so badly, that she was putting up with all of this. In fact, when the girl finally got called home (Thank god!) Evie said she was sad and she missed her. That really made my heart shrivel up inside.

Of course, when we did get back from the garden, Evie was not listening to us anymore, and being naughty. I was thunderstruck. We were around this girl for less than an hour, and, until her spell wore off, she had more influence with Evie than we had in years.

Thus the true horror of bad influences on your children was revealed to me. And to see Evie desperate for this girl’s attention, and to see how bad and corrupting this girl was, if only for a short time. It made me think of abused wives going back to their husbands. Now I am scared to send Evie to school, lest she fall in with a bad crowd! And furthermore, imagine being in that girl’s class in school. The teacher would not be able to give attention to anyone else, she would have to focus completely on dealing with her.

Really, the victim here is not Evie, it’s that poor little girl. If she acted like that with us, imagine what she is like at home. Imagine what her home is like in general. I feel really bad for her. However, at the end of the day, she’s not my responsibility, Evie is. And that’s why I am always going to be nervous whenever we go to the garden, that she might be waiting for us.

I kind of hoped I wouldn’t have to deal with things like this for a few years!

Social Butterfly

/ Shane / 4 Comments

When kids are little, even when they are “playing” with other kids, they’re not really playing with other kids. They’re mostly just playing at the same time as the other kids, who happen to be in close proximity. However, some switch recently flipped over in Evie’s head, where she suddenly noticed other kids. She really just loves to make friends.

Whenever we go to the park now, she’s so excited to talk to the other kids. She runs up to them and says, “My name is Evie, what’s your name?” She also tries to entice them to play whatever game she is playing, such as driving in the little plastic car and announcing casually, in her loudest voice, “The back is open, if anybody wants to sit in it!”

At soccer practice, we’ve been going with the same kids for like 8 weeks now. Suddenly, last weekend, it’s like they noticed each other. Soon Evie and another girl were holding hands and stopping periodically to hug each other. It was the most adorable thing ever. It was hilarious too, as each of them would kick a soccer ball in opposite directions, and then almost pull their arms out of their sockets as they both tried to run after. Eventually another boy joined in with the hand holding, and they almost threatened to destroy the entire practice with their peace, love, and happiness.

The other aspect of this is that she is now learning adult social skills, such as making conversation segues and small talk in order to keep conversation flowing. For example, seeing Nathan’s pop bottle: “I got a water bottle for Christmas from Santa. Have you seen the big girl bed that Santa got me?” which of course leads to her showing him around her room.

The other day she met a random girl at the library and Sara was watching her make small talk with the girl:

Evie: “So, where’s your mommy?”
Random Little Girl: “She’s at work.”
Evie: “My mommy never leaves me. Sometimes my daddy goes to Detroit.”

::General arguing about the moon for quite some time::
Random Little Girl: “The moon doesn’t look like this picture.”
Evie, finally getting fed up: “Sometimes the moon is a circle, and sometimes it is a crescent!”

I love watching her interact with other kids!

Mother’s day and the splinter

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Evie and I picked out a Mother’s Day present and card for Sara last weekend (Some lovely Pyrex containers for keeping leftovers, in case you were wondering. Nothing says love like BPA-free food), so Evie had to keep the secret for the whole week. She was struggling a little bit, but she managed to do it…at least right up until Saturday night. I felt so bad for her, I was getting out some of the old containers to clean up some leftovers, and Evie was like, “Oh, we’re using the ones we bought for mommy at Target?” Like, she didn’t mean to spill the beans, she was just commenting on what she saw. In fact, I think she thought, “Oh shoot, we already gave them to her and I missed it!” I don’t even know how she remembered what we got; it wasn’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world. I felt bad for her, but it certainly did nothing to diminish the pure glee she had on her face when she gave her mommy the card and gift the next morning. She was jumping up and down, it was really great. As hard as it is to believe, I think that her excitement might have been a gift even better than left over containers.

After a trip to the grocery store, in which Evie, Uncle Nathan and I managed to get all the right things without any help (okay, that sounds funny, but this was a major restocking mission with a $200 price tag!). After dropping Uncle Nathan off at the bus station, we hit up Mother’s Day brunch in the new garden! The food was really good and we got to meet and talk to some extremely nice neighbors. I’m really hoping we can get to know them better. It was a beautiful day and it was really nice to have a place to go outside. As usual, Evie was a big hit, especially with her garden shoes. Afterwards I felt a little guilty, because everybody went to work on the garden, and I just played with Evie. So I felt a little guilty since I was the only adult not doing anything. But Evie and I helped a little bit, stomping down the wood chips on the path.

Evie had some trouble walking on the wood chips in her garden shoes, so it was most likely during one of her many spills that she got the splinter. It wasn’t until much later, after we were home, that she came over and said, “Something is on my finger.” It was a pretty bad one too, and completely inside, without any part sticking out. It took quite a while to dig it out, including using a sewing needle to dig out one end. And through it all, Evie made not one little peep. I was so proud of her! I thought she would get upset as soon as she saw us coming at her with tweezers. She did have one small request though. In order for us to dig out the splinter, she insisted that we make a cave for her out of pillows and blankets, so that she could thrust only her arm out, and the rest of her would be covered. This was very odd, but it was a small request and it seemed to work, so who am I to complain? I tried to keep her talking so she wouldn’t get upset, but I’m not sure even that was necessary.

I’ll have to think about other situations where “making a cave” could help out. Could we make a nap-taking cave? A vegetable-eating cave? Who knows. But a pain cave works for splinters, so that’s what counts.