I'm feeling chatty today, and I've just got to share with someone...so let me tell you how things are around here. Alexa is growing, blooming, blossoming, learning, and just being generally awesome this summer. There is a caveat however, she is also stubborn as a rock sometimes, and I do mean a rock, somehow she temporarily increases the gravitational field underneath her when she doesn't want to move.
She started summer camps at Kidspirit this week; she goes in the afternoons from 1-4:30, and Monday and Tuesday were very hard in terms of getting Alexa dressed and moving. The difficulty of summer is the very flexibility of our schedule, and I fell victim to the allure of not having a specific place to be the whole morning. Alexa has Where's my Water on her iPad, and she plays that game for hours, and when I start saying "Alexa, it's time to get dressed," she's too intent on playing her game to listen, and furthermore, she senses that I haven't hit the point yet where I'm going to force her to do it, so she ignores me. I get distracted by whatever it is I'm doing on my computer, and so about every 5 minutes for the next hour I remind her that she needs to get dressed so she can eat breakfast. After an hour or so of this, I begin to be frustrated and take away the iPad and try to make her move to her room to get dressed. She gets angry that I took her game away and does her gravity trick, and the real battle begins. There are time outs, and yelling and arms crossed and heels dug in, and she is finally dressed and eating breakfast about 3 hours after we started. By the second day of this, I was nearly hysterical, there are at least 5 more weeks of summer, and these are camp days when I have 3.5 hours to myself and if I can't manage this, how will I manage when David goes out of town for a week in August? After I calm down enough to think clearly, I realize that I can in fact change this. (Remember Elven's book? If you haven't read it, you should. I have no idea how to write his last name properly so forgive me Mr. E) I remember Elven's suggestion, that blaming the problem on the other person takes away my power to change it. During the school year we have the same stubbornness about getting dressed, but it's compressed into about 45 minutes because the bus comes at 7:30 so I need to stick to a schedule so Alexa will know what to expect. I created some schedules in First, Then (another great app-simple visual scheduling) and now, she can play with the talker until 8 am, and then the schedule tells her that it is time to get dressed, then eat breakfast, then get in the van etc. Some good advice from M, to try not to take it all so personally, and a lot of thought about how Alexa's mood and attitude mirror my own led me to my big revelation this morning. I need to make it clear to her that I am not the one she is hurting by refusal to get dressed, it's her own time to play that she is using up. And I need to fully believe that myself. It's not about Alexa or me "winning" the confrontation, it's her time to play that she's wasting. This morning I was calm and matter of fact about it. I pretended that I was bored by the whole thing, having to reset the timer every time she got out of the time out seat. She was studying my face so intently, as though trying to figure out where red-faced yelling Mom was.
I'm sure that I will forget this again in the future, but today I'm calm. I'm hoping that by writing it all down I will remember it for a longer period of time.
The flip side of Alexa's stubbornness is her determination. She has been practicing kicking the ball all summer, and she is getting so much better, she can now run up to the ball and kick it without stopping, and even has some accuracy. She's also been practicing dancing, and has been having an outbreak of what we call SAS, sudden arabesque syndrome, she kicked several people in the shins at Da Vinci Days by doing this while waiting in line. The thing is, she has been practicing her arabesque for a few years now, something that's very challenging for her because of the balance and strength and muscle control it requires. I'm very proud of her for it. Many kids would have given up on it long ago, but not Alexa, so I try to remember, the same thing that can turn getting dressed into a three hour battle is what allows her to dance.
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