Month: March 2008

The good news is that Leilani is becoming much more aware of her emotions and able to express them without tantrums.

For example, on a short hike last weekend, she found a stick and played a while with it and saw that it looked like a crocodile. Then Raya who was with us wanted to play with it too, and while they were playing nicely, somebody got bonked on the head (I don’t remember who now, it was very minor). On of the parents took the stick away, and since we were leaving, just put it on the ground.

We put the kids in the backpack carriers, but the whole way back Leilani was talking about her crocodile. I hadn’t seen her play with the stick so much, so I just told her we leave sticks and rocks in nature for next time (which isn’t always true, because we parents pick up things such as seashells and beachwood—oh the hypocrisy of being of parent or the difficulty of explaining the difference [and sometimes admitting there is none and the kid is right]). But about 5 minutes later and half-way to the car, Leilani said she was “upset” about the crocodile, without any acting out. At the car, after further communication, we determined she really was emotionally upset about not having her stick, and since she had expressed it so well, Mommy got some exercise and jogged back to get it for her.

So in a way, Leilani is starting to learn the big lesson of delaying gratification. The flip-side of this is that she is also learning to delay punishment. So we now have to teach her about consequences of choices.

The big issue of emotional self-control right now is hair washing. Last week, we had her in a bath and tried to wash her hair. She has gotten soap in her eyes and it stung her, so she really doesn’t want to wash her hair. She started throwing a tantrum in the bath, which just made it worse. We explained to her how badly she behaved and why we wash her hair and how we promise to try not to get any in here eyes, but she still calmy refuses the idea of washing her hair.

Since we can’t really force the hair washing without a dangerous repeat performance, we have essentially grounded her until she does. Grounding for a 2-yr old means no candy or ice cream, no DVD movies or cartoon shows, and no games on the computer. At first we said no baths either, just showers, because she likes playing in baths, but we realized that would keep her away from the possibility of washing her hair.

So every time she asks for these things, we ask if she will wash her hair. What has been so unexpected is that she has never thrown a tantrum about not being allowed these things now. She calmy refuses to wash her hair by saying “I’m not ready yet,” and we say she can have/do the desired thing when she washes her hair, and she accepts that.

During the stick incident above, one of the conditions of for getting the stick back was that Leilani would wash her hair. She fully understood what we meant, and she agreed to it. But that night, she calmly refused to wash her hair again. So we told her how disappointed we were that she broke her promise, and we learned not to give any rewards for promises.

And before you think we’re negligent parents, while her hair and scalp are a bit dirty, we do manage to splash some water on it at the beach and when she plays with the sprinkler in the garden.

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Leilani is very helpful. She loves feeding the cats, gets out bowls, cat food and a spoon all by herself, needs a little help opening the can, but then spoons it all in the bowls and gives it to the cats. The cats like her now, and if I’d leave it up to her how often she feeds them they’d be really fat.

Whenever she sees me preparing food, she asks to help – she does amazingly well cutting greens (with scissors under very close supervision though) and peeling and cutting bananas and other soft fruit (with a butter knife). Washing dishes has dropped a bit in popularity – we need to revive that :-)

From the trilingual department “I threw da Stein in da Wasser”. (“Da” is pidgin, but many non-pidgin speaking kids use it instead of “the”.)

It is expected that bilingual kids have a period where they have troubles sorting languages out, but with Leilani, speaking perfect English with everybody else, I think with me she tries to use German, but some words – like werfen for throwing – are not in her active vocabulary yet. All pronouns, and most other short words she usually says in English as well, don’t know why.