I have about a thousand pictures to share since my last post but since that seems a bit overwhelming at the time, I think that I'll start this posting session with a bit about some current motherly challenges in the house.
Ariana is three now and nightmares are some of our new nighttime challenges. Before this time period of time in her life, she had previously gone to some of the spookiest rides at Disneyland (Adventures of Snow White and Pirates of the Carribean) and also been present during some spooky movies (anything vampire, courtesy of Reuben) and also violent war scenes. We are now at the stage of recognition, learning, and consequences. Namely, we have to pay more attention than ever to what we watch, say, and do. Even randomly flipping through channels can get us in trouble as someone might get an arm blown off in a war movie. Really, even reading Beauty and the Beast can cause us problems. She will wake up at night, sometimes several times screaming things like "The bad wolves, the bad wolves!" or shriek about the bad doctors giving her shots (she's absolutely terrified to the very core of doctors and dentists.)
Hence all these nightmares have calmed our reading choices, made us remember nightly prayers even more, and gotten me to go buy a nightlight. I can't say that a nightlight has helped in any way. Perhaps because for the first week Ariana only wanted to sleep with it, cuddly it (though the nightlight is not at all soft and snuggly) but also because either her or her brother only want to take it out of the socket and play with it at least once a day. Frustrating. Any suggestions about other ways to help nightmare victims?
Speaking of the little brother and his curious one year old adventures, I have recently become more dilligent about very very quickly clearing the table after dinner as Corban will undoubtably climb up onto the table to find leftovers or just get a little ride rocking the chairs around. I have a feeling that to eliminate the problem I either have to eliminate all chairs in our house, wait out the stage, or just spend most of my time that I should be cooking and cleaning only walking to and fro taking Corban off the table or chairs and relocating him to a fun distraction (that just never is quite as fun as almost tipping yourself over on a chair.) For now, I just put most of the chairs on the side when he's in the terrorizing mood. But really, when I'm not putting my butt in the seat, I feel that chairs in the house or just a toddler mother's enemy.
Back to the three year old. This little girl is very social and asks without fail every morning about who we are going to see. She likes the zoo, the park, and other normal activities but what really drives her is social interactions. Already Reuben is worried about how much she pays attention to these things because he's scared of Ariana as a teenage daughter (his main concerns about the child or never the here and now but how he's going to be a scary dad to our future teenage children.) For instance, recently she had a friend who is a handsome and fun boy over. While they were laying together trying out the massage chair, she put her finger in his mouth and then tried to get him to put his finger in her mouth. Weird. Reuben stopped her and she was embarrassed about it later. What are we to do? Will this progress to total craziness in high school?
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