Well, I'm feeling a bit like what I've been writing tilts too much towards the negative, not necessarily because that's the way I feel, but because that's what weighs on me, and is easier to write about. So, a little of the positive side may not be a bad thing.
So, by far the best thing about being on leave has been falling in love with the little guy. Before, he seemed to be pretty much permanently attached to Natasha, so now I get to spend all day, every day with him. Which is fantastic. He is ridiculously happy, and very social. He's starting to sit up, which also means that he's spitting up a lot less.
He also doesn't seem to have the impeccably terrible timing that Ruby did (and does), where you could count on her to have a complete meltdown just as we need to be getting ready to go to an appointment or something. In fact, I went to the optometrist yesterday, and he fell asleep about 2 minutes before the exam started, leaving me perfectly focused on the task at hand. He woke up just as it was ending, and smiled at everyone in the room.
Ruby was actually really good while we were there as well. One thing that I have noticed recently is that I had been conflating two separate things in caring for her. We recently started doing a positive parenting technique based in part on empirical research done at Yale, which basically attempts to strongly reinforce good behavior by rewarding it with enthusiastic positive attention, instead of trying to deter bad behavior through punishment. As she has responded to the encouragement, and I have backed off from punishing her for bad behavior, I have found that quite a bit of her "bad behavior" isn't her being difficult or bad, but results from the fact that she hasn't yet learned to deal well with change or deviations from her expectations. So, if she wants the purple spoon, but I give her the red one before she can tell me, she loses her little mind, and has a hard time recovering.
It isn't that her behavior is bad, per say, but that her expectations weren't met in some way. There are many subtle variations on this, and since I can see that it more for what it is now that it has been separated out from the truly "bad" behavior, I am starting to have a bit more empathy for her (even though I am still trying to hold strong to the notion that she can't get what she wants by crying). What's more, I have gained a bit more empathy for Natasha, as this difficulty with emotional recovery comes directly from her, and it's now easier to see that this isn't something that she can just snap out of, that most likely, she was very much the same at 2 years old, and that she is fighting her innate nature, so I can cut her a little more slack now.
In any case, I gotta go, here are a couple of pics from yesterday...
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment