Tag: rondel

Posted in family life

rondel and the wearable chewies

Posted on by kristinabean

If you’ve been reading here for a while, you probably remember than Rondel has some sensory sensitivities – nothing extreme, but he does tend to want something to lick/chew when he gets anxious, tired, or overwhelmed, and for some time he had just been licking his hands. We were trying to help him get over that habit, for sanitary and social reasons, when I realized that it might be more helpful to give him something to fidget with instead of simply trying to make him stop fidgeting in general. I had noticed that he liked to fidget orally with wooden toys (like unfinished wood blocks) much more than with plastic toys, so I set out to find a wearable wooden fidget for a reasonable price.

This was much harder than I had anticipated.

While there is a large market for wearable chewies/fidgets, the majority are made of food-grade silicone, which I already knew Rondel wouldn’t like enough to use instead of his hands. I looked through site after site until I finally stumbled upon BiteMeBeads, an Etsy store where I could purchase unfinished wood pendants in various shapes, as well as strings and clasps to make my own necklaces out of them. I got two of the silicone pendants just in case (at the very least they’ll be good teethers for the new baby) and two of the wood, and waited anxiously for their arrival.

Well, it has been over a month now and I’m happy to report that the wearable chewies (as Rondel calls them) have been a huge success! Unlike a toy, Rondel can keep this with him while still having both hands free, and it’s less likely to be set down and lost; unlike his hands, they won’t get chapped in the winter, garner him negative attention, or be as likely to spread germs. And for the most part, he has stopped licking his hands and chews on the pendant instead (the fish-shaped one is his favorite). He even told me a couple Sundays ago that one of the girls in his class had told him she liked his fishy chewy – he was pretty happy about that 🙂

So – if anyone has a similar situation with their preschooler, that is my whole-hearted recommendation! Obviously the oral fidgeting was helping him cope with his sensory input or emotional state, and this was a way to adjust that coping strategy to fit a wider range of situations.

Posted in family life

christmas apples and brotherly love

Posted on by kristinabean

It all began when Rondel hung an apple ornament on my parents’ Christmas tree (we don’t have space for one, so we are vicariously enjoying theirs and stopped by to help decorate it!).

Limerick noticed this apple, hanging alone on its branch, and found an apple of his own. Diligently, despite the slippery nature of pine branches (especially ones that are already supporting ornaments), he attempted to hook his apple right next to his brother’s, and finally succeeded. He was so proud of himself!

It’s those little things that show me how much Limerick loves and looks up to his big brother. He wants to be like him, to do the things he does, to be with him – even to the point of hanging his little apple on the same branch as Rondel’s big apple. This is the spirit that causes him to greet Rondel with a hug the moment we pick him up from his Sunday School class, or look to Rondel for a reaction whenever he says something silly, hoping to elicit a laugh from his big brother.

When they hit each other, take each other’s toys, and knock down each other’s towers, and the screams and cries fill the air, I don’t despair of their love and future relationship, because I can remember these other things, the moments of appreciation for and enjoyment of each other, that are woven in the very fabric of their lives. With that backdrop, the conflict itself can become a source of greater strength and depth in their relationship, a thread essential to the tapestry of their growing characters.

Posted in family life, Uncategorized

oobleck!

Posted on by kristinabean

After discovering Bartholomew and the Oobleck, by Dr. Seuss, by sheer random luck at the library last week, and enjoying it on the basis of its story alone for several days, I told Rondel that oobleck was actually something we could make at home. I wasn’t sure if he would want to, but he spent the whole next day (while I was at work) telling my husband how he was going to get to make oobleck with Mommy, so at that point it was going to have to happen!

And happen it did:

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Oobleck is, in its simplest form, a mixture of cornstarch and water. We added some food coloring to try to make it green like it is in the Dr. Seuss book, but we obviously should have added more! The proportions of the two ingredients have to be just right (approximately a 1:2 water:cornstarch ratio), but when they are, the mixture stops behaving like a liquid or a solid and becomes a non-Newtonian fluid. In other words, the way it responds is based on the force you apply. Let your hand sink down slowly into the bowl and it feels like water; try to pull your hand back out quickly and the substance instantly hardens around you. (For a good overview of the science, check out this article from Cornell).

I spent a lot of time just playing around with it on my own before I could convince the boys to touch it, but after they got over the initial weirdness of it they didn’t want to stop. Rondel in particular enjoyed the odd sensation of it and kept immersing his hands in and pulling them out again over and over and over. In fact, because our air is so dry, I had to keep adding water to the oobleck so he could keep playing with it as long as his interest held – which ended up being about an hour and a half, and would have been longer if we hadn’t desperately needed to put Limerick down for a nap.

Oobleck is definitely a messy activity. Because of the way it sticks to your skin, it’s not going to stay nicely contained in a mixing bowl! However, since it’s just cornstarch, it does hose off of everything fairly easily (much to my neighbors’ relief… the newly returned snowbirds aren’t used to the kids playing in the common area and were worried about the mess). It will also dry out your skin, so it might be good to have lotion on hand for after the clean-up. This was my first time playing with it as well, although I’ve read about it before, and I highly recommend it (and the book!) for both you and your kids!

Posted in book lists, family life, Uncategorized

books for the youngest dinosaur lovers

Posted on by kristinabean

When Rondel fell in love with dinosaurs this fall (with Limerick close on his heels, as always), I was at a bit of a loss at first as to how to feed this love with good books. I spent a lot of time searching through recommended book lists online, as well as combing through the library catalog, and ended up bringing home quite a few of various genres, lengths, and reading levels. While I think that all of the books we ended up trying out were good books, some were definitely better than others for a young preschooler and a toddler! Two important aspects that stood out to me were quality illustrations and accurate but accessible information. In other words, mediocre art or dumbed-down language made a book annoying to me and, what mattered more, less captivating or engaging for the boys. Drawings that captured the wonder and drama of the dinosaurs could keep them riveted, and detailed information at an accessible level answered their questions and gave them a foundation for their own imaginative dinosaur play. All of the books we ended up truly loving had at least one if not both of these attributes.

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D is for Dinosaur: A Prehistoric Alphabet, by Todd Chapman and Lita Judge

This book was one of the best. The alphabet format allowed it to move through a wide range of dinosaur topics (some pages focused on types of dinosaurs, others on specific species, others on basic scientific concepts, and still more on fossil discoveries and paleontologists) without becoming overly long and unwieldy. Each page had a short poem to go with the letter and a well-crafted illustration to accompany the poem, but the unexpected bonus on each page was the extensive sidebar of supplemental information. I never read a full sidebar to the boys, but I almost always grabbed one or two sentences from them to give them more information about the drawings (which were incredibly detailed and thus led to detailed questions from the boys). This book also spent some time on extinction and what happened to the dinosaurs, which helped Rondel understand why he couldn’t just go out and find some real dinosaurs!

monsterbones

Monster Bones: The Story of a Dinosaur Fossil by Jacqui Bailey

This book tells the story of a dinosaur who comes to an untimely end, slowly fossilizes, and is eventually discovered and reassembled. The science is good (one section describes how bone turns into stone at a microscopic level!) and punctuated by humorous thought bubbles from the dinosaur himself; information is broken up into segments and sidebars so that the discerning adult reader can add more or less information and time to the story as is appropriate for the listeners’ attention span at the moment. Sometimes we read them all and sometimes we skipped most of them… But more than any other book we found, this book explained fossilization and described paleontology in a way that a very young child could understand and get excited about. And since it’s rather incomplete, at least in my opinion as a scientist, to just learn about dinosaurs without understanding how we’ve obtained that knowledge, this was an invaluable resource (not to mention that most other dinosaur books will just casually mention “dinosaur fossils” and expect the reader to know what that means). It was an enjoyable book for me to read aloud and surprisingly to me, since I thought it might be a few years beyond them still, it was enjoyable for the boys as well. They even asked for it at bedtime!

In addition to these books, we had a few Eyewitness/Atlas type of books that gave broad overviews of the dinosaur era; they weren’t the sort of thing we could read straight through, but they tended to have excellent illustrations and exposed the boys to the vast spectrum of dinosaur species that existed. We also borrowed the Wee Sing Dinosaurs CD from the library and Rondel begged for it every car ride to the point of tears… but while it was a huge success with him, it drove my husband absolutely crazy! The songs are cute but far from high musical quality, and they will be stuck in your head forever once you’ve heard them a few times…

The rest of the books we brought home were either over the boys’ heads or not really at the same level as the two above. I am looking forward to reading the Magic School Bus books with them when they’re older, as I loved them when I was a kid and the dinosaur one seemed quite good when I skimmed through it this time around, but so far the boys have very little interest in them. It would also be nice to find some decent dinosaur fiction! Rondel doesn’t need the storyline aspect to stay engaged, because the dinosaurs themselves are the draw and poorly done stories detract from that, but I would enjoy it and I believe Limerick would as well (and a book that appeals to both of them is always welcome).

So there is my very short list of excellent recommended books for the very young dinosaur lover! With these, some dinosaur atlases, and some dinosaur figurines (accurate ones of course!), you should be set. Even your one-year-old may go around saying things like “metriacanthosaurus” and correcting you if you don’t pronounce “parasaurolophus” correctly, and your three-year-old should be prepared for months of dinosaur pretend play involving such things as turning into a dinosaur fossil (by being buried under pillows and blankets for “millions of years”), hatching from a dinosaur egg, roaring like a giganotosaurus, being eaten by a T. rex, and ramming his head into everyone like a pachycephalosaurus. (Results not guaranteed).

Posted in family life

at the pumpkin farm

Posted on by kristinabean

This post is a bit out-dated already, since we went to the pumpkin farm in time to get our Halloween pumpkins 🙂 but since we were all hit by the stomach flu starting the evening of our visit, we’ve been a bit distracted by laundry, bathroom-cleaning, and attempting to carry on normal life with lingering fatigue and nausea. I think we’re all better now – but the boys are starting in with sniffles and hoarse voices so I guess we’re in for a round of something new. Ah, fall with toddlers 🙂

The pumpkin farm we visited has a huge variety of attractions and activities available, but we honestly only made it to a few of them; I wanted the boys to be able to just enjoy themselves on their schedule instead of having to rush from thing to thing to thing just to say we did it all. Rondel especially takes some time to acclimate himself to a new place, and I wanted to give him that time so he could enjoy the morning as much as possible.

Unsurprisingly, the first thing they wanted to do was snack 😛 so we spent some time eating, taking in all the sights and sounds and smells around us, and deciding what we should do next. Also unsurprisingly, they both ran to the bounce pad first of all, and since we were there on Tuesday for the farm’s toddler discount day, we didn’t have to worry about a bunch of older kids bouncing around and making it dangerous or intimidating for the little ones. I even got on and jumped around for a bit, regardless of how silly  must have looked with this huge pregnant belly! It was so much fun 🙂

As is typical for each of them, Limerick instantly ran out into the middle of the bounce pad, while Rondel sat with me on the edge for the first five minutes or so watching everyone else, talking to me about life, and occasionally snuggling up to me.

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Look at those beautiful eyes! He’s probably thinking, “Stop taking pictures and pay attention to me, Mom! I’m talking to you!”

But after that, Rondel joined in as well and had an amazing time jumping, running, rolling, and more; the boys are at an age where their sheer physical energy astounds me, and I’m always looking for fun ways to burn it off – this was definitely a good one.

We spent most of our time here, but did walk around a bit more of the farm and took a little train tour around it as well.

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Limerick investigating some straw from a hay bale 🙂
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Some unripe grapes growing along the fence – Rondel and I tried a few anyways 🙂 I’ve enjoyed the dry-sour tang of unripe grapes since childhood.

Finally, on our way out, we stopped to choose a pumpkin for each of the boys. While they each picked one just slightly too large for them to lift independently, Rondel simply asked me to put his in the stroller for him, while Limerick struggled for a long time to lift his off the ground and onto the hay bale. I eventually had to take it away from him because he was falling apart in tears of frustration and we needed to head home for nap time – I felt so bad for him 😦

Overall, though, it was a good experience (though cooler weather would have been nice), and a special part of fall in a place that doesn’t get most of the traditional autumnal highlights.

 

Posted in musings

to the “difficult” kids

Posted on by kristinabean

From eighth grade through college I volunteered every Wednesday night with the Awana program at my church, with the K-2nd grade kids. I loved it for so many reasons 🙂 But what I came to realize through that experience, as well as through the summers I spent as a camp counselor, is that my favorite children were almost always the difficult ones, the trouble-makers, the strong-willed and stubborn kids, the insecure and struggling kids acting out without even knowing why. They seemed to live in turbulent waters, when most of their peers were coasting by around them; the behaviors that should have been perceived as a plea for attention, connection, and love all too often simply served to push other people away from them. And I loved these kids, and sought to connect with them, and trained my defensive instincts in their behalf.

Then I became a mother, and one of these kids was my own child.

And I realized that no matter how much I had cared about those other kids, and gone through hard things with them and for them, I had never come close to loving them like I love my son. I had stood up for them against the negative perceptions their behaviors had led to – but I had never felt that primal physical rage in their defense that I feel when someone makes even the slightest off-hand comment disparaging my child. I wish I had loved them better. I wish I had been a fiercer advocate for them; I wish my heart had been more easily broken for them, my life more freely poured out for them. Because I know now, and I knew then, so I had no excuse, that most adults will see the negative behavior and never look past it to the child who may be scared, overwhelmed, overstimulated, uncomfortable, and just simply in need of love and guidance.

When does your heart bleed, as a mother of a needy child, a socially awkward child, a child who doesn’t fit in without that extra love and care?

– when you watch your son “playing” with a group of peers, and they’re all busily climbing and digging and talking and investigating the world, and he’s sitting on the side just holding a toy and watching them, trying to figure out what’s going on, like they all know this social script that he’s never heard of

– when you come to pick your child up from Sunday School and he’s trying to break into a circle of kids building, to be part of the group, and one of them says, “oh good, he’s going home!” when she sees him running to you

– when you glance at the activity/story pages coming home with your son and the only personalized comment is that he played with his tongue.

In the moment I read that comment I knew only two things:

  1. Since when does an adult who claims to love and represent Christ think it is ok to fixate on a “weird” behavior that a child has to the exclusion of all that child is as a person created in the image of God? Also, did they think they were enlightening me or something? Believe me, random childcare helper, I know my son better than you do. I know that he licks his hands when he’s overstimulated by the noise and chaos of a group of kids, when he’s trying to figure out social cues, when he’s excited by everything going on around him or worn out from processing a hundred different things at once. You don’t need to fill me in on that piece of information.
  2. One callous and ignorant comment is not sufficient justification to leave a church, no matter how strongly I wanted to in the visceral rage of my first reaction.

I just want the world to know that the kids who seem different or difficult are beautiful, funny, intelligent, sweet, unique individuals – just like the ones who fit in, make friends easily, listen well, and charm you with their good behavior. You just need to see them for who they are, to see the person who needs and struggles and wants to be loved, instead of stopping at the outward web of odd or negative behaviors.

Posted in family life

water balloons in october…

Posted on by kristinabean

So after our beautiful 2-3 weeks of cool relatively autumnal weather, summer decided to visit again and we’ve had highs in the 90s for a week or so straight. Sigh.

The boys have enjoyed pulling out the water play again for one last hurrah, though, and we took advantage of the chance to use up the last of our water balloons before the dry winter could render them useless.

You can tell from the long sleeves that it had been cooler in the early morning, at least 🙂

Both boys’ main objective seemed to be popping the water balloons as quickly as possible, so they mostly just threw them into the rocks as the most reliable way to get the pop to happen – they didn’t always throw hard enough to get them to pop on the concrete. Limerick also enjoyed stomping on them as an effective way of making them pop, and Rondel humored me enough to play catch a few times and throw the balloons at me instead of the rocks.

Limerick also kept calling them bubbles, for some reason (maybe because bubbles also pop?), which Rondel found absolutely hilarious 🙂

It may not be much of a fall here in the desert, but we’re finding fun things to do with what we have, and enjoying our colored leaves and pumpkin vicariously through our picture books. Maybe next year we’ll make it up north to see the changing colors in person!

Posted in family life

being cute

Posted on by kristinabean

Most of our park outings involve a snack; I’m not sure if it’s actually needed, but it’s become a habit and I don’t feel like poking the bear by trying to change it!

Anyway, the boys were being pretty adorable the other day during their snack:

I’m not sure why, but they couldn’t stop laughing about something! It was one of those moments that makes all the hard days worth it, when we are all just enjoying being with each other without anything special going on at all.

Posted in family life, Uncategorized

to my sons’ grandmothers

Posted on by kristinabean

One of the greatest gifts my children have been given is the chance to know both of their grandmothers well and form deep, personal relationships with them. There is something special about the unconditional love and care of a grandma, particularly when coupled with their wisdom, experience, and maturity. When I am concerned about a certain behavior, my mom or my mother-in-law can provide the perspective her own years of child-raising have given her; when my patience has run out or my tank is empty, they can support me with their time and prayers; and when I worry more about my parenting or how people judge our family, they can simply give their love and acceptance to my children.

At family gatherings, I often notice some of our relatives looking askance at Rondel, for his odd physical behaviors (spinning, licking, etc.), or for his intense emotional reactions (especially in the uncomfortable, overstimulating environments that often surround family events), or for his particularity and attention to detail (which he hasn’t yet learned to express gently…). And it hurts me a lot. I want to go into “Mama Bear” mode and totally destroy the people who judge my son poorly, especially when they go beyond glances and start making snide comments. I try not to because that’s not the example I want to set for my children on how to interact with the rudeness and criticism of the world, but that’s my visceral reaction…

And so it means so much to me when my mother-in-law comments on how fascinating Rondel is, how sharp and attentive he is – when she notices his quirks and differences with affection and love instead of judgment. She’s not oblivious to his sensitivities and struggles, but she simply accepts them and loves him not despite them but because of  them, in a way, because they are a part of who he is. I don’t think I can fully express the gratitude I have for her because of that, despite all the differences we have in general about raising children 🙂 And because I’m apparently ridiculously blessed, I know I can count on my mom to have that same attitude and perspective towards my children.

So thank you, wonderful grandmas 🙂 Our little family is so much richer, emotionally and relationally, because of your presence and your love.