You may have noticed the relative quiet over the past few weeks from me and for that I apologize. I like keeping my blog updated, I feel that it keeps me in the habit of writing on a regular basis which I think is helpful. The reason for my absence however has largely been due to the fact that I had my daughter, and I hate to say it but when you aren’t used to having kids, they just wear you right out. It has been a trying couple of weeks with her, with its fair share of ups and downs. But over this time, I feel that we were able to get out and do a couple of interesting summer vacationy type things so I figured I would write about them a little.
The first thing of note is that I’ve begun to return to geocaching over the last couple of weeks. Over the last two weeks I’ve gone to about five or six geocaches with my daughter. I am not overdoing it or anything, I think my rate a couple of years ago was much higher, but I don’t want to overdo it and I don’t have as much time as I used to have since I work now. However, just getting back into it makes me happy, even if I only do a few a month, it is nice to get some exercise whilst visiting new and interesting places.
Work and Vacations
I stayed with my mom over the course of the two weeks while I was at work so that she could provide me free babysitting. In return, I chipped in for meals and helped make one. Now that I am working 10 hour days, it is much more difficult to deal with this type of schedule though. I started letting my daughter go to bed an hour later, but even so it was about 7:30 by the time meals were usually done and eaten and so only really had a short hour and a half to spend with her most nights, sometimes not even that if she wasn’t acting good. And this time, I was usually exhausted for so I didn’t really feel like I got much quality time with her. Although, one night my roommate and I met up with my mom and my daughter at the Mallard’s game and that was pretty exciting to go to. She got an ice cream sundae in a baseball hat which she was very happy about.
The 10 hour days did have one great benefit, it allowed us to finagle the weekend so that I got a 4 day weekend without taking any PTO. With this, we went up north to my mom’s cottage for a family reunion that was going on. I know I’ve been to a couple of these as a child, but I don’t think I’ve really gone since probably about 16. So it was weird to go. My brother was traveling up to go this year so I thought it would be a good opportunity for my daughter to meet him again, she’d met him once before but she didn’t remember. My daughter had a good time playing with her cousins, and it also marked the first time since my graduation that I had seen or talked to my sister’s family. It was a little awkward though I think we got along fairly well. We also found a few geocaches while we were up there, one day in the rain which wasn’t a whole lot of fun, but it was an experience.
Trying to get good behavior from my daughter
Overall, I felt my daughter was fairly good on the trip. She has her moments where she is extremely upsetting. Her continued inability to listen is really starting to get to both my roommate and I. She just refuses to do almost anything we say and while I’m at my mom’s house I tend to bare down on her a little more with time outs and forcing her to stay at the table to eat and what not. I find it harder to do this sort of thing at home because whenever I do it around my roommate she gets even more frustrated and I also feel she tends to cave in and make deals that I don’t want to make. I don’t like to reward bad behavior. For instance, my mom made pork chops one night which obviously my daughter didn’t like. I originally was going to make her eat half of it, but she put up such a fuss that I ended up making her eat all but a couple of bites. I feel my roommate might have bargained her to eat the half or less that she had to eat in the first place, but I feel like this just rewards it. I understand this philosophy, but I don’t know I just think with my daughter this is to her how she gets what she wants. She’s always trying to bargain things to swing her way and I don’t like it. If I told her up front that she only had to eat half she would have tried to bargain to a quarter. My roommate’s method should work with most kids, but it just doesn’t work with mine which sucks and it ends up frustrating all of us.
We did get a good last day together despite some rough days towards the end. We went to Flat Top Grille for breakfast on Sunday which really is a marvelous breakfast place, and my daughter had a great time and I think we all did becaucse of it. And then we went from some fairly frustrated shopping and finally came home and let her swim a bit and played some Super Monkey Ball together.
Overall, a good, yet difficult couple of weeks. Hopefully we figure out something a little more solid for a vacation for my next time with her.