Another four months….. February 8, 2008
Posted by Mridula in The first year, kids.Tags: life with newborn twins, new born, twin boys
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Time flies fast especially with kids around I guess. You are going thru the day and waiting forthe kids to go down so you can finally get …..to sit down ? But not so fast….still need to finish up your real chores!
Interestingly enough as new borns you always think of the time you will have once they no longer need to fed every 2 hours and as they get to 6 months you think …hmm it will be great once they start on solids and i stop breastfeeding. And then they turn one and you realize that you hadnt accounted for them being mobile now. So all your time goes in keeping track of where they go, what they do and the clean up after them.
Arjun and Rohan now are in a phase where they like to play with something up until they see that the other one has something else. So Arjun is playing with this bowl (or dabba as he calls it) and throws a side glance at Rohan. Oh he is holding a bowl too but that does look more interesting than what i have! So he manages to get it out of his hands and now I have Rohan angry. So the fighting starts. Most of the times I can work with this in the background but one day it suddenly turned quite. I really needed to finish up cooking their dinner so I let it stay quite for a few minutes. Should have known better by now right? anyways once i noticed, panic hit. I run across the room and i see both of them in the bathroom……will skip the details but i am sure you can all guess.
Jayesh and I were talking about this later that night and we observed that somehow they didnt need to fight when they were messing around in the bathroom. So obviously they were totally immersed in the activity and their toys are just not interesting enough. Some toy manufacturer needs to have a baby in the house to figure out what they really like.
Timeouts or not….. February 1, 2008
Posted by Mridula in Toddler years, kids.Tags: time out, time outs, toddler, toddler tantrums, twins
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Time outs or not….. we face this question a lot these days.
Jayesh and I cannot get around to doing the timeout thing. we come from 2 completely different backgrounds and still have the same opinion. I had really strict parents and we were punished for doing or not doing something we were told. No questions asked. Jayesh had the exact opposite experience where he would be reprimanded but almost never had a time out.
Of late we hear a lot about not making time out to be a punishment but giving them the down time to understand the outcome of their actions. This sounds good but we are still not sure how to do this.
For eg: Last week Rohan/Arjun broke a dvd….
Our first reaction was - what did you do ronu and he looks at us like ‘oh i am not supposed to do this?’
So then we realize that first its our mistake – it cannot be within reach and now what do we do next?
You cant give them a timeout for something they dont know and then we tell them – if you do this then you can’t see Curious George because thats where it comes from . They seem to understand it but i dont think it means it wont happen again.
so now if they break a dvd again, they dont get to see curious george for a couple of days and that seems a good way to get the point across but we will most probably have to find something equally interesting for them to do in the meantime. so we are really paying for their mistake because now instead of letting them watch the episode and get some time to have dinner, we get to find a way to entertain them (most likely read a couple of books) .
will be interesting to see what others do in this situation, what is the option to a time out?
