life in the loony bin

 

 

 

I’m sitting here, sipping on some fresh brewed southern style ice tea, watching the last of the first season of True Blood and just marveling at how things have changed in just a few short weeks. Life is SO good around here these days I can hardly believe it. 

Jacob has slipped into the family like he’s always been here.  We’ve absolutely zero behavioral problems or outbursts from him, which is just remarkable.  He’s doing great at school.  We went over his spelling and vocab words tonight, and he knew every single one with no problems.  The only issues he’s having is his lack of personal responsibility for his possessions and things like that.  He’s been brought up to think everything in life is disposable and he’s never been made to treat things with respect and care.  He’s always losing toys or breaking them.  And his critical thinking skills and logical reasoning/common sense need a lot of work, but that’s expected from a child who has spent YEARS in front of the television.  I’ve got some plans in the works to help him out with that, and the first one is going to be structure, structure, structure. 

He has never had a stable environment.  If his mom wasn’t moving from place to place and dragging the kids along, then different people were going in and out of the houses, and she’s never kept a job for more than six weeks.  So, I’m in the process of typing up a daily schedule for him.  Nothing strict or rigid, just the times of day when he should be doing homework, or chores, or preparing for bed.  He needs this so much; you can tell he gets lost in a situation when he doesn’t know what’s expected of him.  So I’m going to type up his schedule and tack it up in his room so he can look at it when he needs to.  And then I’m going to do a master schedule for the whole family and put it up in the message center, because getting Jacob into a schedule has really shown me how much I benefit from one as well. 

As for Chloe, well I don’t think there’s any other word for her but precocious.  She just gets smarter and smarter every day.  And her attitude!  I’m almost sorry to say she inherited both mine and Aaron’s latent talent for sarcasm, and she dishes it out daily.  Lol.  Just yesterday I told Aaron he needed to take a shower and she looked at him and said "Dad, you stink!" lol.   She’s learning every day, but she’s SO strong willed.  Discipline is definitely an issue with her, and Aaron and I struggle with being consistent, but we’re getting there. 

And Ben! Can you guys believe he’ll be nine months old in a week? It’s crazy! He still seems so much like my little tiny baby, probably because he’s so much more dependent on me at this age than Chloe was.  He’s my little man.  🙂 

Aaron and I are doing much better than I EVER would have thought was possible just a few weeks ago.  Really, all the stuff that’s been happening between he and I is for another entry all on it’s own, but I’m just really, really happy right now that things have changed for the better.  🙂

Now, I have two weeks without school to look forward to, and I plan on enjoying every second of it with the family now that we’re finally all under the same roof again.