With the help of my best friend in the whole world (thanks, Julie!) I am now committed to getting Olivia to a point where she is feeding herself.
We’re going to pick up some star stickers yesterday and she’ll get a sticker to put on that day of the calendar after each meal she feeds entirely to herself.
There may be a reward system that occurs after a specific, yet undecided, number of stars are collected on the calendar. Perhaps the stickers themselves will serve as reward enough. Who knows? This is going to be a work in progress.
And that’s just it, isn’t it? We’re all works in progress. My life as a mother continues to be a work in progress. My life as a wife too.
I want to succeed at this because if I fail at being Olivia’s mother, she is the one who will pay the price.
She’s going to my mom’s this weekend to spend Saturday night. My nephew will be there too. It’s their very own slumber party to mirror Alyssa’s 13th Birthday slumber party. It gives O something to which she can look forward and it gets her out of A’s hair for the evening while she spends time with friends. This is what I call a win/win situation.
Yesterday was a tough day for Olivia. She had a rough morning at home before school and came home from school with a yellow slip from her teachers. She was speeding through her math facts test and her teachers called her on it.
This morning was better and I told her I thought today would be better too.
She asked, “Do you think I’ll be good at Gram’s tomorrow?”
I replied, “Of course I do.”
“Why do you think I will?” she wanted to know.
“Because you can and I know you want to,” I told her. And I believe that.
She is able to control her own actions. She can behave when she wants to. Lucky for us she usually wants to do so. But sometimes, the ‘wiggles’ get to be too much for her and she loses control. At those moments it’s my job as her mom to teach her to reign it in, to figure out how to reign it in all by herself.
I can’t fail at this because to do so is to fail Olivia. She deserves so much more than live with the results of my failure.
A mom, a dad and two daughters. We're living ordinary lives with a twist of 5p- (Cri du Chat) for spice. But we're about so much more than our younger daughter's genetic diagnosis.
1 comment:
So much love to you! Take it easy on yourself, you are an amazing mama. Just think...you never thought she'd be sleeping by herself and look at her now. In a year, you'll be wondering why you were ever concerned about this.
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