A Happy Birthday wish to my beautiful, loving, caring daughter. Her children are the inspiration of this blog. Follow her on Instagram at watch .me.grow.2. She is a wonderful mommy and child development specialist. Check out her learn through play.Â
May this year bring you all the beautiful things life has to offer.
Potty training in my opinion, is never a cut and dry (no pun intended) situation. I remind my daughter that is is an accident when our little Liv makes a mistake. I seem to have memory block in recalling l if I was this understanding when I was potty training her or her brother. I remind her mother that Liv is only two. My daughter reminds me she is 28 months, Okay, two!
Alivia is with me two days a week of these potty training days. On one particular “accident” day, I was designated potty trainer.Â
It was her sister, Ava’s 5th birthday. I was watching both girls. I decided to have a special day and took both girls to breakfast and ceramic painting. We made it through breakfast with no incidents. We made the potty run. Of course, Liv didn’t have to go potty.
We, all three proceed to the ceramic store. We decide on what to paint, sit down and Alivia says “potty”. That’s like an action word in my vocabulary. We leave Ava painting, it is a secure situation and I’m not endangering her.  Liv and I jump up and head up the long stairs to the bathroom.
We get into the bathroom and Liv yells “poopy”. Yes, we’ve made it in time. I lift her skirt, I reach in to pull down the diaper (never do this) and yep I pull out a poopy finger. I say “oh Liv” and she looks at me with those soulful, sorry I did it eyes. What can I do. No worries, we got this! It wasn’t easy. But we did it. Everything in the bathroom spotless, Liv spotless and hands spotless and thoroughly disinfected we leave the bathroom. She is commando style clean, wet panties wrapped in my purse. I realize later, of course, I put a change of clothes in my purse. Can you say “frazzled“
Back to painting dolphins. Check!
While driving my granddaughters to lunch, out of the blue, my five year old granddaughter informed me that she was not allowed to say bad words. No surprises there. She continued to giggle. Ok, what’s going on, why did you bring this up.
She continued to tell me she sometimes “practices” bad words at night before falling asleep. I had to do all I could to keep from giggling. I kept my composure and asked her if this “practice” happened before or after she said her prayers. After, of course.
I suggested she might not want to do that because first, we don’t swear and second, we may confuse God if he heard all those words coming at him at the same time. She didn’t reply for a while. She decided she was going to ask her pops his opinion on this subject. More giggles. Amen
So Ava started full day kindergarten. As we expected, things didn’t go as well as planned. She has a very strong personality which we don’t want to break, but she can be, to say the least, very trying.l On the counter point, she can be very loving, compassionate and empathetic way beyond her years.
The first two days which were a Wednesday and Thursday were peel off days. The teacher and aide had to literally remove her from her mother’s leg wailing and a’ flailing. She is strong!
During the first day she repeated and repeated “I miss my mommy”. I’m sure she broke the reserve of her teacher. Day two was a repeat of day one minus the “i miss mommy”. Progressing nicely. Friday was stellar. She was being picked up early for a planned long weekend. No problems.
After the long weekend, we expected more of the same. Well, surprisingly, entry into school was relatively easy. Staying in the classroom was not. The class was assigned a task and when completed could go to circle time for a game. Ava, being a perfectionist with no inner time constraints, took a little too long and missed the game. Well, she was not having any of this. She packed her desk, went for her backpack told her teacher this was too hard and too long and headed to the door.  Luckily, she was sidetracked by her teacher, but I’m sure in back of the teacher’s mind she was thinking just let her go.
That night while I was visiting Ava and the family for dinner, I heard the story. i explained the dangers of leaving her classroom as her mother and then her father had told her previously. Again, my daughter was reminding her of the dangers and asked how she would get home. She looked at her mom and said “well, you can draw me a map to our house and put it in my backpack”. Can’t wait for the teenage years.
It’s getting easier every day to drop her off except now LIvie, her sister, cries when Ava heads to school. I pray for my daughter daily.
Hi. My name is Michele and I am giaisforgrandma.com.  I would like to begin by telling you a little about myself. I am a mom of two, a daughter and a son both 30ish (how’d that happen), a grandma of two girls ages 2 and 5 and a wife to a very supportive husband of which we are close to 40 years married. Yes, I married at 10. That was a joke and I hope I don’t offend anyone with my type of humor.
Yesterday was my birthday and as a gift to myself, I finally followed through in starting this blog. It is a present to myself. Yay!
I hope you will enjoy my writings which will basically be about a grandmas perspective on the view of raising grandchildren and little musings of the day in day out happenings in my life with my grandchildren. My promise to you and myself is to update this blog often.
I hope you will join me on this journey for at a least a week, hopefully two or perhaps a year or more. I’ll take one day at a time.
Enjoy your day.
