So due to a combination of events (initiate by me losing my daycare funding for a few months) I decided to pull Atti out of daycare on Friday, cram my work into three days and spend four days a week with him. He is struggling a bit with some of the kind of higher levels of behaviour being expect of him as he gets older, and I think he needs a bit more attention and a bit more time at home going slow. He needs to learn to entertain himself again (he was great at it when he was little, how did I let that slide?) and he needs to learn to wait, and to work as part of our family group. Less screen time, more time with me having time to read books and do puzzles and go for walks I think.
Last week was my first week. Work-wise it was a bit of a bust. Screen time was better (well til he was sick and all I could do was play the same 6 eps of Ben and Holly over and over as he lay on the couch in between crying jags). The iPad went to 'the shop' indefinitely to be fixed. He has recently discovered you tube, and that was a bit of the final straw for me. I kept turning the internet off because supervising THAT is a pain in the arse. And he has been having too much screen time and has become appalling about demanding it and so on.
I am not totally anti screen time, I am happy for him to watch 10-15 minutes in the morning before we leave the house (handy to keep him on track getting washed, dressed, brushed and fed and great for me to have 10 minutes without someone talking to me to actually ensure I have everything we need for the day) and a bit in the afternoon. But the ABC is rubbish at screening the stuff my kid likes at the times I am willing to let him watch tv, which is one of the reasons we got the iPad in the first place. So thank goodness for the library and their dvd collection!
So what else? Well, food was a bit better... hmm. Hit and miss maybe. I make a spaghetti with the faux-meatballs that we all love, but I put broccoli in it and he flat out refused to eat it. But I bought quite a bit of veggies and health stuff to have on hand and that went pretty well. One days lunch was hummus, carrot sticks, egg and rockmelon. Oh and these healthy seeming whole grain rice crackers that were so nice (in a kit with the hummus) that I tracked them down and bought a pack.
The plan is pretty much to spend the two weekdays at home, mostly. We can do some cooking together, I intend to do some cleaning and decluttering and so on. I am going to make a behaviour chart for him this weekend, and start working on some of the stuff that is causing him some problems. I am apparently very trendy because I had started all of this the same week I stumbled onto a doco on the ABC about slow parenting. And I was all 'hell yes, that is exactly what I am trying to do'. So I might even look a bit closer at the rules and schedules he set up for the overburdened families in that and do a month myself. We can do lots more reading, and I am hoping to do some more fun stuff together. This is the plan, anyway. Let see how it goes
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