The 19th Wife and Weight Watchers!

Posted By SLK on Thursday, July 01, 2010   { 0 Comment(s) }

Right...its morning time and again Kit decides to break the beauty of a peaceful hour of work in the morning for me before breakfast. She wakes up before Kat and is now seated beside me (this time she has placed the little chair in a funny position so that she is actually sitting on its back - maybe she is getting too big for it now?)

Kit has developed a new found love for my books - she decides to read for me - so she has picked up the most unusual book - The 19th Wife - story of a secretive polygamous Mormon sect and murder and she is reading about a boy going to school from it - its actually quite funny! Inbetween sentences she confirms if I like it and I nod like a robot so I can carry on with my work...

Then she picks up my Weight Watchers books and starts reading from them as those ones she loves with their colourful pictures and all. After a while she announces "Mummy, your books are boring, you don't have good books" and she says this with her nose all scrunched up as if disapproving my taste altogether!

She's off now to wake up Kat...time to wrap up work...it was good while it lasted!

Tags: morning with kids, working from home

Tell me the truth!

Posted By SLK on Wednesday, June 30, 2010   { 1 Comment(s) }

I am working in my room and can hear bits and pieces of a broken conversation between Kit and the babysitter in the next room.

Kit: “Are you lying to me? Tell me the truth.”

I find this very amusing because only the other day I caught Kit with a shark (toy one!) in her mouth in the bath and when I asked why she had put it in her mouth she said she hadn’t and we had a complete lesson on telling the truth and being honest etc. So here is little Madame trying to copy me with our babysitter!

I decide to peep in her room and here is what I find : Kit is perched at the top of the ladder of her bunk bed (top bunk now used only for toys as Kat decided she was too mature for bunk beds or even to share a room with Kit) comfortably seated on the top bunk. Babysitter sitting with a book and a bowl of Kiwi. She is having a laugh as she tries to pronounce ‘truth’ – our babysitter is Spanish and the t and r does not come naturally to her so she is having fun trying to say it together! Kit on the other hand is furious as she is losing her handle on this conversation when the babysitter laughs.

Kit then confirms with me if the babysitter is telling her the truth that eating Kiwi will make her hair grow long and cheeks pink? Well, well, well…here we go again! Don’t feel so good twisting benefits of a Kiwi for her just now (have done it for so many fruits and veggies for the last 10 yrs) especially when I know she doesn’t like Kiwi and is demanding the ‘truth’ up front!

…she is now happily munching an apple (still up on the ladder I think) while the babysitter reads a story from below!

Tags: how children copy, working from home

Bad Mother

Posted By SLK on Monday, June 21, 2010   { 2 Comment(s) }

As usual Little Kit is awake just when I need to work at my office in the morning!

She is sitting on her little chair next to my big one trying to distract me from my work and I am getting very frustrated. She brings one toy after another and tries to force me into conversations with her.

She vanishes for a few seconds and comes back all decked up in bracelets and necklaces and announces (fluttering her eyelids!) “I want to be a mermaid please. I don’t want to be human”. I can’t resist giggling with her – she does look so funny – Kit is so much into Ariel, Melody and their entire clan, that Kat is always hiding DVDs from her fearing that she will have to watch them in the car with her.

Next she’s just brought out some book which she wants me to read with her. When I said “No” (and I hated myself for this – as it’s like “who says NO to a book?”) Kit said “Can I read it myself?”. This made me feel even worse but as I was so busy I said it was fine. So she carried on with some foreign language in the background and then when she realised she was getting nowhere with me, she made the most heart piercing statement ever. I will enroll her for drama lessons soon...I must!

Kit: “You’re not a good mother, are you?”

I froze. I stopped doing whatever I was doing and looked up at her dumbstruck. How on earth did she pick that one up? How does Kit know that? That was my darkest secret ever!!

That did it. That worked. She got me. I am with her reading to her now and I have an Everest of a task ahead of me but that can wait…I can’t be a ‘not good’ mother, can I?

Tags: living with guilt, morning with kids, working from home