This blog and some others we run is on the move:
From today onwards you can find it at:
http://5shiningstars.narelo.com/
See you there!
Nathaniel & Rebecca
Whenever people find out I have five children, the most common comment I get is “Gee, you must be really busy.” (see my response here) The second most common comment I get is “Rather you than me!”
I’m not really sure why people feel the need to tell me that. It’s not any of my business what family size suits you. I firmly believe we all have a number of children that is just right for our individual temperaments and personalities. For some, that is none. Most seem to suit 2 or 3 children. Not everyone wants a larger family and that is fine too.
I feel very blessed that my perfect number was also Nathaniel’s perfect number, and also that we were able to have that number of children. I realise not everyone is so fortunate, and my heart aches for you.
- Rebecca
Whenever people find out I have five children, the most common comment I get is “Gee, you must be really busy.” (the second most common comment I get is “Rather you than me!” but that’s irrelevant to the subject of this particular blog post 
) Well, actually, I’m not a busy mum. I’m a lazy mum.
Yes, a bigger family means a bigger workload but I refuse to do everything myself. I try to model the attitudes and behaviours I expect from them. I make sure they have a (relatively) clean house to live in, food to eat and clean clothes to wear. I referee arguments, reward initiative and good behaviour and discipline bad behaviour. That’s enough, really.
As a result of such lazy parenting, my children will find their own interesting activity when its time to play. They take turns and share quite well (although that last part is age dependant, as obviously MissK10 is going to be better at that than MissC1!) They are polite and well-spoken, usually respectful of each other, and have been known to comfort one another when a game goes wrong and someone has been hurt. They are getting better at helping me around the house – MissK10, MrJ6 and MrX4 will respond positively when asked to help me accomplish household chores, and MrJ3 & MissC1 are learning from their example. They help each other accomplish all manner of tasks, work together as a team to finish jobs, and generally are better behaved collectively when we are out somewhere than they are at home.
Don’t get me wrong – my children are not perfect. There are arguments, tantrums, bad attitudes, physical attacks, and lots of sulking, and that’s just while we get ready for school and kindy in the mornings. I find myself telling someone to “Stop being a pest!” far too often (where being a pest is defined as deliberately teasing or winding up a sibling beyond their ability to cope) and I resort to chocolate to soothe my frustration when the noise just will not stop.
Overall, however, I am quietly proud of how well they are all turning out and I am looking forward to meeting the adults they will become.
- Rebecca
I just read a blog post from single dad laughing. It’s entitled You just broke your child. Congratulations.
Please read it – from beginning to end. Think about how you as a Dad (or Mum) treat your children. What Dan writes is so true that I felt I had to share it.
Let’s love our children and love on our children!
- Nathaniel
Despite the title, this is not intended as a morbid post. Rather, this is the culmination of several months of slow realisation that last weeks Christchurch earthquake has brought into sharp focus.
If something had happened to me yesterday, my obituary would read something like this:
Rebecca was a good wife and mother. She tried hard to keep her household in a state of happy chaos, and was mostly successful. She had many good ideas that unfortunately will now never come into fruition.
Know what? That’s not good enough for me. I know I have a problem with procrastination, with laziness, and with letting myself get distracted to the point I don’t follow through on plans. That is not how I want to be remembered. I would rather my obituary went more like this:
Rebecca was an amazing wife and a wonderful mother. She put her family first, but still managed to have a helping hand available for others. Her children remember that their house was always full of laughter and the pantry was full of baking. Rebecca’s many and varied interests saw her become part of a wide group of friends, all of whom will miss her smile (and her chocolate cupcakes).
I know it’s not going to be easy, but the only one who can make the second obituary a reality is me. I am fully capable of everything stated above, all I have to do is step outside my comfort zone and do it. I can bake (and I do make good chocolate cupcakes ), and my children love having home-baked goodies to eat. I have the time to do it, I just never get around to it, same as some of the housework during the week. This is going to change. I am a little OCD, but channel it into making sure everything is organised. I just need to take one room at a time, sort it out and make a list of what is needed to be able to put everything away properly. I love to read, to sew, to write poetry and have always wanted to learn sign language so am going to look at local groups and night classes that can extend these interests. Once the children are a little older, I will restart studying to become a librarian.
What would you like your obituary to say, and how are you going to achieve it?
- Rebecca
What a day. Posts like this one probably come along quite regularly. This one isn’t really about teaching and learning but that’s okay. It is still a reflection of the day.
I’m currently sitting in my son’s bedroom as he goes to sleep. He’s had trouble getting to sleep recently so this is a bit of a regular occurrence. I love being a dad and spending time with my kids. I try to get home as early as possible so I can spend time with them. Today was no different. The train times have changed slightly so my normal train home now leaves 7 minutes earlier than it did last week. I made it today! I was amazed. But we sat and sat. About 10 minutes after it was supposed to leave an announcement came over that it was cancelled and to catch the next one. Usually this would really frustrate me. But today was different. I guess the events of the day really had me quite sober. Today the 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit Christchurch, and believe me this put everything in perspective.
This is a horrible day for New Zealand. Five months since the first big quake hit Christchurch. It has made me think of life and people. The cancellation of my train was nothing. I had the blessing of going home to my wonderful wife and 5 kids.
My thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Christchurch in the tragic time. New Zealand is behind you as is a lot of people and countries around the world.
- Nathaniel
(crossposted from teaching at the end of the earth)
We have progress, of sorts.
MrJ2 is getting much better at staying awake all day as we all settle back into the term-time routine. As a result, he is going to bed better in the evenings, and no longer needs someone to sit in with him. Often, MrJ2 is asleep less than 10 minutes after his heads the pillow.
MissC1 is also getting better at going to bed. I now tuck her in, and sit down on the floor near the door with a book or the laptop. She wiggles around a little, but falls asleep on her own fairly easily. This is a huge improvement on needing to lean over the cot with my hand patting a heart-beat rhythm against her thigh or resting gently on her back, and a step forward from sitting directly beside the cot as she falls asleep. The next stage will involve slowly moving my way across the floor and out the door as she falls asleep unaided. This should eventually lead to us being able to put her to bed, tuck her in, and walking straight out.
The biggest key in teaching children to sleep unaided is consistency. Once you’ve decided what your sleep-time will include or exclude, then do that every time. For our older children, this means their nightly routine is identical whether we are home or staying with family. For MissC1, this means similar things happen just before her day-sleep as at night time (although, there are subtle differences – right after lunch, I don’t clean her teeth or change her into her pyjamas 
)
- Rebecca
Continuing with the sleep problems. It’s 9:05pm and I’m sitting with MrJ2 waiting for him to go to sleep. He was already up quite a bit longer than usual, but unfortunately he had two short sleeps during the day. Not much we could do about that, but it certainly gets frustrating. Rebecca happens to be upstairs at the moment sitting with MissC1 trying to get her to sleep. Hopefully Rebecca and I will get to spend some of our evening together.
Actually, that was not what I wanted to blog about, but it’s related to sleep. Not the kids sleep, but mine. Boy, do parents need sleep! I’ve had a couple of later nights than usual recently and I’m really starting to feel it. Combine that with the new 5:30am starts that I’ve been having to get to work, and I get to the stage that I really struggle to cope with the kids. It’s not that they’re being particularly naughty or anything like that (although I have been known to lose the plot with them when they are constantly fighting and I’m really tired). It’s usually just that they are a little noisy.
What I have noticed when I haven’t been tired but Rebecca has is that I can cope with the noise much better than she can. It’s taken a while but I now realise that I’m the same. I don’t cope with the noise when I’m tired, but Rebecca will. You get the idea.
The point is that it’s not really fair on the kids. We, as parents, need to be so careful that we don’t overreact to something that happens normally. We need to make sure we’re disciplining bad behaviour and not just letting off our frustrations because we’re tired. I guess the fact that I’m aware it happens is pretty good. I’m admitting I have this problem. Rebecca and I try to be aware of each other and help each other out when we know they’re tired or just simply not coping.
The other thing we as parents need to do is learn to apologise to our children if we growl them simply because we’re annoyed with what they are doing, or we growl them because we are not coping. Let’s admit when we are wrong, and demonstrate to our children that we make mistakes too, and that it’s okay to say ‘sorry’.
I know I’ve apologised to MissK9 a few times in recent months and she is so gracious and receives that apology, normally with a ‘it’s okay Dad’ or similar response. Children are VERY forgiving. We also need to make sure we forgive – it’s gotta go both ways!
– Nathaniel
Its 8:45pm and I’m writing this post using Nathaniel’s laptop, sitting on the floor in MissC1′s room. She should be fast asleep, but instead is standing up in her cot watching me.
The funny thing about young children and sleep is that generally, sleep gets sleep. By that I mean the more sleep they have, the better (and longer) they sleep each time. When our children have had a good day-sleep, they are more likely to sleep through the night that night.
This has been a rough week for MissC1 and her day-sleeps, because the new term has started. During the holiday break, she was going down between 11 and 12, and sleeping for a couple of hours. Now, we pick up her brother from kindy at 12:30 so she has been woken before she’s had enough rest. As a result, our evenings have been lost to me sitting in with her until she falls asleep (lingering separation anxiety, but that’s another post for some other time). As a result, by dinnertime she is overtired and grizzly, and by bedtime is so beside herself she can’t settle properly. Once she does get to sleep, she naps for a while then wakes feeling partially refreshed. Of course, she’s not had enough rest to cope so collapses in tears if I get her up to play a little, but will sit and play in her cot while I sit on the floor.
In another week or so I will have a new routine working where she has lunch early then goes down for a sleep just after we get back from the kindy pickup. MissC1 can sleep for a couple of hours and will wake with plenty of time for us to leave to pick up the other kids from school. Once she’s getting enough sleep during the day, her nighttime routine generally fixes itself. I’m hopeful that she will go to bed at a reasonable time, and start sleeping through the night again. Then the only problem we’ll have is that I’m so used to getting up to the kids that I wake up automatically around 3am every night! Hopefully it won’t take too long for me to retrain myself too.
–Rebecca
PS: 9:25pm, and she’s finally asleep. Maybe this time she’ll stay asleep for longer than 20 minutes
Never never never underestimate the importance of regular dates with your spouse. Nathaniel and I have just come home from our first overnight stay without any kids in ages (since we went to a wedding 3 years and 1.5 children ago). It was a great chance for us to hang out as adults, and reconnect as a couple, and I am very grateful to our wonderful friends who babysat our children so that we could do it.
Getting away for a full night is rather unusual. Under normal circumstances, we rarely manage to get out of the house together. Our solution has been to have “at-home” dates. Once we’ve put the children to bed, we sit down together for an evening hanging out at home. Sometimes its a movie and junk food, other times we’ll cook ourselves a special meal, or play board games or cards. What we do doesn’t really matter, what’s important is that we put aside time specifically to spend with each other. If we think it will help, we unplug the land line and switch off our cellphones.
Scheduling regular time together is important for parents. Once the busyness of the day is over and kids are in bed, we find it important to spend time together without interruption. This means that other nights when we are in the same room but doing our own things, we don’t feel disconnected.
–Rebecca
