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Now that the weather is getting cold (and particularly, it appears to always be raining), I'm trying to figure out "stuff to do" with Cora. I know, there was the conversation over at LL's blog about how saying a particular lifestyle would make you miserable is an affront to the other camp and their feelings, but shit, I struggle enough figuring out stuff to do with my kid just in the evenings and weekends, I'd be at a real loss figuring out what to do with her during the weekdays too. Maybe if I had a degree in Early Childhood Development, or had really any significant experience working with children, it might be better, but I don't. I talk, I read, I write, I do really boring stuff. Cora thinks it's boring too; I used to read to her from my tax casebook, and it put her right to sleep. I know, everyone says "crafts." I. Hate. Crafts. Hate them. I hate the mess involved with crafting stuff. Stickers and paper and scissors and finger paints and sparkly gluey stuff. Hate it. Several of my friends scrapbook. I can't scrapbook. My idea of a scrapbook is to stick all the pictures in like a photo album and call it a day. Just can't do it. The City daycare does crafts with the kids every day. They make great stuff, and Cora really enjoys it. I know I have to go get the stuff and do it, but ugh, what a mess. I'm not adverse to clutter, but I really hate mess.

I can tell my kid gets bored with me, particularly here in Small Town, where she doesn't have a ton of toys, or her "puppy," to entertain her. We read books, we color (crayons and coloring books I can handle), we play with the few toys she has here. I take her to the indoor playgrounds at the mall and at Chick-Fil-A. She probably watches too much TV. But I figure her language development is advanced, so it can't be all bad. I just don't want her to be bored though. I was definitely bored when I wasn't in school. My mother is a homebody, the only trips out of the house we took were to the pool and to the mall. I could only occasionally talk her into a trip to the playground. I watched 3.5 hours of soaps every day. Every day. I can tell you what was going on in the now-defunct soap Loving, All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital until I was in college and stopped watching all except GH (and Loving ended years before that, then became Port Charles, a GH spin-off, which also died). I started watching Days of Our Lives for a little while, but got bored with it. Anyway, I digress. I'm sure it will get better once she's a little older and we can play games together and her attention span for reading a book will go beyond Goodnight Moon. Then I won't feel like I'm boring the hell out of my kid every evening, and she won't hand me the remote control and demand "ABBY!"

I am amazed at how much she seems to understand though. She occasionally has little temper tantrums at bedtime because she doesn't want to go to sleep. Telling her she isn't allowed to scream about it seems to be working. For instance, tonight I put her to bed and a few minutes later, she's squalling at the top of her lungs. I went into her room, and told her that I know she's sad she has to go to sleep, but that doesn't mean that she gets to scream about it, absolutely no screaming. She nods, sniffles, and stops screaming. No more noise. It isn't just a fluke, it's continued to work. It doesn't usually work during the day for temper tantrums though. Those I generally have to just wait out until she pulls it together, or resolve the problem (like, I'm starving to death, where's my food). Not too bad. But, she's not quite two yet. I'm sure there's plenty of fun still to come.

As an aside, the names were finally released for bar results in our state, and apparently this year is the outlier statistically. Normally we have between 9 and 10 fail, this year it was 17. We even had a big shocker -- a top ten grad from our class didn't pass. Therefore, I count myself very lucky that I did.

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