Games and Deconstructed S'mores

Today's not-so-favorite moments included . . .

. . . Daniel throwing a cup of orange juice at the beginning of lunch. Clean-up duty is all the more bitter when I'm hungry and my lunch is just sitting there waiting for me to eat it. Dude, could you possibly throw your cup at the end of the meal, when I'm full and your cup isn't?

Today's favorite moments included . . .

. . . the kids and their friend Jackson "breathing fire" at each other. They were pretending to be dragons.

. . . eating microwave s'mores with the kids. We each have a very different concept of the ideal s'more. I like mine with dark chocolate. Joy prefers hers sans chocolate--just marshmallow and graham cracker. Daniel eats as many marshmallows as he can until I put them away, then he munches a graham cracker or two.

And another thing . . .

. . . I still struggle to decide when to intervene as a parent, because the kids shift between playing and pestering so easily and so often. I want to teach them to be kind and considerate, but I feel like if I jump in every time one of them acts out, I'll focus to much attention on the negative behavior and deprive them of the opportunity to learn conflict resolution. They usually resolve things quickly on their own, so unless things get really dangerous or unacceptable I've started just letting them work things out themselves most of the time.

. . . Joy wanted me to pretend to be a lion this afternoon. She must have told me at least twenty times how to properly say "Roar!" but no matter how hard I tried to correctly imitate her pronunciation, she was always convinced I was saying it wrong.

. . . Joy also wanted to play Simon Says. Her directions included "chase Simon slowly" and "dogpile Mama." When it was my turn, I gave just one command: "lay down and take a nap." I promptly led by example. Joy objected but Daniel immediately followed my instruction, which set me laughing. Joy always finds it unnerving when I laugh and she doesn't get the joke.

. . . Joy asked to play Tic-Tac-Toe, so I found a site where you can play it online. We played until it was time for me to cook dinner, then Joy decided to play both X's and O's after I left. By the time we sat down to dinner, the final score was O's 20, X's 24, Ties 18. They say it takes a truly skilled player to outwit himself.