Good bedtime

Tonight was a really good night. We received a really yummy dinner from Donna Kalla and the girls went to town on it. (Taco salad is my favorite, and I think it is one of the girl's as well) It was delivered a bit earlier than I had expected, but that made for an earlier dinner, an earlier play time, earlier bath time, earlier story time and a slightly earlier falling asleep time. I might actually get to bed at a decent hour tonight! :)

O had her usual tiny tantrums, but we have a pretty clear routine that we follow, and they rarely last more than a minute now. She is learning what she can and cannot do. It seems that she has more of them around me than when just Jenetta is here, but she is often more wound up around me - we play rougher and louder when daddy is under the pile of blankets and pillows, etc. This probably ramps up her baseline for excitement, so a tiny thing not going her way brings on the tears.

One thing that concerns us is that O has very little compassion for her little sister. We have to remind ourselves that this has just not been modeled for her. She has a ME FIRST attitude in pretty much everything she does and sometimes this is really bad for L and we are doing our best to work on that. And we are not just talking about typical four year old stuff. It seems thoughtfully hurtful at times. It is a slow process, but we see the mental wheels turning for O a little bit.

The main reason I wanted to post tonight was that something happened during story time that could have gone very badly, but actually turned out really good. We read a book called David Gets In Trouble. The girls really liked David Goes to School yesterday, so we continued with the theme of a kid that does a lot of wrong things and makes up a lot of excuses. At first I really disliked the book, but after I saw what it is doing for the girls, it is growing on me. They ask "Why he do that?" on just about every page, and it leads to talks about why they do the things they do. We have calm, rational discussions about the progress they are making.

Whenever David does something wrong, L sighs "Oh, Man!" and I think that is priceless! But in one scene, he gets his mouth washed out with soap for saying a bad word. O talked about that because apparently this had been done to her before. This led to a conversation about spanking and hitting. I assured her that we would never put soap in her mouth or hit her. O talked about some things she had experienced before and the homes she had been in (as clearly as a four year old can do), so I mentioned that we love her very much and want them both to stay with us forever. She put her head down on my lap, and I thought she might be crying, so I asked her if that made her sad. I was worried about all these memories and what they would stir up.

But she just looked up and smiled and said "No, make me happy!"

Then we prayed together and they went to bed.

We meet with their social worker tomorrow, so it will be interesting to get her take on all this.