Loving To Fail

"An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. If he succeeds once then he's in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work."

— Charles Kettering

This quote was in my email this morning. I really, really love it. I think it's one of the absolute best things you can teach a kid. Yes, you're going to fail. In fact, you should do it a lot. Every single day, you should keep working, and have FUN trying to figure out how to make things better and faster and more efficient. And yes, you're going to STINK at some things the first time you try. That doesn't necessarily mean you need my help. Sometimes I'm not going to help you. (and that freaks some of them right out... you don't WANT to help me? I can't do it all by myself!) Yes you can. Depending on the kid, sometimes I explain that, and sometimes I just say I'm busy or I can't right now, and if you want it done right now, you'll need to figure it out.

Working through your frustration is good for you, and it's true that flunking in school sometimes sets us up for not wanting to try. I mean, nobody likes to fail. That's something I can't really do anything about. But at home? Work it through! Help less, ask questions and LISTEN to the answers, and your kids will surprise you.

I think as parents and caregivers we all tend to get into the pattern of helping our kids too much. Sometimes it's because oh my heavens they take SO LONG TO DO THINGS. It is easier to just do it for them, and it makes less mess for us to clean up afterwards.

Sometimes it's because mamas can be control freaks. We like for things to be done our way. Our way is the best way, and that means it's the only way it should be done. I have learned so much by sitting back and watching the way that kids choose to do stuff. Lots of times it doesn't get done the way I wanted it to. That matters in some things, but in others? It doesn't. It really doesn't. And it helps kids so much if I let go of my preconceived ideas in that areas. It still gets done. And they are doing it.

Talking them through a failure is something I'm still learning how to do. It's my conditioned response to leap in with the NO NO voice sometimes and go, "That's not the way that works! Oh my goodness you're going to hurt yourself/ break that/ whatever! Do it like this! NO! LIKE THIS! never mind, here, just let me do it...." And for me, that's a huge fail on several levels. It teaches them that I will step in and do it for them and so they can (okay, I'm not finding a better phrase than "half-ass it"... usually I don't like to cuss on the blog, but that's what they do). It also doesn't help me back off and let them learn. It doesn't allow them to fail in a safe way so that they can try again next time.

I find that the older they get, if I just call their name and get their attention, I can say things like, "I think if you do it that way you might drop it. Then you'll have a mess to clean up. (because yes, they will be cleaning that mess, not me.) Can you think of another way to do it that might be better?" Everybody stays calm and the kid gets to think about it himself and do it himself.

I also think we do it to ourselves while we raise kids. I have been working at trying to get my kid to drop a binky/ sleep through the night/ potty train for so long now! It doesn't happen easily or quickly and we get frustrated. This is the invention process. You get it right once and it works! True, what worked before may not work today, but if you start feeling like you've flunked out, it's not good for anybody.

Anyway. There are some thoughts for today. :) What can you add that I haven't thought of?

Big Girl

Miss Aurora is suddenly getting to do so many things! I am always amazed at how fast that year goes.

Chunks of real banana! Mostly she played around and spit them out and tried to squish them, but still. They made her so happy.



She's at a great stage for things like this outside- she can't crawl away yet, and this is an interesting place to sit her up and let her watch everybody. They don't mess with her and she can't get dirty or eat bugs. :)

Especially with more new babies coming soon, she is well on her way to being one of the big kids!

Always Fun...

It never gets old for me to watch a baby falling asleep in his lunch. I love it every single time. Simba gets tired about 20 minutes before lunch is ready, but he's eating so much big boy food now that I hate to put him down without letting him eat what the other kids are going to have. He ends up dozing in his food on a semi-regular basis. It makes me happy. He's so cute.


Every kid I put in the jumperoo falls asleep in it at least once. O'Malley and ... (what did I used to call the baby I had last year... I can't remember his Disney name...) anyway, both of them used to keep jumping in their sleep. Girl Friday doesn't do that- once she falls asleep, she is OUT.


Oh! I remember now- Eeyore. That's what I called him. This one:

He'll be 2 next month- I bet he looks SO different. He probably has some more hair now. :) It always cracks me up when I haven't seen a kid in awhile and they've gotten tons of hair. It looks like they're wearing wigs.

This Is Exhausting, Said The Frosting

Today's Muffin Tin Monday theme is I Can't, Said the Ant. We read the book and talked about rhyming words and chose foods that sounded good. I can't imagine why the artichoke didn't make their short list...

My husband took the camera with him on a trip, so there are no pictures for the next two weeks, but our foods are:

I can't bear it! said the carrot...
What a blessing! said the dressing....
How exhausting! said the frosting...
This is a breeze! said the cheese....
Rather rare! said the pear...
Gee! said the pea...
Take my advice! said the rice...

It's funny how we have weird combinations of foods like this for lunch. I'm not sure I would have ever served cheese, rice, peas, carrots, and frosting. But the food program just says we have to have a protein, a carb, and 2 fruits and/or veggies, so this qualifies. And it makes sense to them because of reading the book.

Space Work!

We have been having such a great time with the space theme this month. The kids are learning the names of all the planets, which ones are hot and which ones are cold, rotation and revolution around the sun, lunar cycles and phases of the moon... it's amazing. This is stuff I had mostly forgotten about from school and I'm relearning as much as they are, I think.

Did you know spiders went up in space? Yesterday was spider day- apparently back in the dawn of space travel they took different things up with them to see how gravity affected them. We wanted to see if spiders could still spin webs in zero gravity. They can. Arabella, the first spider in space, spun a web in two days. :)

Today we talked about how the astronauts had to develop special food to eat in space because gravity is what keeps your food on your fork! We pretended to catch food in the air as it floated around, and then we made space pudding.

Two tablespoons of vanilla pudding mix, four tablespoons of milk, zip it up in a bag, and smoosh it around until you've got pudding. You can't open the bag, because all the pudding will float out and get in your hair.... so we snipped a little hole in the corner and they sucked it out. So much fun.

Duchess and O'Malley LOVED it, Sebastian made the pudding and ate a few bites and then said it was yucky and needed to wash his hands, and Ariel refused to do it and ended up opening her bag and pouring the pudding all over her chair. Would not taste it either. But oh well. Most people had fun.

Duchess asked, "How come Ariel never wants to even try anything GOOD and only eats yucky stuff like green beans?" :) She does like her veggies, which I think is funny. Pudding? Cake? Cookies? No way. She wants peas and corn and green beans.

You can't make me eat the pudding. Not gonna happen.

6 Kids 5 And Under

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it would be like to have a big family. That's something I do on a regular basis, actually, but it's easier to visualize right now. Generally I've got a cluster of kids that are all pretty close to the same age. When we take the quad stroller and go walking, it's obvious to anybody paying attention that there is no way these kids could all be mine. Oh look! Four babies all around the same age-ish and then two more who just learned to walk! Not physically possible, not to mention one is Asian, two have red hair... whatever.

However, right now I've got two sibling groups who dovetail into each other, and then two infants. Today we went walking and I had Aurora, my Friday girlie who still needs a good Disney name, O'Malley, and Sebastian in the quad, and Duchess and Ariel walking. A man and his dog stopped to talk to us and made the predictable comments about my hands being full, just seeing the big kids who were petting his dog. Then he walked on by and saw the girls in the back of the stroller and just stopped in his tracks and goes, "HOLY CHRISTMAS!"

And I realized that for the first time in awhile, ALL the kids could conceivably be mine, biologically. The four bigger kids are all about 15-16 months apart, and Aurora and {help me think of a name for this new baby} are 6 weeks apart but look like they could very easily be twins.

5 1/2, almost 4 1/2, 3, almost 2, and 6 month old twins.

Good grief. This could be real.

I did tell him that most of them are my day job and only 2 belong to me. I have a feeling I'm going to want to start claiming them all though, just to see what people say to me. :)

25 Random Things About Us

This list is going around on Facebook, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to show off snippets and pictures and stuff that's happened so that I'll be caught up once and for all...

1. Snow White graduated and went to her new school at the beginning of January. We all miss her and the kids ask when she's coming back to visit. I hear she's doing fabulously well in her new place, which was never a doubt in my mind. She'd outgrown me. :)
2. Simba thinks he is one of the big kids now and I keep finding him in weird places quicker than I think he ought to be able to get there. He was trying to scale the shelves but got down when I went for the camera.
   
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4. I've also found him on top of the table this week, but I was too busy running to get him before he leaped off the edge to get a picture of it.
5. I have a new part-time baby girl who comes on Fridays sometimes. I can't think of a good Disney name for her.
6. It is taking Aurora quite awhile to get used to the fact that she has been dethroned from the title of The Only Infant In The House Who Should Be Held All The Time And Not Have To Watch Anyone Else Be Held Or Heaven Sakes Fed!
7. The big kids divide on gender lines most days now. Duchess and Ariel want to have tea parties or play Sorry! in another room, and O'Malley and Sebastian like to hang out and smash trucks into each other.
8. Most of them have a Webkinz account and so when they go outside they want to dig for gems or else make "gak" or "gunk" and stir a bunch of mud and rocks around and paint it on stuff.
9. Ariel has become even more dramatic lately and will throw herself into sad-looking positions and whimper and peek out through her fingers to see if I've stopped the universe for her. Usually I laugh at her and take her picture. It bugs her, but most of the time snaps her out of the funk because she wants to see what she looks like.
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11. Muffin Tin Monday has become a pretty regular occurrence around here and they like trying to figure out the theme. Today we had olives, cucumber slices, hot dog slices, carrot slices, cheerios, and string cheese slices. Circles. They were pleased.
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13. Our curriculum theme for February is Blast Off! and we're all really excited about it. I've been finishing up random bits of leftover months that we never got around to, and haven't ordered a new theme box in a few months.
14. I don't think I have found one thing that Simba will not eat. The kid can put away some groceries.
15. On the flip side, most meals he eats more than both Ariel and Sebastian do all day long.
16. O'Malley and Sebastian are trying to potty train. It's in that stage where I despair of it ever happening, but I know that all of a sudden one day it just WILL and I should stop worrying about it.
    
17. Ariel is beginning to drop her nap and I let her stay up two days a week and work on school while I do kindergarten with Duchess. They are learning to skip count by tens, fives, and twos. Duchess is annoyed that Ariel is picking it up as fast as she is- she wants to be the smartest one. :)
18. Duchess loves to hold Aurora and pretend that she's her baby sister. I think she wants to keep her.
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20. I wish I had a wardrobe as cool as Aurora's.
21. I'm really excited about the supply fee this month- it's been awhile since I bought a lot of new things for the playroom.
22. I'm looking at getting this for the babies. It looks like something they will enjoy. You put them on their belly and they can spin around and play with all the different parts of it.
23. I'm not sure what direction I want to go for the big kids- Lakeshore is such an awesome place! There are a million cool things there that would make our days more fun. I think this may be at the top of my list though.
24. I'd also really like a sand and water table that I can use for moon sand, but I'm not sure how practical it would be and if we could keep the area clean enough to not drive me batty.
25. I finally feel like I might be caught up on all our goings-on!