Today is International Blog Swap Day which means I’m hosting a UK blogger here today and she’s hosting me for the day. We’ve both written about the stages our kids are at. Read on for hers, and then click over to her blog for mine. Or read the lot linked up here.
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I’m very excited to be writing this guest post for Jen. One of the things I have discovered about blogging is the fabulous online community that’s out there and it’s lovely to be able to expand this and meet fellow bloggers from the other side of the world. Thank you Jen for hosting my post.
I’m Iona and I blog at http://www.redpeffer.me.uk where I talk about my family, our experiences and activities as well as write the odd opinion or two. I love photography and am really enjoying how blogging has helped me to improve it and inspire me to continue.
My children are now 7 and 3 and we are lucky enough to have a girl and a boy. They are my inspiration, my frustration, my love and my fear all rolled into one. I’m sure most of you if not all will recognise these emotions!
Recently, I’ve noticed my 3 year old find his voice. This is wonderful to watch as he becomes his own little person. But it comes with a caveat-he now argues, fights and bickers with his big sister. This happens increasingly more often. He wants to express his own views, yet he also idolises her and wants to copy her. This inevitably leads to tension and conflict. He becomes frustrated. And at age 3 he has yet to learn how to control or manage this without it turning into a screaming and wailing fest of epic proportions.
When the arguments happen and I haven’t been there to witness them. I then get the ‘he did that’; or ‘she did this’ scenario. Both insist they are the ones hard done by. Both want the other told off. I know I’ve been guilty of assuming it was someone’s fault or telling them both off equally because it’s just easier to manage. Then you have both of them sulking and huffing as they both feel hard done by!
And I’ve noticed my soon to be 8 year old understandably wants her own space. She doesn’t want her 3 year old little bother following her everywhere like a shadow. She need’s to have time and space for her own activities and room for her special books and toys to be just for her and not shared. I totally understand that, but it can be hard to manage on a day to day basis. As a parent I’m constantly trying to accommodate two very different types of need and struggling to find that all elusive balancing act that sometimes feels so distant to be almost impossible to reach.
And as your child gets older, their problems can’t be so easily solved with a hug or a cuddle. Obviously they still help a little, but you find yourself having more complex conversations. Often these conversations don’t have conclusions either. At almost 8, my daughter is still at the age where she expects a definitive answer for most things and I’m trying to show her that most of life isn’t that simple. And then recently I discovered that her friends have been talking about relationships, kissing and even sex. They are in Year 3 (ages 7 and 8.) That shocked me. Fortunately, she doesn’t seem terribly interested in the whole thing, but now I know she is being exposed to it all, we have to think about what to say to her and how to say it. It all feels too early, she doesn’t have enough life experience to understand much of it. Where on earth do we start? Right now I haven’t started at all and am secretly hoping it will all somehow go away and re-appear when she’s older! That’s an effective parenting strategy isn’t it?!
We are as open as we feel appropriate with both our children, but it can be tricky working out what information to share and in what way. And don’t get me started on the whole friendship/relationship thing. I just want to wrap them both up in cotton wool but of course I know that this won’t help them be happy adults. My mum always said it got harder as we got older because she couldn’t solve everything for us, and now I know exactly what she means.
Thank you for reading, and please do pop by to say hello. I can be found on Twitter @Redpeffer, and my blog will take you to all my other social media profiles from the home page.
Thanks for having me on here. Great to meet new bloggers 🙂