Mama's office
Yesterday Gail was closed for the first half of the day, and Matt had a doctor's appointment at 10:30. So, from about 10:15 to 11:45 I had Nikolai with me in my office. It actually worked out quite well -- much better than I had imagined it would. When first he got here I thought immediately of the entertainment value of the vending machine and getting food from it. In hindsight I see that placing a 3 year old in front of a box full of 50 different candy options might not be a good idea.
When I turned down his 87 requests for candy from the machine and routed him instead to the healthiest options he handled it quite well (whew), and without any fits. I allowed him to feed the dimes (yes, all dimes, I was scrounging) into the machine and then push the button for the strawberry flavored fruit snacks I allowed him to have (ok, so it was almost as healthy as I could get with a vending machine). He was tickled pink watching the spiral arm move and push the snacks out, and he found the loud "bang" when they dropped quite gratifying. He reached in and grabbed them himself and off we went to Mama's office.
He discovered some cars that were buried under a pile of junk behind my chair, and sat quietly and very happily eating his strawberry fruit snacks and playing with his "new cars". All in all it was a very peaceful and productive time. I got work done, he got new cars. We were both happy.
When I dropped him off today at Gail's, I was telling her that he had spent some time with me in my office yesterday morning before he came to her house. Having overheard this conversation, Nikolai said "Mama, you have *wonderful* snacks in your office."
When I turned down his 87 requests for candy from the machine and routed him instead to the healthiest options he handled it quite well (whew), and without any fits. I allowed him to feed the dimes (yes, all dimes, I was scrounging) into the machine and then push the button for the strawberry flavored fruit snacks I allowed him to have (ok, so it was almost as healthy as I could get with a vending machine). He was tickled pink watching the spiral arm move and push the snacks out, and he found the loud "bang" when they dropped quite gratifying. He reached in and grabbed them himself and off we went to Mama's office.
He discovered some cars that were buried under a pile of junk behind my chair, and sat quietly and very happily eating his strawberry fruit snacks and playing with his "new cars". All in all it was a very peaceful and productive time. I got work done, he got new cars. We were both happy.
When I dropped him off today at Gail's, I was telling her that he had spent some time with me in my office yesterday morning before he came to her house. Having overheard this conversation, Nikolai said "Mama, you have *wonderful* snacks in your office."
posted by rebecca at 11:46 AM
1 Comments:
haha - I can't imagine that went over very well. I must admit, I'm a bad mother, I didn't look to see if there was msg or trans fats in the strawberry fruit snacks. oh well.
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