Monday, August 27, 2012

Pardon My French

Tonight was my last yoga class. Thank heavens. I think if I have to do another down dog I'll throw up. Jeff just gave me a celebratory chest bump to the face.

My sister in-law Paulette introduced me to a book called Bringing Up Bebe. It's about an American woman who married a British man, and moved to Paris. When she has a baby she starts noticing the differences in French and American parenting, and how well behaved French children are. She starts researching what they do differently, and altering her own parenting style. The book is awesome, and while reading it I realized that I'm totally a French person. My child is not well behaved, so you'd never guess, but the way they think about parenting, and their methods of raising children are exactly like my own. They are obviously doing a better job, which just makes me hate them, but I'm still happy to know that what I do is actually a real parenting method. They believe in allowing lots of freedom with a few strict rules. No means no, indefinitely. But children should mostly hear yes. They shouldn't be hovered over, and protected from every little harm. They should learn from experience, which means they have to be allowed experience, without constant interference from their parents. They have strict rules around sleeping, eating, and respecting others. As long as those rules are obeyed then the rest is pretty much left up to them. French parents don't worry about damaging their children with every little thing they do or say like American parents do. I love that they laugh at American mom's at the park who run around behind their kids giggling, and narrating everything they do in an awful baby voice. The lady I nannied for in New York actually told me that she wanted me to act more like that when playing outside with the kids. I told her that wasn't my style. Anyway, I'm going to move to Paris, and my kids are going to sit at restaurants and not climb on the table or throw food at me, and they're going to go to bed when I ask them, and not get up until morning. Maybe in Paris everyone will stop talking about Chick Fil A, and glaring at me for sitting on a bench at the park instead of following Grace around making sure she's having fun. Everything is better in Paris.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Things that would be embarrasing. If I did them.

Falling asleep during yoga. Not even during meditation.

If people at the gym could hear the music that I run to.

When our downstairs renter almost catches me in my underwear, but instead just hears me running away from her.

P.S. Grace has added poopy and Jesus to her vocabulary this week.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Smarty Pants

First of all, this...



Grace is getting so smart. Like unnaturally smart. And spiritual. She says 15 prayers a day. I don't even know who taught her to fold her arms and have prayer. It's something we can work on, and now because Grace makes us, we are. She can eat with a fork or a spoon. She feeds herself cereal every morning. She's saying all sorts of words lately. My personal favorite is "baby". She says it every time she sees a baby at the store, or a picture of herself, or one of her nasty dolls. We found out that her little friend in our ward can say her own name now, so I worked on that with Grace, but apparently her name is too hard, so I just taught her her friend's name. That's good enough for now. I can already tell that Grace is going to be a hippie. I always find her outside, naked, eating an apple off the tree in the backyard. I try not to go outside, ever. I feel like as soon as the sun hits me I will throw up or pass out. I've been pretty dramatic about this whole pregnancy thing, and I'm starting to annoy myself, so today went for a walk, and then a bike ride, and then I sat in Grace's pool while Sadie brought me apples off the tree. Sadie is getting smarter too. All this time I thought she was eating apples off the ground, but apparently she jumps up and gets fresh ones off the tree. Maybe she's a germaphobe too. Remember those plants we planted like 4 months ago? We ended up with 4 of them in planter pots. Two tomato plants, one zucchini, and one mystery plant. Everything else is dead, and we have yet to see a vegetable. Gardening sucks.