Super mom is back

I think my motivation used to come mostly from Lillian's old day care. Missy always had the most super ideas for teaching and making crafts and homemade toys and I, Lillian's real mom, was not about to be out done by someone whom the state was paying to care for our child. I wanted to be super-er than Missy. I made crafts with Lillian and we made sorting games and matching games and I had puzzle time and reading time and art time built into our daily schedule.


Then, I got pregnant and threw up for four months straight. Puzzle time was replaced by Little Einsteins and she grew out of the sorting games that we had made. Yesterday, I realized that I've defaulted my teaching responsibilities to Sesame Street (which, by the way, has done a fabulous job of teaching Lillian how to count to 13. Seriously, I had nothing to do with that). So, I decided that we would make this little book. I'd cut out the pictures and we'd sort them and glue them on the corresponding color pages.


I think it's safe to say that this book was the source of the most contention ever. Not only did she not want to help sort and repeatedly asked to watch 'Einsteims,' (not that I let her watch that much TV. She watches Sesame Street in the morning and then watches two episodes of Little Einsteins after her nap for a total of 1 hour and 40 minutes of TV time per day. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than 2 hours, so I figure I'm doing just fine. But, if Lillian had it her way, she'd do nothing but watch TV all day long) but we fought over every step of the process. She wanted to help cut so I gave her some saftey scissors and scrap paper. She saw right through that one. Then, we only had one glue stick so we were sharing; she'd make her best attempt at putting glue on the pictures, then I'd finish it up. This arrangement was most odious to the little girl who wants to do it all herself. How insulting that I'd imply that her work needed fixing! There were many tears. Many times did I say some variation of "if you can't share and be nice and be a big girl and stop crying, you can't play with me and will have to play by yourself in your room."


Eventually, I gave up and the book lay on our kitchen table, half finished. I decided to give it another try today and things went much better. She shared the glue stick and contented herself with writing on scratch paper with the markers when I wasn't using them to write the names of the colors. I'm glad that I went back for the follow-up because I was ready to let that slacker mom take over forever after the disaster that was yesterday.

But now, Super Mom is back... Actually, now that I don't have Missy to steal ideas from, I'm a little at a loss of what to do next. Any ideas?