Disneyland Family Fun

On Tuesday we spent the whole day in Disneyland and around noon we were joined by our cousins, aunt, uncle, nieces and nephew. And in the the evening we were joined by papa and yaya. It was a great day...quite long for me because I did not get a decent nights sleep the night before. However, we lived to talk about it :o) Gabriela Zoe thoroughly enjoyed Disneyland and it is so fun to see her understanding more and more. When it was nap time she would not go to sleep, and Stephen and I kept telling her that we would still be in Dland when she woke up. Well eventually she was convinced and allowed herself to sleep for an hour. On of the highlights is that she got to shake Mary Poppins hand and take a picture with her. She was in AWE!!! I would say that she is her favorite 'princess' at the moment :o)

Boundaries

As I am writing this I can hear GZ playing in her room! I consider myself a babywise mom even though I do not follow everything to the T and maybe some other babywise moms would not think that I am :o) However, I understand the principle behind the method and as I understand it is : 'The parents makes the shots and not the baby/toddler/kid' I do have to keep going back and be reminded of some specific ways to make that applicable. Like I said I don't follow everything and I cannot be 'blamed' for having read the book cover to cover several times...but i have leafed through it multiple times for specific issues. I was reading the blog Chronicles of a Babywise Mom and I found a lot of similarities in the approach I took in potty training my daughter. For one thing I don't expect my 18 month old at the time to tell me when she needs to go to the bathroom I take her (learned that the hard way :o) every 30 min. then 45 etc and now she can go for longer periods of time without needing to use the restroom and almost always is able to ask before the issue is urgent to the NOW!
As I was reading through her blog I came to face with this reality, one thing that I have not been consistent with in the past is alone playtime. I have not been against it, but maybe I got a little lazy in training my daughter to be able to do that. After I read that blog I was thinking through the idea of alone playtime. The reason why it is important is to teach the child to be able to entertain herself. In parenthesis let me add that in my specific circumstance that is not a problem. GZ has always been able to occupy herself when I can't give her face to face time. This may be the reason why I did not push 'alone playtime' However, this last week I realized there is another even more important purpose and that is the teaching of boundaries. I thought about when she is a teenager and she wants to do something that I do not allow or I need her to do something, I believes it goes beyond the understanding of parent/child relationship to the built in frame of mind that the parent is the one that sets the boundaries of what is allowable and what is not and for how long etc. Yes if that boundary is set by the parent from the time the child is young the battle agains boundaries set in the future I believe will be at least more mild. And yes my daughter is about 11 years away from even beginning to be a teenager so I have a lot to learn still. However, this is what I believe is a glimpse of the future in light of what I am doing NOW as a parent. My part is to pray and seek God fervently, read/seek/ask for advice and the outcome is up to God.