I had no idea that cucumbers could grow this large. I had no idea that WE could grow a cucumber this large. I guess if it gets hidden under a tomato plant and thus forgotten about, a cucumber could quite possibly take over the world…or at least our backyard. By the way, it was way over 2 pounds.
Three….what can I say about being three years old? Well, testing boundaries, rules, and independence sums up the age pretty nicely. We have passed through the threshold of summer, usually our difficult months, pretty easily. I thought I was going to pull out my hair a few times but all and all, we haven’t had too many scuffles. Catherine is a good kid but like most preschoolers she is getting good at testing her mother and father. For the most part she listens but we do have our battles, one of them being cleaning up at the end of the day. Actually, cleaning up at all. She dillies and dallies and dawdles until my blood pressure is way, way, way above normal. I have tried a few tactics but none of them seem to hold out for very long. I have tried timers…worked for about a three days. I have tried positive reinforcement by putting hearts on her chart. When she gets 7 hearts she gets a small prize. That lasted about a week. I have tried negative reinforcement by taking away her beloved silly bands but that doesn’t work either.
This child baffles me. It seems like whatever form of discipline we try it just doesn’t work. For example, when it’s clean up time we set the timer for 15 minutes. If she doesn’t get everything cleaned up by then she doesn’t get a heart. That used to motivate her. Now she will say, ‘I don’t need a heart.’ I kicked it up a notch. She gets her 15 minutes and if she doesn’t have everything cleaned up, I add another 7 minutes to the timer and if she still doesn’t get everything cleaned up then I would take away her silly bands. Well tonight, 15 minutes passed…’I don’t need a heart’…set the timer for 7 minutes….5 minutes in she was taking off her bracelets saying, ‘I don’t need my silly bands’….I then got so exasperated that I told her I was going to send her to bed without a story or her beloved panda bear. She then retorted with, ‘I want to go to bed.’ By that time she was done cleaning up. Needless to say, it’s been a few days since she has gotten a heart on her chart.
There are other a couple of other issues that we have battles over and it seems that negative and positive reinforcement does not work. She only goes to ‘time out’ now if she has done something serious and even that doesn’t seem to sway her. Like I said, she really doesn’t get into trouble very much but these daily battles over smaller issues I am having a hard time trying to figure out how to navigate. If rewards don’t work and taking away an item or a privilege doesn’t work, what am I supposed to do?
Thoughts??
Several months ago, my organization was invited to participate in the Texas Rangers firefighter appreciation night. They wanted to honor an organization that worked with the families of fallen firefighters and a local Arlington firefighter had given them our name. When I got the email from their rep. I almost deleted it thinking it was spam. When I opened it and actually read it, I still thought it was too good to be true. I quickly emailed the rep to see if I read the request correctly and he replied within minutes. His email was not spam and they really did want to recognize our organization and the families of fallen firefighters.
I was pretty excited about going to my first baseball game in a LONG, LONG time. My first baseball game was the Oakland A’s back in junior high and then when I worked as a medic in the Astrodome, I got to see a few Astro’s games. Two families that I had worked with, the Staley’s and the Bale’s, both wanted to attend. And the executive director of the Federation of Fire Chaplains, Ed Stauffer and his family came along.
Not only were they going to be honoring us at the game but we were going to be able to go out on the field for pictures, meet Nolan Ryan, and then they would make a donation to our organization. We also got to sit in a suite, which was, well, sweet! I actually didn’t get that much time in the suite because we met up with some good friends of ours who are also fire chaplains. We had a great time and the experience was unforgettable! I hope they choose for us to come back next year!
It’s hard to believe that Hurricane Katrina was 5 years ago. The lyric in a familiar song, ‘time keeps on slipping into the future’ seems to be the motto of my life. When a friend of mine was re-mincing about our response to Katrina, it jarred me a little. How can 5 years have already disappeared?
Responding to the aftermath of Katrina was one of those life changing events for me. Even though I had witnessed the disaster of 9/11, nothing compared to the utter devastation of what this hurricane inflicted on mile upon mile, state upon state. I couldn’t wrap my brain around most of what I was seeing. Sites, smells, and even the rancid taste in the air stayed with me for weeks after my return. To this day, when I see a windowless, white van I can’t help but think of the body recovery vehicles.
I have written two other posts about my time spent in New Orleans and St. Bernard’s Parish. You can find them here and here (I’m not sure why the pictures are messed up in the post When I get some time I will fix them). What I do want to share for this 5 year anniversary post is the fact that I had some true friends that were working side by side with me. We dealt with some tough stuff…most of the stuff the average person will never see in a lifetime. These chaplains that I got to work with, I consider the best of the best. I will never forget sitting with them in broom closets talking with a burned out paramedic, or sitting on a curb in a flooded out neighborhood waiting for the body recovery vehicles to bring the dead to the ‘reefer trucks’, or standing on I-10 overpasses ‘counseling’ the rescue workers, or going through decontamination just so we could enter back into our cars to head to base camp. So many memories with some incredible people. I couldn’t imagine a better team to work with. I couldn’t imagine a better group to process the experience.
5 years later I still have some images of that time burned into my brain but most importantly I have memories burned into my heart. The experience has made me a better person. The experience has sealed upon my heart the chaplains that I know I can count on when we are faced with something really, really bad. Those relationships were forged in flood waters, on church floors, at base camps, inside of a Navy ship library, and in the back of a D-MORT facility. When it comes to the work we do as chaplains, I can’t imagine a relationship any stronger than the ones that were built in New Orleans. And for that, I feel incredibly blessed.
I didn’t realize that 3 year olds can be totally into a fad but it looks like we have one on our hands. Catherine is just completely obsessed with the Silly Bands craze. As you can see on her arm she has about 30 of them. They remind me of some punk rock phase from the 80′s. She won’t keep any other type of jewelry on her body but these little rubber, animal (or anything) shaped bands she can’t get enough of. The first set she got she accidentally misplaced (she’s still into stashing things into boxes and bags) about three days ago and she was devastated. I told her we would buy her another set as soon as she got all five hearts on her chart for sleeping through the night. Well, she did manage to find them before we had to buy her a new set but she didn’t let her daddy forget that he still JUST HAD TO BUY her more of them as soon as she got that last heart. She knows how many she has and if one is missing, all hell breaks loose.
Even though Catherine has gone to summer school, we were all still a bit anxious about starting pre-k 3 today. I was ready for her to get back into her school routine but I was a little worried how she might do with her new teacher and the new classroom. Well, no worries needed here because she marched right in and was ready to go! I’m almost looking forward to kindergarten because I think she really thrives in the classroom setting. I can’t wait to see how much she will grow and change this year as she moves full steam ahead to being a 4 year old. The kids in the pre-k 4 class just seem so big!
Here are a couple of pics from today:
And one last silly picture to leave you with a smile
