Dave and Cathy's Family Blog

Here are the May highlights:

• Celebrating mother’s day — Luke provides us with a funny moment when he reveals what he thinks his mom is good at in his card
• Lilah gets her first sports’ trophy with the completion of basketball season
• Watching the finish of the Tour of California bike race live
• A beautiful day at the beach during Memorial day weekend

Lilah

At last, Lilah received her first sports’ trophy with the completion of basketball season. Of course Luke was quick to remind her that he has many more trophies — does this one-upsmanship ever stop? In any case, Lilah was happy and made a new friend in the process – Gabby. It turns out that Gabby also goes to Lilah’s school, but they had never really been friends before. Being the only two girls on the team however, they quickly became buddies and are now planning to participate in “Wet Ball (water polo)” together at the YMCA so we’ll see how that goes.

I can’t believe my “little” girl is almost 10. I can definitely see her personality changing. She is very independent and can be really moody if you try to interrupt when “she’s busy.” She can also get quite ornery like when we don’t indulge her in her request to eat at the Soup Plantation — her favorite restaurant. The other day, when I tried to give her other options for eating out, she gave me the curt reply, “not interested.” Overall, she is still a great kid, but sometimes you can’t help but long for the days when your child just automatically rubber-stamped any suggestion you made.

One cool new thing she started doing this month was creating stories that have multiple endings. Essentially, she creates PowerPoint slides that provide readers with different scenarios they can click on before moving on to the next slide in the story. The outcome of the tale depends on the options you choose and if you select the wrong option, the results are usually fatal as you can see by this sequence of slides below:

Luke

Like Lilah, Luke is also exerting his own independence these days. But his approach is a little different. Whereas Lilah will ignore you or respond to you with short phrases that express her displeasure, Luke will grill you to death on why he can’t do something. Or he will try a different angle to get you to agree with his point of view. This approach may sound a little more assertive, but it is just as annoying to parents as the cold shoulder or bad attitude treatment. In fact, sometimes Cathy and I relish the quiet that we get when Lilah storms off into her room. But Luke doesn’t play that game so much. He just likes to stay in your face as long as he can, just waiting for the slightest chink in your armor to appear so he can have his way.

In a better display of independence, Luke is beginning to sleep in his own bed again (instead of sleeping on the floor next to our bed). This isn’t totally his doing, mind you. We used some Luke negotiation tactics to get him to agree to sleep in his room for two weeks. The deal was that he would sleep in his bed for two weeks without getting out in the middle of the night to come into our room. In exchange, we would allow him to open up the new DS game we purchased for him and he’s been wanting to play. He agreed to the deal and although it started off a little shaky at first with him getting out of the bed a few times, things are better now and I think he’s going to stick to his end of the bargain. At one point, Luke actually fell out of the bed, and when Cathy went in there to put him back in he groggily asked her if falling out of the bed counted as “getting out of the bed” and thus violating the terms of our agreement ;-). Cat reassured him that falling out did not count. Too funny.

Luke still remains a pretty affectionate little guy. He is quick to give you hugs and tell you he loves you. The other day, right before bed he threw a paper airplane at me that we had both made together earlier in the day. He then walked off to his room and yelled out to look inside the plane. So I opened up the plane and inside there was a hand-written note from Luke with the words “I love you.” How sweet is that?

That’s all for now. More next month!