Monsters!... and other stuff

Erica is so scared of monsters. Its getting rather hard to deal with. Okay, VERY hard to deal with. I try to remind myself over and over that I myself was once a little kid who was afraid of monsters. But trying to remind myself of that doesn't really help too much.

It all started when she began having bad dreams. I'm not sure what they're actually about; she doesn't really tell me. But I'm positive that she's having them, not just using it as an excuse to get me in the room during the middle of the night. Because she'll wake up some nights to use the potty, then go straight back to bed w/o any crying. Yet, the nights she has bad dreams, she'll wake up and cry and cry, not wanting to be left in her room.

She doesn't have bad dreams very often. In fact, she'd gone quite awhile w/o any. I wasn't having any trouble AT ALL leaving her in her room to fall asleep. Then Tuesday night she woke up with a bad dream. Ugh. So of course then last night, she was so scared to be alone in her room. I sat with her for awhile, then said I had to go start the dishwasher. [Which, I really did have to do.] After a few minutes, she started crying for me again, banging on the door. So I went back in and sat with her again. Then I said I had to go brush my teeth. She didn't cry too bad that time, just whined a bit. I stayed put in the bathroom, not making ANY noise, until I was sure she was asleep. She slept the night through fine then...

Oh wait, no... she did get up. But that was just to use the potty. She had no trouble going back to bed. Thank goodness.

ANYWAY...

*I'm telling all of that mainly b/c I needed to pass the time while uploading another movie clip. It is from Erica's second dance class, which was this past Tuesday. I have the entire "dance" that they're learning. And, by mistake, I forgot to stop recording when it was over. So you'll just see my legs there at the end. You can just press 'stop'... sorry. How embarrassing. At least I didn't say anything silly while it was recording.

*My family had gone away for vacation two [??] weeks ago. I posted pictures that you can look at to see how our time was.

*I've started preschooling Erica. Once it gets to Kindergarten, I'm NOT NOT NOT homeschooling. I definitely don't have the patience for that. But since we're sending her to dance class, we can't really afford preschool too. Besides, it's a bit early for that anyway. She won't do kindergarten until 2010. [Wow, that just seems crazy. I'm getting old.] Anyway, we just started this week. It's been going okay, I suppose. We've done numbers 0, 1, and 2. Yes, she can count already, but hadn't been able to recognize the written number. But she can now; she's even starting to write the numbers. 2 is much harder to write than 0 and 1 though. We're also learning about food groups. I'd been doing the food pyramid with her before, but realized she didn't really understand why we put cheerios and pretzels and bread all together. So today we had a tea party, all fancy and dressed up. And we made play-doh foods to "eat." All from the grains/carbohydrates group.

The plan is gonna be something like this: Monday and Tuesday learn at home. Wednesday no formal learning, just a related activity. Thursday learn at home. And Friday go to the library to find books relating to what we've learned.

*Well, the video clip uploaded. But I'll share one more thing. My child cracks me up sometimes. When something happens or someone says something that's funny, she'll laugh. But then she'll go on and on about it. How to explain... um... Well, say that Andrew trips over her toys that she's left all over the floor. She'll laugh, and then say something like this: "What if my toys were messy, and Daddy tripped on them, would that be funny? That would be funny. Hehehe." It's hillarious that she does it... but it gets kinda old too. Cuz she'll say it OVER AND OVER AND OVER until you answer her "yes, that would be funny."

Alright, well I guess thats it for today.

Buh-Bye!