My child oscillates between being delightful and being a down right thorn in my side. OMG, this weekend!! Not sure what's going on with him but he's been so fragile; having a meltdown because he didn't like the hotpot restaurant we went to last night, and then bursting into tears multiple times today because his iPod kept crashing from the stupid game that refused to load. It's enough to drive a parent to alcoholism, I tell you! So as I sip my Bloody Mary on a Sunday afternoon I'm letting him spend all of his points on watching youtube because I just am too tired to nag.
This afternoon, getting him to practice 5 minutes of keyboard was like extracting teeth. 5 minutes! I was rewarding him with 1 point for it too! That's 20 minutes of device time, or 1/3 of $2 if he want to save for Beyblades (3 points = $2). I think I'm extremely generous with the earning of points. But no, when Kien is going through a non cooperative phase the moaning and the groaning can make you feel like your ears will bleed. But this is life, right? As adults we also go through phases, and sometimes we also feel that the amount of effort it takes to, say, do a day's work at our job isn't worth the stress for the $. But if you want to eat, have a house, go on holidays, drive a car, and be able to afford hobbies then you just have to suck it up. The points system I've put in place for Kien is trying to teach him about this - well that's what I'm hoping its teaching him...there ain't no free ride. Either that or he just thinks I'm really mean. He has asked me why his friends can get to use devices FOR FREE. I told him I didn't care what his friends get or doesn't get because I am not their parent. He thinks I'm being unfair. So my natural response to that is...life is unfair, kid. Get used to it. Now go and empty the dishwasher and that will earn you a point.
The other day I was emptying his book bag and found a certificate he got. I didn't get around to asking him abut it. This afternoon I was tidying up the dining table and found the certificate, so I asked him to let me take a photo of him holding it for this blog post. He was like, "oh, when I got it in assembly they also made me hold it to get photos taken."
"What? Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because it was a surprise", he said.
"And you were going to tell me, when?" Do you think he'd give me one photo with a decent smile after our conversation?
At the end of the year the school always does an art exhibition where the kids get to choose a piece to showcase. This is Kien's submission for last year.
The reason I haven't talked about this before is because Kien actually lost the artwork at the end of the year when they were cleaning up. Don't ask me how he could lose something so big - it's an A3 drawing stuck on heavy weighted paper to form a border. Anyway, we thought it was lost forever but then it showed up all of a sudden in his classroom at the beginning of the year. I was so happy when I found out it wasn't lost, because he had actually taken out the top prize for the 7 year olds category.
He was rewarded with $25 voucher at the local book store.
I asked him to explain to me all the details in his drawing. Oh boy, I think that's an entirely different blog post, all to do with nuclear weapons, saving villages and meteors. Yeah, too much for a Sunday afternoon frivolous post.
