Last week I conducted an experiment. I decided not to yell at Jonah, at all, no matter how much he was annoying me. It didn't necessarily shorten the length of his tantrums, or eliminate the irritants altogether, but at the end of the day I felt so much better about myself. Like I actually deserve to be in this job. Now, that's a feeling I'd like to have more often than not. Especially in the face of an increasingly risk-taking Abe (latest trick: standing up on the seat of a riding toy), I need to cultivate more calm.
Of course, by Saturday morning I was pretty tired of keeping it under wraps and I did do a little yelling. But then I decided to take the afternoon and have an outing with Jonah, to the transit museum, and it was awesome (even more so because we did not take Abe, who it would have been a nightmare to keep track of there). He stretched out our visit to two long hours, revisiting each bus multiple times, looking for the "perfect" subway train (one where you can go from car to car without getting off), and even taking great interest in the photo books of old buses (which all appeared to be self-published by a bus freak from New Jersey). We saw a birthday party set up there and it looked pretty nice. Hmmmm.
Josh needed to work on a couple of songs his mom asked him to play at her father's 99th birthday party, on Sunday, in Allentown, PA. One of the songs was, "Young at Heart." On a whim, I grabbed my melodica - a pseudo-instrument that looks and sounds like the spawn of a clarinet and an accordion - and figured out the melody. Saturday night, after the kids went to sleep, we went out to the front stoop (so as not to wake them), and worked on it until we had it. OK, maybe that sounds twee. Maybe it was. But the experience of getting together with my husband and doing something fun with music - that did not involve the kids - was so great. I hope we will manage it again soon.
