Good Morning!
On this day in 1789 electors unanimously chose George Washington to be the first president of the United States.
In 1847 the first U.S. Telegraph Company was established in Maryland.
In 1932 the first Winter Olympics were held in the United States at Lake Placid, NY.
In 1957 Smith-Corona Manufacturing Inc., of New York, began selling portable electric typewriters. The first machine weighed 19 pounds.
And in 1964 the Administrator of General Services announced that the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had been ratified. The amendment banned the poll tax.
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Quote of the Day
“I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would be also free.”
Rosa Parks
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Today is Clint Black’s birthday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ilw139h3E8&feature=player_detailpage
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Wandering Views 
Good morning! I am behind on the thread–lots going on–but wanted to say hello.
I have a QoD: How can a parent best deal with sibling rivalry and bickering? My girls are 15 and 9 and fight almost constantly. It breaks my heart, as I love them both fiercely and long for harmony. Any suggestions from all the wise parents on here? Thanks!
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Good Morning….I’ve been awake since 3:30….it’s going to be a long day!
We had a bit of the bickering between the older two….and there was a time when it was so ridiculous we made the rule that if they couldn’t get along ,there would be no socializing with friends until they could show mutual respect with one another first. We were going with the model of learning to love one another at home before we could reach beyond our walls. I was the type of Mom who made my kids talk…get it all out on the table..no going to your room to “pout”….at the time they were annoyed…now they tell me “thanks”….go figure 🙂
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Good morning. Rough night with little sleep. My brain was quite busy.
I know nothing of sibling rivalry. I think a little of it would be fun.
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I don’t have first hand experience with sibling rivalry since I have an only. My thought is to get them involved in lessons like knitting, quiltimg, or maybe tutoring with a family learning English. I think most people want to do their best in learning a new skill and s
will try to help thos learning alongside. Just have one sctivity that is “their activity.
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Kim, I hope your brain was busy planning things, not rehashing things.
That’s a terrible thing to lose sleep over.
I know. It’s hard not to do that.
You can do that when you get older, I do a lot of it now. 😉
Rehashing, I’m talking about.
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Sibling rivalry: a couple of different aspects. I use sibling rivalry to force them up the ladder to independence. Somebody does the right thing, they are given more responsibility and that makes others want to do the right thing so they get more responsibility which also includes more freedom.
As to bickering and sniping, not tolerated. Zero toleration. None. When they first arrive, I give them the ground rules: respect others. That plays out, as I carefully outline, no molesting one another, no stealing from one another, and do disturb the family peace. They can disagree but if they disturb my peace by bickering, they will not be happy. It has been successful so far. We have had a few incidents in the first two, and that appears to be resolved, but they don’t bicker around me. Ever. Of course, it probably helps that each child receives tons of individual attention so they are not vying for it.
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Donna, I thought you might be interested in an example of poor writing and editing.
In the Times-News that starts out”
“After suffering alone with post-traumatic stress disorder in Brooklyn, N.Y, “Maggie” traveled down the coast to Western North .Carolina, where she discovered Mainstay’s café, Dandelion. While there, she found hope in a plate of homemade shrimp and grits, and a glass of iced tea.”
An interesting story, a full column long. But you can’t get to Western NC by traveling down the coast. But worst of all, nowhere in the article does she tell where the Dandelion café is.
I looked it up in the Yellow Pages. I may go there some time.
Trivial, but things like that iterate me.l
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I don’t have a lot of wise words about sibling rivalry. I know parents can increase it by comparing or favoring one of the other of their children. I know that their can be rules of what children are allowed to say or do to one another. I know parents can pray and study to understand what is driving the need to tease, boss or ridicule a sibling. Ditto for how to deal with discipline. I know parents can make a point of showing how much they treasure each child’s distinctive traits and talents.
Children are just so different. The most difficult thing about parenting is that children are not machines. Usually by the time you get a handle on one challenge, another pops up.
It’s lovely to see them when they are grown and have learned to love one another.
Praying for you Ann.
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I understand, Chas. I am reading a story that takes place right after the Civil War. One of the characters uses the phrase, “Not to worry…” Things like this jar me when I am reading. It made me stop and analyze whether or not someone WOULD have used that phrase. I appreciate when authors have absorbed enough of the literature of the day to have a grasp on how people spoke and acted in whatever era a story is set.
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Did I say, ” do disturb the family peace”? I meant ” do not”.
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No gloating.
A cardinal rule. They all four still go on alert when someone says, ” you’re not gloating are you?”
It’s also important as indicated above, that they understand different ages mean different things. As an oldest born it drove me crazy to see privileges I had to earn being given to the younger ones “for free” at a really earlier age. I tried to be careful of that with my own.
Of course, more than once I told younger children if they thought it unfair the oldest one got to do something they were too young to do, they should have been born first . . . . 🙂
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http://www.dandelioneatery.org
Sad work ‘family’ news this week, our longtime LA City Hall reporter — who worked for our sister paper but also covered downtown for us — died (he was 66 but had battled diabetes for several years; he kept on top of it, but complications seem to always crop up with that illness eventually since there is no real cure).
Nicest guy ever, known as a real “gentleman,” good guy, always helping younger reporters out — but also a tough, prolific, seasoned & very respected City Hall reporter. Accolades have come in from far and wide and there was a City Council motion yesterday to name the LA City Hall’s media room, where he & other city hall reporters do much of his writing and other work, in his honor. All the area politicians knew and respected him.
I remember checking in with him last summer to see if he’d be able to just grab a few quotes from a light-hearted port publicity event that was being staged on the City Hall steps that I was writing about. I didn’t want him to have to spend a lot of time with it, just needed something brief that I could roll into a larger story I could do from our office which is 25 miles away. He wound up sending me a whole short, well-written story, complete with quotes and color. Seems like he always went the extra mile.
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Trivial, but things like that iterate me.
How can something “iterate” a person? Accordint to dictionary.com, iterate means:
1. to utter again or repeatedly.
2. to do (something) over again or repeatedly.
Do you mean “irritate”?
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Yeah, the oldest-has-more-privileges thing. I am just a bit more than a year (15 1/2 months) older than my sister, and though I was trying to be an adult while she was still happy to be a child, because of how close we were in age giving us roughly the same responsibilities and privileges made sense. (It’s natural that the firstborn is given a bit more responsibility, and more privilege should come with it.) But it galled me that my three-years-younger brother not only had the same bedtime we did, but he was allowed to ignore bedtime and I wasn’t. I’d get punished if I was five minutes late because my bathtime got pushed later because he got out of the bathtub late, but I once kept track for a three-week period, and he was late to bed a full 14/21 of those days and I never heard any consequences come to him. Giving the baby of the family more freedom is a pretty sure way to evoke jealousy and rivalry.
I wasn’t the firstborn, but since my next older brother was almost seven years older than me and he moved out of the house when he was 17, by the time I was 10 I was the oldest one at home. It simply would have made a lot more sense to say the baby of the family was the youngest and the only boy at home (thus in a different bedroom from us) and so he needed to take his bath and get to bed at such and such a time and we girls then had another 45 minutes to get our own baths. As it was, we had no stated order for our baths; we simply had to wait till the bathroom was free (no one bathing or using the toilet). And many times I was in the bathroom about to get in the tub when evening devotions would be announced. If I wasn’t physically in the tub yet, I had to reclothe and go into the living room . . . and my siblings would then know I wanted to get my bath and would race to get to their own baths before me after devotions was over. That was a really bad system, partly because it rewarded the wrong sort of competition.
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Looks like wood-burning fireplaces will soon be illegal in my part of the world — from a story today:
” … New research linking fireplace smoke with heart attacks and lung disease — coupled with stricter air regulations, daily bans on indoor and outdoor wood-burning, and unusually warmer winters — may soon erase that Norman Rockwell fireplace scene from real estate brochures. ..”
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Peter at 11:45
Yes. I proofed myself on that, but didn’t notice.
Things like that irritate me.
We used to iterate our calculations to reduce the statistical error of the calculation.
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Re sibling rivalry: my mom said that the four boys argued a lot less than the younger three of us, and she said she believed the reason was that four naturally divides into two pairs, and with three one is usually “left out” and is trying to get back in. In other words, with four each of the four has a partner, so two will do one thing and two another, and it works.
That’s just part of the reason I did not want fewer than four children (one or two are too few, three is an awkward number).
But I really think it was more complicated than that, partly because I was nearly always the sibling “left out” and I rarely tried to “get in.” I was more interested in reading quietly than in trying to get a sibling back on my side. But after lights out, my sister was on my side, anyway. She and I got along after our little brother was in his room for the night and we were in ours.
Gradually, though, my brother and sister and I discovered a very interesting dynamic. I have no idea whether it works this way in other families or how parents can use this “data” if it does work this way in other families . . . but I have a hunch there is something usable in it, so I’m telling it.
From the time I was about 12 (which would have made us 9, 11, and 12), possibly a year or two younger, our parents would occasionally leave us alone for half an hour or longer while they shopped together or did other errands, and eventually while they would go out to eat. And while they were gone, we got along. We weren’t naughty (I wasn’t inclined to break household rules, and I did tattle if they did, so they “broke rules” only behind my back), but we’d do stuff we only did when they were gone. For example, we would put on records and dance around the living room. We didn’t know how to dance, so it was just silly dancing. Or we’d all gather possessions we didn’t want and hold an auction with play money. Or we’d go into our bedrooms and change into the most mismatched outfits we could find (including two different shoes), and then when Mom and Dad came home and we helped unload the groceries, I might have a green and white striped shirt with red plaid pants, one white sock and one black sock, one sandal and one sneaker, and a purple bow pulling my hair up into an absurd do.
When I was 16 Dad got sick and spent his last two months in the hospital 100 miles away. Mom would take one of us children with her and spend several days in a hotel near the hospital, but the other two would be left at home. Four or five days later she’d come home for a day or two, pay the bills and buy groceries, and then drive back with a different child. Since my youngest brother was still in junior high, I’m guessing he missed some school that way, but my sister and I were taking high school by correspondence, so that worked for us.
But again, those of us left at home didn’t bicker and we followed the household guidelines. More, we realized that we didn’t mind doing dishes, and we did them without bickering. Somehow when we had the responsibility to work it out, we did. (I suppose that’s opposite from the fact that we didn’t “work it out” over he order of our baths . . . but there, we had conflicting expectations. We had to have a bath before bed, but there was nothing to keep the first person who got the bathroom from hogging it for an hour when we only had 90 minutes till bedtime, and then the second person took 20 minutes, and then when the second person was told to get out of the tub, the third person was left with only 10 minutes, which wasn’t necessarily enough. If we’d each been given 25 minutes with a five-minute buffer, and had respected that, it could have gone smoothly. But when one child can benefit at the expense of siblings with no consequence, it becomes a free-for-all without check.
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Sorry, that was long. (I’m not really criticizing my parents. They were “old” to be dealing with a houseful of young children, and we weren’t killing each other. But I do think that a few tweaks could have made life easier for all of us.)
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I enjoyed this article, and thought Mumsee or others who work with autistic children in some capacity may find the article inspiring and helpful. (It’s the January 31, 2015 post at the top of the page.)
http://aut2bhomeincarolina.blogspot.com/
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Grab your laugher. We are off to the second class of financial peace. 😉
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Interesting “promo” from our pastor on FB for this week’s upcoming sermon:
Certain passages in Scripture—usually the difficult ones—require we change our entire outlook…on everything. This Sunday’s passage (Romans 9:14-18) is one of those …
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The other evening, when Lee wasn’t coming home due to his bum truck & the continuing snow, Forrest kept asking & talking about it. He seemed very concerned, & said it was sad that Papa wasn’t coming home. So sweet.
When Heidi was settling down to sleep that night, on Lee’s side of the bed, she dragged his pajama top out from under his pillow, & lay down on it, like she was cuddling with it. So cute.
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The rabbit pastor Steve chased tonight was the Trinity.
Very interesting. Not that anyone still understands it, but it was a good discussion.
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AJ, those have been some lovely birds you’ve been posting. I have always half wanted a pet bird or two. Bt I hear birds are messy, and I’ve just never wanted one enough to get one. I may someday.
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Ugh. Birds in the house. No way. At least a cat uses a litter box.
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Media fast day again tomorrow. We’ve been doing them on Thursdays this year (except January 1).
It’s been turning into kind of a comforting routine. The day goes slower, and it gives me more opportunity for quiet reflection, which feeds my soul in a way I can’t describe.
The kids do well with it, too. There’s no balking at not being able to use devices that day. They accept it and find other ways to use their free time, lots of times playing games together.
They might not admit it, but I suspect they may look forward to the media-free days as much as I have been.
In fact, it almost seems now that, though we all enjoy our screens, six consecutive days of tech gets a little wearisome. I’m thinking of adding Tuesdays as another tech-free day.
Maybe even cutting out weekends is another idea I’m toying with in my head. I could live with using the computer only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Lots of things to ponder, but then, I’ve always loved to do that…
Have a wonderful day tomorrow, fellow wanderers. We will too. 🙂
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Forrest, who doesn’t usually nap anymore, took an unexpected nap late this afternoon, so he’s still awake. (Chrissy & I are babysitting this evening – until about 10:30 – & tomorrow morning till about 12:30, as usual for Wednesdays & Thursdays.) The good thing about him being awake late is that he will probably sleep late tomorrow. 🙂
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aarrggh, just got home at midnight. SS appointment in the morning and there are 5 messages on my phone telling me they can’t meet tomorrow.
Not sure what to do.
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when my oldest couldn’t get along, I called them over and quickly prayed.
Ended up telling them that if they could n’t get along when they each had their own room (only house that that happened) then they would have to share a room. If that didn’t work them they would sleep in the bathtub together.
It worked.
Later they were always telling me that the younger ones needed to sleep in the bathtub.
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