score one for Mama

Josh has been giving me grief lately about walking - especially when it's just us here while Dima's in school and I had a revelation today while taking my own walk before the kids woke up. I was using my digital walkman and it has some songs on it that Josh likes so I decided to try headphones on him while we walk. It worked well once I made it clear that the head phones were for him and the actual walkman was for me. He was bopping his head while we were out there and having a great time and he recognized songs from the Cars movie as well as ones from other movies that I haven't seen but he has. I didn't realize how much we usually talk until he was quiet because he was so engrossed in the music. He was funny with the head phones on cause he usually greets the neighbors and today he was yelling "HI!, HI!" and "LOOK AT WHAT I HAVE!" one neighbor was way up their drive way and he was still trying to show off the headphones. Then when he moved the headphones would fall off him so I tried again and again to explain that if he leaned back in the stroller the headphones had something to rest on and he kept trying to look around and got frustrated that they kept falling off. Once we came back here I set him up with a baseball hat under the headphones and that did the trick, and he actually wanted to walk more! So now during walk time everyone's happy. I'm going to save the walkman for walk time only so the novelty doesn't wear off and I might even program it with a bunch of songs just for him.

Tonight we have practice with the Kindergruppe of out dance group and I'm hoping that they'll both behave well - and that Dima will get the confidence he needs to dance in public. I'm always torn between trying to help them and just leaving the room so I'm not a distraction. Dima's been especially wound up outside of school lately and I think it has to do with holding himself together while he's in school. He spent almost an hour in continual time outs yesterday cause he kept doing things that he knows are against the rules. Hopefully they can both get decent naps this afternoon and behave nicely later on.