fear of mistakes

At the end of each school term, we have a parent-teacher conference. Nate's teacher shows us the work he's done in class, tells us what he's doing well, and tells us what we can work on during break. 

Term 1 and term 2, Nate was in 2 different schools. Both terms, his teachers complimented his good behavior, speech, and number/letter recognition, but wanted us to work on his pencil grip. They said he was writing too lightly. It was true. In pencil, you could barely see what he wrote. 

During the break between term 2 and 3, we worked on this a lot. Nate colored or did tracing almost every day, and I told him to make it as dark as possible. He did great! He would sometimes start out light, but I could remind him to write darker, and he would.

Back at school, Nate did really well writing dark until he got to the day he had to write a number freehand for homework. I sat him down to his homework, and he said he didn't know how to do it. He wanted me to hold his hand to do the homework with him. I helped him practice the number on a separate sheet of paper, he practiced on his own a few times, then I told him to do the homework page. 

Nate told me he was afraid. I asked him what he was afraid of. He just shrugged. 

He tried. He started out doing it backwards, attempted to correct it, but ended up with a scribble. He looked at me, repeated that he was afraid, and looked like he was on the verge of tears. 

Suddenly, I realized what he was afraid of. 

"Are you afraid of messing up? You're afraid you'll make a mistake?"

He gave me a very sad, "Yes." 

I told him, "Of course you will mess up sometimes. Everyone makes mistakes, even Daddy and Mama." 

"And even Ben?"

"Yes."

"And Gigi and Grandpa?"

"Yes! Everyone does. But what can you do when you make a mistake?"

He didn't know.

"You try again! You're using a pencil right now. You can erase and try again."

He did. And the next try was perfect. Well, perfect in a relative sense. Not perfect in a beautiful penmanship way, but it was clearly the number it was supposed to be. I congratulated him. The look on his face was priceless!

After that talk, Nate needed a few reminders that it's ok to mess up, and all he needs to do is try again. Eventually, he started writing darker, with more confidence. Sometimes now, he will "make a mistake" for fun (like writing a 3 instead of a 4), so that he can erase it and try again. 

Two weeks ago, they were working on number 8. He had a hard time figuring out the process for that one, but once he got it, his 8s have been beautiful. He also figured out how to write a 9 and 10 that day, before working on them in class (last week and this week).

Numbers Nate wrote 2 weeks ago. The scribble circles were Ben's input. Nate's 4s are weird, but I think that's because in print 4s are closed at the top.

I was impressed when he wrote the above numbers because he went left-to-right. He usually writes right-to-left. I hear that is natural for lefties, and he seems to be one, though it's only been a few months since he stopped switching. Now when he tries to write with his right hand, he holds his right hand with his left to guide himself the way I help him write sometimes.

I was also impressed that the 7 was the only one backwards. His 6s and 5s are often backwards, but I have to write them myself in order to tell which way they should be. I remember having trouble with those as a kid, and lots of practice tracing dots gave me the muscle memory in my hand to write them correctly, but my brain doesn't always remember which way is right. See? I make mistakes, too.

he'll never sleep late again

Ben the Builder poses with a tower he constructed

It has been hot lately, like sweating all day long, 90+ degrees in the house kind of hot. Nate's old companion, heat rash, has been showing up here and there.

Last night and early this morning, it rained. The rain was so soothing and comfortable. It was nice and cool this morning. Nate, Ben, and I were all enjoying sleeping in the rain so much that we slept until Rodgers marched through the house telling everyone "Wake up, it's late!" We let Ben sleep a little longer, since he doesn't have to get ready for school.

As usual, Rodgers left the news on in the living room, and Nate wanted to eat breakfast at the coffee table. After getting Nate's breakfast ready, I checked on Ben. He was either still sleeping or faking really well. Then, I went to get myself a cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, Nate was calling out everything interesting he saw on the news. Suddenly, they were showing images from a construction site.

Nate yelled out, "IT'S SCOOOP!!!" (i.e. the backhoe digger from Bob the Builder.)

Ben came running down the hall. "I'm awake! Where's Scoop?!"

Expat Blog

Living away from your birth country can be fun and frustrating and exciting and difficult.

You start out on a high, excited for the new adventure.

Then reality hits, and everything becomes horrible. It wouldn't be like this in your home country. You wouldn't have these problems there! That's what we call "Culture Shock."

But you get through it. Ok, everything isn't perfect in your home country, either. You are just used to the problems you have to deal with there. So you figure out how to cope with these new challenges. This is the "Recovery" phase, shown in the W-curve below (from Berkeley's International Office page).

During Recovery and Adjustment, it helps to find people you can relate to - people who are also adjusting to new challenges and getting used to living in a new country.

We know some expats in east Africa, but we don't get to see them much, even those who live near Mombasa. (South Coast looks close to North Coast on the map, but it is so far away.) So I looked for online communities of expats.

A few months ago, I joined expat-blog.com. I have not spent much time on the forum, but I have enjoyed reading blogs by other expats. I can relate so much to their experiences!

And now, a Kenyan-Texan family is Blog of the Month for November! You can see my interview on their website [clicky]. Blogs by my fellow expats living in Kenya are here.

kids, moving internationally, and eating

Nate used to be a really good eater. Once he started eating table food, he really couldn't get enough. Around 18 months old, he started getting picky. He would refuse to eat his favorite foods, spend entire days eating nothing but pickles and cheese, and could not be convinced to try new foods. If I considered the food he ate for an entire week, rather than just each day's menu, he still had a fairly well balanced diet. We chose not to have the mealtime battle of wills.

He was still in this picky phase when we moved to the other side of the world. Though we have a lot of the same foods here in Kenya, everything is slightly different. I expect an adult would enjoy the differences in ingredients and cooking in Kenya, but it was a lot for a 2-year old to deal with. He stopped eating almost everything. He also stopped gaining weight. We became rather lenient with Nate and eating, just to get some food into him. He would refuse to eat all day, then wake up crying with hunger pains at midnight.

Nate's weight chart. We moved 6 weeks after his 2nd birthday, just before the "2" dot.

Around 2 1/2 years old, he started eating meat, and he also started gaining weight again. He maintained a vegetable strike for several more months, though I could get him to eat peas about once a week. After Nate turned 3 he became a bit easier to reason with, and we instituted a vegetable requirement at supper. I could get him to eat either peas or green beans every day.

I think his food issues come down to 2 things: control and fear. I used to think it was only about control. We let him save the vegetables for last if that's what he wanted to do, but he also knew that he could get seconds of his favorite dish as soon as he finished the veggies. We tried to give him as much control over it as possible, without letting him skip eating vegetables altogether.

Once he was used to this vegetable requirement, I decided to try requiring him to eat a bite of everything served so that he could branch out, and we wouldn't have to have peas or green beans at every single meal. It started with 1 carrot stick - he liked everything else on the table that night. He fussed and complained and tried to refuse to eat it, but once I actually got the carrot stick into his mouth, he grabbed it out of his mouth, held it in his hand, and calmly took bites of it. The next night, the same thing happened with the carrot, but he almost made himself sick when I made him eat a bite of potatoes, too. We talked about it and determined that food he isn't used to eating is scary. Ok. I was a picky eater as a kid, and I can relate to that actually.

So what do we do about it? I decided to work on 1 new food at a time with him. Since we'd already started on carrots, we kept that up until he would eat a serving of carrots without being afraid. Then we moved on to zucchini. It seemed worse at first, but we progressed through it much more quickly. I think we'll give zucchini a little more time to settle in, then we're going to start on broccoli.

He was so proud of his bravery in eating an entire zucchini spear last night. I'm proud, too!

on chocolate away from home

Life overseas is different in many ways. Ice cream is one. Here, there's far too much ice and not enough cream. Bakery cakes are another. I have no idea how Kenyan bakeries make their cakes to be so horrible. Chocolate is different, too.

Kenya has a few varieties familiar to a girl from Texas. There are Snickers, Kit Kats, Twix, and Peanut M&Ms. There are Mars bars, which are similar to Milky Ways in the US (but if you see a Milky Way outside the US, it's a Three Musketeers; if you see a Mars bar in the US it's something else entirely). The rest is either Cadbury's or Beacon.

I am a dark chocolate kind of girl. I prefer dark, semi-sweet, or bittersweet chocolate over milk chocolate. I can, however, make room in my world for milk chocolate, especially when dark chocolate is hard to find. The rack of Cadbury's chocolate bars usually has 10 or more varieties of Dairy Milk with something added to it (nuts, mint, crunchies, whatever). Beacon is the same. I have only tried 1 variety of Beacon, which is their supposed dark chocolate bar. It tasted like milk chocolate with extra sugar. I don't think I could handle their milk chocolate.

I know some of you love Cadbury's Dairy Milk, and I mean no offense to you personally, but Dairy Milk is an abomination. It's barely even chocolaty. It's like sugar and milk with chocolate coloring.

If something is supposed to be chocolate, why not make it chocolaty? Speaking of which, I do not understand the existence of white chocolate. It's not that it tastes bad, but it's chocolate, without the chocolaty part. What's the point of that? Like blonde brownies. Brownies without cocoa? Why make blondies when you can make brownies?

But getting back to the topic, Cadbury's has saving grace, in 2 products (which is more than I can say for Beacon). First, the Creme Egg, which obviously is in a class of its own (though I strongly believe it would be greatly improved if done in dark chocolate). Second is Bournville, which is a dark chocolate bar we sometimes find here that is actually quite good.

Lately, our Tuskys has had these in stock constantly, but they didn't always. When I first discovered it, we found them so rarely (once a month or so) that Rodgers would buy me one any time he saw them. By now, even Nate and Ben know which chocolate bar to choose for me. I don't think they even realize that the purple Dairy Milk packages contain chocolate, too. And that's as it should be.