10 Things I Do Every Day for Amanda

I have 3 girls. My eldest, Jessica, is 14. My second daughter, Samantha, is almost 12. My youngest, Amanda, is 4. Jessica has hair like mine, brown, thick and wavy. Samantha is blond and has straight hair. Amanda is also blond and has lovely curly hair. I have a lot of fun taking pictures of Amanda’s hair.

I’ve already done a few posts about hair with cute photos of Amanda. They are listed here:

• Some Things Just Take Time
• Girls and Hair
• Knots in My Hair
• Blame It on the Fairies

So, I thought to do something a little different. What do I do as a mom of a 4-year-old?

10 Things I do every day for Amanda:

1. I dress her every morning. (She is able to put on some of her clothes without help.)

2. I brush her hair every morning and tie it up to keep it out of her face.

3. I have her wash her hands before meals and right after coming home from preschool.

4. I bath her every day, usually after preschool and just before her nap time. (Sometimes her sister, Samantha, does this for me when I can’t.)

5. Every afternoon I put her down for a nap. (Again, her sister sometimes does this for me.)

6. I make sure she drinks water even when she doesn’t feel like it (or juice mixed with water).

7. I make sure she eats balanced meals and treats are allowed, but in moderation.

8. I tell her how special she is and that I love her.

9. I brush her teeth every night before bed. (She can’t do it properly yet, so I do it for her to protect her baby teeth from cavities.)

10. Every night, before I go to bed, I pick my sleeping girl up and take her for one last pee. (If, on the rare occasion, I go to bed early, then her dad will do it.)

5 Things I do often for Amanda:

1. I wash her hair.

2. I cut her nails.

3. I read to her.

4. I do Pinterest with her. (This is a new hobby of hers and she even has her own board.)

5. I go shopping with her. (She loves going to the mall and the grocery store.)

Yesterday, Amanda wrote some of the letters of the alphabet on paper. She did such a neat job that I thought to scan her work and share it with you. The “A” is her favorite letter, because it’s the first letter in her name.

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Blame It on the Fairies!

Girly Comments & Graphics

Enjoy your weekend!

How does Shakespeare, fairies and knots in hair have anything to do with each other?

This is a follow-on from my previous post Knots in My Hair! 

Last year, while teaching Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare to my son’s high school class, I came across a funny mention to knots in the hair. It appears in the bizarre speech made by Mercutio. He blames the fairy, Queen Mab, for putting knots in dirty hair and that once combed out, the locks are unlucky.

After years of brushing Amanda’s hair, I wouldn’t say that the locks are unlucky, but that the children are who have to endure the combing of their hair!

Here’s the quote below:

"She [Queen Mab] is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone.......
That plaits the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes."

Wikipedia’s conclusion to this states, “Therefore, the appellation of elf lock or fairy lock could be attributed to any various tangles and knots of unknown origins appearing in the manes of beasts or hair of sleeping children.”

I also found this interesting quote on Wikipedia:

“When young children, especially girls, wake from an evening's slumber with tangles and snarls in their hair, mothers with a tradition of fairy folklore might whisper to their daughters that they had caught fairy locks or elf-locks. Faeries, they say, tangled and knotted the hairs of the sleeping children as they played in and out of their hair at night” (A Child’s Book of Faeries by Tanya Robyn Batt).

I’m so glad I’m from a modern era that understands the need to wash and that I can buy good shampoos and conditioners!

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Some Things Just Take Time

Purple Play-Dough in Her Hair (18 months old)

My previous post was about how parents can help children overcome their fears. I mentioned that using games was a key in helping Amanda overcome her fear of shadows. Today’s post is about a fear that Amanda had that took her two years to finally outgrow. That was the fear of getting water on her head or in her eyes. It started with her very first head-to-toe bath.

Amanda was not my first child. I was very used to the routine of checking the temperature of the bath water. I was also used to the task of supporting the baby’s head with one hand while washing it with the other. Despite all my best efforts, she would scream and carry on as if she was being mishandled. Sometimes the other members of my family wanted to know what I was doing to her.

Bath-Time (about 1 month old)

I would try to calm her fears by singing to her or making a game out of bath-time, but nothing worked. By the way, I didn’t wash her hair every time she took a bath. I only washed her hair whenever it was necessary. As soon as she was old enough to hold a facecloth over her eyes, I let her do that to try and help her feel more in control of the situation.

I still remember the first time she didn’t cry. She was two years old. She and I both verbally celebrated her achievement. After that, she began to out-grow her fear and the crying happened less and less often.

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