I want to place to talk about my nephews. I have kids in my life too. They’re cute. I want to share too. Aunts, uncles, neighbors, grandparents. It takes a village, as they say.
This village does not discriminate based on someone’s relationship to said children.
My nephew, 6, has very excitedly decided to tell me, his parents, basically anyone that listens that he really really wants babysitters. He goes to daycare you see, but he has this idea that if you can get someone over to his house to babysit, he can tell them what to do. I assume he got this idea from a cartoon or another kid because he’s never had a babysitter, outside of grandma and grandpa coming some evenings.
I think this is going to happen soonish, maybe. His parents have cards from people that work at his daycare, which by the way, is closing down and gave them about a week, yes, only a week’s notice. That owner is a jerk. The land was sold because they’re re-zoning the area, so you know she knew about this sale for months but decided to screw her clients for a few extra bucks. It’s just so unkind to leave all these parents scrambling like that.
Anyway, they’re toying around with what to do and in-house babysitter might be their most expedient option.
Yeah when you have a babysitter that works for you, it sucks to lose them.
It’s fascinating to see how my nieces and nephews are so different than my own kids in their development. Size, activity, when they learned to walk and talk are all so radically different. Funny enough the family seems to be fairly internally consistent. My kids consistently early adopters, also skinniest, my wife’s sisters kids not far behind but shorter and slightly more square build, while my brothers kids? His daughter is 18 months old and only just started taking steps, and his are all chunks.
And imagination. It’s been amazing to watch how imaginative my son gets. And his imagination is far more advanced than his older cousin. Despite just over a year difference, he has zero creative imagination. I’m talking almost Drax levels here. And I don’t mean that hyperbolically, he gets legitimately angry when my son makes a lego thing and decides it transforms from a car to a boat to a plane and then an octopus. To him it is simply the thing that it literally is, and how can you say it’s something else, that’s wrong!
They’re all related and all so very very different. In personality and temperament my son and daughter are closer than my son to any of his 3 cousins of the same gender and within a year of age.
Anyhow hope your sis finds a good solution @Nesrie. I’m sure she’s near panic at the moment (my wife would be).
My 10 year old nephew showed up at one of our movies recently with his sweatshirt turned inside out. It’s Minecraft sweatshirt. He doesn’t like Minecraft anymore so he doesn’t want to show the stuff anymore. Meanwhile the 6 year can’t wait to deck out in whatever his latest obsession is. The Captain America, Batman, PJ Masks, Vamperilla and Mickey. I think he’s lost interest in Paw Patrol… maybe.
Aaw man. That’ cute. Yeah when they start telling stories, even when it makes almost no sense at all, it’s interesting.
Sadly, my nearest nephew has no one else to really hang out with at some gatherings. His mom’s SO has a niece and nephew, and the boy is huge into legos but…
He’s like this too. Has to build them as the instructions say. In fact if he is off, like one block or something so it doesn’t match the pic he has, 2-3 adults trying to talk him away from the cliff. Very very focused. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him build something without instructions.
When my nephew was into Minecraft, three adults built his little house for him, me included, while he played with the little guys. Man 100s of pieces on that thing. I think I would prefer just building whatever.
I’m just mad they would do this to them and all the other parents. Like the kids were talking about not having daycare before it was announced. They had to find out why he was saying that and then confessed. It’s just so inconsiderate. He starts Kindergarten next year so they were kind of excited about full day K and summer programs and then this last minute thing fell on them. And of course he knows them, he’s going to get some new people for a few months, go to summer camp (short one) and then school. That’s a lot of change on a little guy. I hope he manages well. I am sure I will hear about it, from him, on Skype.
See my son has been into Legos since he was 3, proper legos I mean. He’s a little over 5 now. Anyhow this is recent, basically the last 4-5 months (regarding legos, not the imagination side). Before that he would also get upset if it wasn’t right. But I taught him that you can make cool new things too, didn’t even show him just said you can, and the lightbulb clicked for him.
A jet pack car with pincher claws, Mr Freezer’s jet boat, and I don’t know what that thing in front is.
Point being 6 months ago his favorite set falling apart would have had him in fits. Now he does… this. Almost always some variant of a (pick 2-3) car, plane, boat, rocket ship. But, hey, whatever makes him happy. Just saying, sometimes that one lags behind the creativity side ;)
He is my little sister’s fiance’s nephew. We’ve got a bit of a distance there, and the fiance piece, relationship is under two years. I’ve got some getting to know that whole family still going on, and he doesn’t interact with my nephew much at all. I’m usually in the room with the adults or interacting with him. I think he’s about 7. My nephew plays with his sister more often, but she’s also more social.
Watching kids interact feels like rolling the dice sometimes.
That’s cool though. I love the Lego got big, again, with their kits and licensed products but seeing what kids create instead of what they choose has a lot of benefits.
When my nephew was into Minecraft he spent hours looking at how to build specific things on YouTube, not as much just screwing around. I think the creating stuff just in the head pieces is really good for them. I hope he goes back to that. He used to draw some but YouTube kind of ate that a bit.
In my bid for the Understatement of the Year Award, I’ll say that’s a crappy situation to be in, but they’re probably right. It’s costly, of course, but obviously so is taking off work. With luck, they’ll be able to find a more economical option after a bit.
While I have a kid, he’s away from home for a spell (medical stuff has caught up with him, which is an unfortunate story for another day). But in the meantime, I’ve had two nephews and a godson to fill my free time. Everybody’s been getting older and older; one nephew is graduating high school next month, the other now has a girlfriend so … not a lot of uncle time. I get it, lol. At least we’ll be watching Endgame together this weekend.
My godson, on the other hand, isn’t yet 2 and I’ve seen him at least a couple times a month whether babysitting or just hanging with the family. But now they’ve moved to Charlotte (several hours away), and I’m feeling that hole in my life. I’m too old for the kids who are here, too distant for the kids I’m not too old for, lol. It’s a weird emulation of the empty nest thing, I guess.
Whelp my nephew is here with me this week. I got the full skinny on the daycare situation, although most of it I heard over the phone.
They wound up doing super expensive emergency care for a few weeks, and our little guy was so upset each morning that daddy refused to drop him off. He said it hurt too much to see him cry and scream as he left so mommy took over. Apparently he felt he didn’t have enough friends anymore, the daycare was more structured (this is normal he will be in kindergarten this year) and he was just a miserable little guy for some time…
But now he is okay because he got to do orientation for the planned summer camp, and he is excited about that. He used his goggles in the pool for the first time here after a day of mommy and daddy pushing and then him just… doing it out of the blue.
He’s also picking up some phrases from someone we haven’t figured out yet… for instance, he started a sentence with “if you want to know my thoughts about that”… I’d never heard him say something like that before and neither has mommy and daddy. It’s going to be fun to see what else he is picks up because it sounds like he is listening to some adult and picking up their mannerisms.
Yikes, as I just sold my house and am moving my kids to Oregon, I am legitimately concerned about my son and having those types of issues. He is the same age too.
Well, time to find him some friends to cushion the blow.
My youngest nephew is currently a social butterfly. He will talk to anyone and everyone about anything until his parents, who would probably live on a deserted island if they could, try and reel him in.
I suspect he will do great in summer camp, and once he starts seeing the same kids day after day, his age, he will get however many friends he thinks he should have. He is unlikely to have friends are birthday party since none of the parents really had a chance to reach out to each other during the mass exodus… but he has cousins and once he is in school for awhile he’ll hopefully maintain at least a few connections year after year.
He’s still little. He’ll be okay. He was so excited when his cousin came to my house to see him and he didn’t tell me the story about his trauma at all (he’s very eager to share stuff like that).
At this point, it seems like the lasting horror of that situation will sit with mommmy and daddy that most, sadly. I haven’t seen them in that much despair since they found out about his milk intolerance which is… totally gone now! I have now made my youngest nephew a fan of cheesecake despite the fact he learned to reject anything with the word cheese in it.
We had three firsts with my nephew this week so far, probably the last first for this trip but you never no.
First time he’s ever gone to a West Coast beach
I’ve never seen a kid freak out as much as my nephew did when the wind blew sand against his legs. You’d think glass shards were shredding him apart before our eyes. It was a total meltdown five minutes on to the beach. His two aunties, lil sis and myself, went in search of rock shelter while his parents tried to calm our screaming child down. He was fine within ten minutes of finding him a shady quiet spot. It was at this point my sister explained to me he will yell ouch and cry if he is just experiencing something he doesn’t like and there is no pain involved at all. Once we found Patrick the purple starfish and made sandcastles, all was well again… until he hit his daddy with a stick, that was another 20 minute meltdown. He told us on the way back it was the worst experience he’s ever had, terrible awful Oregon Beach. heh, course it doesn’t erase the smiles i got on camera.
First time he’s ever gone bowling
He actually did really well for about half this venture, until he lost his arcade privileges for not listening. I say about in a year or so we can try letting him hold the smallest ball. This nephew is in the bottom 9% for his age… just a tiny kid, but the arcade issue apparently started prior to bowling when he got so bad at a Wal-mart that his parents almost cancelled going at all… so actually not as bad considering this. We had lots of kids there for this one.
First time he’s ever gone river-rafting
Today’s venture, best one out of the bunch. He was entertained for 3-4 hours, got to see crawdads (they called them crawfish), baby fish, 52 degree water and I think we were close to 90… took them to a swimming whole that runs 10-12 degrees warmer than the main river. This was great. The older nephew, 10, had a bit of a meltdown around lunch. But these kids largely did great, and I think it was great. His parents even talked about looking into rivers where they lived because my nephew treated this like a 3 hour Disney ride, just delighted almost the entire time… the fact we came out by a play-gym in the park was just gravy.
My youngest nephew starts kindergarten next week. It’s going to take an act of God to get his parents to take those school pictures, you know the ones in front of front doors that are all over Facebook right now. And if they do take them, I will have to chase them down for… months to get them distributed.
He seems really excited about school The trauma of the suddenly closed daycare, and yeah it got bad, so bad daddy didn’t want to take him to the new care anymore because of the heart break… was replaced by summer camp and this week in home babysitters which consist of teacher aids from the closed school.
I really hope he does okay at school, and I am sure I will hear about it not long after his first day.
He also wanted to visit me and his cousin on the weekend but we had to tell him against that we’re a long ways away. He’s really worried that his cousin is afraid of rides and wanted to tell him it was okay which was… sweet.
Mommy took care of most of that, but I blew-up (air compressor) and tied (fingers still hurt), all ~150 of those balloons. No, we are not rich enough to hire someone to take care of those for us, and using the fishing line to make them stiff, thanks YouTube, made this go a lot faster than than any of us expected.
Grandma helped too!
I hope the now 11 year old enjoys it. I suspect we don’t have may more parties like these left. He’ll be pre-teen, then teen, and then family birthday parties might give way to his friends and stuff.
My lil sis was initially disappointed in that because it’s so cloudy, but I assure her it can be seen, even the cameras are picking it up. I think the kids are really going to like it, at least for a minute. They’re ~10-11, so such things will only hold their attentino for so long.
The children in my house strongly approve of the party decorations. :)
We enjoy the themed birthdays, but often we let the kid pick the theme so the results have occasionally been weird, like the recent “apple birthday,” “spider birthday” and “brown birthday.” Everyone’s up for the challenge, though!
Oh wow. This sounds really challenging. I mean on the one hand it’s just a color but on the other, coordinating that. heh. These kids sound very creative! I don’t know long we get with this one still wanting themes, but I’ll take it while I’ve got it.
I guess I better go back down there, take my aspirins and prep for noise. First few kids have just showed up. Phew. It’s going to be a few trying hours here until the sunsets a bit and we get them outside to play… laser tag.
