Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The Cooking Mistake

I am making an all-out effort to get Ricki’s behavior under control. My two main thrusts of action are to see that she goes to sleep early enough. The second is to teach her that doing homework is worthwhile, and should not be postponed. To this end I am preparing a schedule with fun activities interspersed during the homework period, and to award prizes for working steadily.
Sleeping is more difficult, and she falls asleep best if I am on the computer in the room. The problem is that if I get up, she wakes up. I am “quiet as a mouse”, but somehow she still senses if I leave. I can only make my get-away after she has been asleep a while. I hope to wean myself from the room, but first I need to get her general behavior disciplined.
Anyway, today’s planned activity was to make hotdogs in dough. I had it all planned:
-Ricki could hang up her coat, etc and then her a tape while I took a quick rest.
-We would make the dough…
-do some homework…
-deo the cooking activity…
-finish hoework..
-supper
-computer time for Ricki (she loves this)

While mothers can plan……
Ricki did not put her stuff away, but created more of a mess. So while she finally cleaned up (under threat of no computer in the evening), I made the dough. However, she was upset, and trying to get out of putting her things away. The end result was that I put way too much oil into the dough, and had to add two kilos more of flour to rectify the amount of oil. Thus a minor baking job became a major one. (I finished most of it after Ricki went to sleep.) In the long run, though Ricki did successfully do some homework, earned a few cents of prize money, and helped some with the baking. Not bad for the first day.

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