Jaxon: What are we having for dinner??
Mum: We’re having…
… steak and three veg…
… fettuccini carbonara…
… steamed chicken and vegitables…
… insert any number of meals here…

Jaxon: I don’t like…
… steak and three veg…
… fettuccini carbonara…
… steamed chicken and vegitables…
… insert any number of meals here…

Every single night we have to battle him at the kitchen table. Every night we have to fight with him to eat his dinner. Regardless of the fact if he has had it before and loved it, never tried it or only had it once. Its so repetitive and by far our biggest challenge when it comes to raising Jaxon.

We have tried various methods to try and get him to eat more (I am so so so so so so so sorry for doing this to you Mum!) or try something new (including cakes and sweets!) We have sent him to bed hungry on various occasions. We have sat and tried to reason with him. We have yelled at him. We’ve tried negotiating number of mouthful’s before he can leave the table and stop being begged to eat his dinner. We have tried it all and he just does not repsond to those things.

Mid way through our first discussion about all of the reasons he couldn’t eat dinner I decided I would try something different. I forced him to sit at the table until he finshed his dinner.

We all ate our dinner and then moved away from the table. I did the dishes, played with Dexter and gave him a bottle. For one and a half hours Jaxon sat at the table with his cold spaghetti.

He tried every single trick in the book! He dug really deep this time!

… Muuum, I’m not hungry…
… Mum I’ve got a sore throat…
… Maaaaarrrrmeeee, I have a sore tummy…
… Mum, I just don’t want it…
… Mum I’m very very sad…
… Mummeeeeeeeee, I’m going to cry!…

He really did cry! He’s never cried at the kitchen table like that. But he refused to eat all night before finally getting told to go to bed hungry ten minutes before bedtime!

So I’m hoping I won this battle of will’s with him tonight. Since starting school he’s really been one up on me behaviour and additude wise and I am hoping this will be my one up on him for a breath of fresh air!

I’ve decided these school holidays that I have a couple of new goals to reach.

One, I want to lose three kilo’s. To get me below 80. I haven’t been below 80 since I was 16 or so!

Two, to start taking more GOOD photo’s of the boys. I’ve been using the auto function for nearly two years now. Since Tim had his MS attack.

So I haven’t taken them out for a very long time to do JUST that. I don’t think Jaxon would even remember our little trips to parks and creeks and what not just  to take photos. As I said, first time in years.

Yet when I put the camera down for a few minutes he asked me if I was going to stop taking photo’s. When I replied yes he exclaimed “Yay, we’re freeee”

It can’t be that bad can it?? For furture reference Jaxon, Mummy only has a few baby to teen photo’s to remember life as a child by. Count yourself lucky!

My anal retentiveness means I have to seperate these photo’s because they’re different layouts and it would piss me off to look at all mixed up!

Thanks to daylight savings I actually took the boys to the park at just past 7am in the morning. I was wondering why no one else was there!

That’s unfortunately, exactly like me. Down to the letter I was like him. I cried for the first 6 weeks of school when Mum left and I put little or big (as Mum would say, pfft!) brick walls up when I was scared of trying and I wouldn’t even try. BUT. I was incredibly confident otherwise.

This little video shows just how much like me Jaxon is. I was the kid volunteering to speak in front of huge crowds. And I was really good at it too! I did speeches for the school when important people came to visit and I was always the “president” of the SRC every year until year 12. I was highly involved with things like that.

In talks with various people from the school, we’ve come to the conclusion that Jaxon (and I) is a perfectionist. He doesn’t like it if he doesn’t know how to do things. He feels silly when he see’s that other people know how to do things better and though having more practice would seem like a logical step towards getting things right or better, it’s easier NOT to do them and NOT get seen learning and failing when all you want is to get it right and be good at it RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND.

So here’s the video of his little speech. I am so very proud of him and hope he keeps his confidence up to do things like this for years to come. Public speaking really is a hard thing to do but it always came very naturally to me and I hope it does for Jaxon too.

I’d just like to note, before you watch the video, that in practice the kids that got to speak were asked to think of two things to say about their hats. In practice, Jaxon only said two things about his hat. But when he got on that microphone he didn’t want to stop!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was a little worried that when his teacher Miss Jodie asked him “How did you make your hat” that he would say “My Mum made my hat”

Jaxon’s body clock is set to 5.45am these days. It doesn’t matter how often I tell him to go back to bed because it’s still dark (“But I’m hungry”) or go and watch TV until my alarm goes off at 7am (“But I’m cold”) he will insist that I wake up with him.

This one morning, he asked me what was wrong with the sky. Apparently it was his first sunrise. So we got ourselves a big blanket and we went and watched it rise together. It was a beautiful morning spent together.