Thanksgiving Stress and Untangling Bad Habits

Old pic

We had a wacky and rough Thanksgiving.  Sigh.  Sometimes it's great having family and friends and sometimes it's.... hard.  I'll point out the blessings though.  :)  My mom helped me great in the kitchen and really took a load off my shoulders while cooking.  I had a friend coming over who had to work late so I waited to make a meal till evening time.  I was a bit tired but it was still awesome.  

It's been a bit of a transition for me into the fostering world.  Sometimes it's hard to retrain kids that aren't used to things being done the way we do.  The little girl we have absolutely flipped out when I asked her to help clean up with the girls.  I went to her brother and asked if she ever had to help.  He said no and that they had to do everything for her.  Luckily, she's young and there is plenty of time to fix that.  It'd be harder to retrain a kid with good habits in their teens.  Luckily, our teen foster son has really good work ethics.  He had to shoulder a big load before but we don't do that.  Here we have balance and everyone has to contribute down to 3 years old.  That way we don't have someone or just older kids bearing most the load.  Also, another thing we're adjusting is teaching her to get things for herself rather than relying on big brother to always rescue her to get menial stuff.  These are not big, big issues and little ones are easy to refocus in a different direction. 

I have so many things coming up like house inspection on December 9th.  Eek!  Also, we're right in the middle of foster care classes and although it's a lot of paperwork to study and fill out, we're one of the lucky few who can do it right from our home rather than be gone for hours every Saturday.  Yay!