Since I picked up Anna early from school today, she has had some really good behavior (and also some more typical behavior as well). Since she as lately taken an interest in money, I have been rewarding her with some coins for doing tasks like setting the table and cleaning up the family room.

At one point, she asked me to help her count her money; I asked her to sort out all the change into piles of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, which she did. I then counted all the change up out loud and arrived $2.28. She responded by saying “No, not like that!” then added up the total number of coins and saying “I have seventeen jingly pieces.” So we’re still at the stage of preferring ten pennies to five quarters. Hmmmm… I wonder how many cents it will cost me to have her finish cleaning the garage.

I’m trying a new strategy to help her get to sleep earlier, which is to sit next to her bed with my laptop (which I’m doing right now) while she goes to sleep, or at least lies down without saying anything. I’m hoping to head off the hour of getting up, running around, using the potty, flipping lights on and off, etc. which generally happens while Jen and I are downstairs cleaning up at night. It really worries me that though bedtime is 11.5 hours long, in the last couple months she has started giving up two hours of it to wandering about the halls at night. At one point, I was coming downstairs at 5:30 am only to catch her coming up–she said she had been checking to make sure that Tara was ok.

I’m willing to spend a little time in her room as long as I don’t end up sleeping there, and I can surf or blog which I would have been doing anyway; perhaps tomorrow I’ll sit for a while, as it would be a good example for her to see me doing that, and it’s a nice quiet time to do so. In the last few days I have managed to squeeze in a sit or two, and it really makes me aware of how out of practice I am–my head is just buzzing with all sorts of things clamoring for resolution, and days like today illustrate clearly that I need to focus if I’m going to ever get anything finished.