uh do you have a couple of children
i have one she's twenty months old
uh-huh
oh boy
how many do you have how many do you have
at least you're sleeping
i have uh two boys one's eleven and one's fourteen
oh
i imagine the activities we uh encounter with our kids are quite different at this point
they probably are but maybe you can give me some insight and i can remind you of the old times huh
oh i remember them fondly it seems like the the baby like young children uh destroy your sleep and older children destroy your life
yeah
and i don't really mean that it
well i've heard that it only gets worse my husband and i sit around thinking gosh you know what are we going to do when she starts going out and
having friends and going to school and getting exposed to all the other things out there
oh
i think the biggest problem is that you just have no training for this
yeah
and you really have to wing it you know as you go
yeah
yeah
but i i remember fondly having the small ones they they seemed real happy and it was so easy to solve their problems and as they get older it just seems that everything is more serious and and
complicated
it's more complicated it's emotional it's not a matter of giving them a lollipop anymore it it just gets harder
yes
but um what we've done and you might want to do as you know as time flies by is i'm remarried and my husband never had any kids
uh-huh
so we were trying to figure out how um how we would make this turnover as smooth as possible and we came up with what we call the family meeting
um-hum
and once a week we get together and this is a chance when the kids can say whatever they want without us getting insulted about it
yeah
and we have sort of an agenda that's like good news this week bad news this week uh suggestions any new business any uh
hm
any questions questions any anything you know and we
how long does that last how long does your meeting last
well it it changes it could be a quiet week it could be the kind of thing where kids want to go do something else so it goes pretty quick at the end is allowance so they have to make it through you know collect
that sounds like a good theory or a good way to do it
well you know we we actually sit and talk to each other once a week at least you know not that we don't all the time
right
but it it it works out nicely and i don't know you know i think i'd do that even if i wasn't remarried if i had thought about it
yeah
and you know we plan also plan a family activity because people are coming and going and it's hard to be all together to do something so
uh-huh what kind of things do you do on the family activities
well it could be a game of Scrabble and or it could be you know reading a book out loud or making up a story and passing it around the table you know one sentence to each person
um-hum
and um it's it's not something that's impossible i mean the kids will usually want to go to a game park or something you know we can't do that you know we try to keep it real
yeah
right
it's getting quite expensive to do that these days
oh please
yeah that another thing that comes up with us is family vacation
yeah
we just kind of knock our heads we don't know how to make that right it seems as if we do what they want
uh we marathoned a trip in California we stayed with some relatives for awhile and then we went to Sea World and we went to Disneyland and we we went to every kid thing
did you drive there
uh no we we flew to California and we stayed free at my aunt's house so that gave us a base in San Diego
yeah yeah
and we saw Sea World and the zoo and this and that and our lives were sort of normal because we you know it was someone else's house so we made sure we had dinner at dinnertime and that kind of thing
then we drove a bit further and when we were on our own it just kind of fell apart because we'd stay late at the parks and
i didn't enjoy it after awhile you know once is you know it's interesting but it's really not my cup of tea and family vacations are kind of difficult
yeah
you know sharing a room with the kids is not much of a vacation once they're old enough to know the difference
true true
so
yeah my husband wants to go on a family vacation we're on the east coast like you and he wants to go out to uh the Grand Canyon and do that sort of thing when Helen gets a little older but
it's hard to tell i at twenty months old he's he wants take her to the zoo and that sort of thing but i'm not sure if she's ready for any of that if she's you know if it could hold her interest
hm
so we don't really have anything any kind of family activities to do we basically just sit around the house and
she runs from one to the other and we read to her that's something she enjoys
well i guess the playgrounds used to be hot when the kids were little
yeah there's not many of them out there though like was when i was young
huh
i mean there was a playground just about in every neighborhood but i don't even know where one is around here anymore
there might be some at the schools
yeah
you know that you can use when it's an off time you know on a weekend or something
yeah that's a good idea
and a lot of if you have a a YMCA or something they have kind of a tot programs where they have little exercise class for kids her age and all kinds of things
uh-huh
yeah
hm
what help yeah go ahead
probably
probably be very hard to be the instructor twenty months old
huh yeah but that's not your problem that's the fun of it you
