Personal Responsibility

My husband is fairly hard-line on the personal responsibility topic. I am too, to a lesser degree - I feel it's important but I'm more willing to make exceptions for people who need help (in my estimation) than he is. And we try to teach our kids that personal responsibility too. The eight-year-old is the easiest of the three - she's at a receptive age for it (she hasn't hit the adolescent nothing-is-my-fault bit yet, frequent home-late excuses notwithstanding) and she has a certain amount of her mom's sense of Random Guilt For Everything - but the eleven-year-old is coming along too. Her mom and we (and Abby's dad) work fairly hard on it, and we've had some recent homework projects that have improved our (the adults') communication on the topic. None of us are perfect, but we're working as a team (go amicable divorces!) to get a sense of responsibility for their own homework instilled in the older two.

The youngest, four-year-old Lizzy, is a little harder. Part of this is simply because she's still very young; her time sense is still screwy and her memory of where she has put things is a little weird. And she violates warranties in the strangest ways. I've lost track of the number of remote controls that have gone missing around here (we've found most of them (although one we found in a full glass of water) and those we haven't we've replaced). And the King County Public Library's local branch probably knows my phone voice by now, as I call in to explain why books are late fairly often. But this time she's misplaced the book that belongs to Snow the Giraffe, which was lent to her by her preschool this weekend (she was Star of the Week so she got to bring Snow and her blanket, book and basket home with her this weekend).

We saw the book Friday night when we read it, and Saturday morning when we read it again, and we have looked all over the darn place. Abby's gotten under the bed, we've looked under and behind the couch, etc. No Giraffes Can't Dance to be found. Sigh. So I ordered a copy from amazon.com, next day delivery, and I'll bring it to the preschool and let them know. And I'll try to instill a sense of This is Wrong in Lizzy. But I'm not holding my breath on her getting that lesson yet. We still have to reinforce it with the older two, and they're 11 and eight.

It will come with time.