You Always Have Those Two

           I love all the children that I work with everyday and I know you are not suppose to have favorites but I do. Shhhhhhhhh! The children do not know that. It seems like my favorite ones are the more challenging ones. I know have had 3 very challenging ones and I loved them all. I think the reason is that I get to try things out and learn new things with them.  You can tell that you have really helped them in some way before they leave. I started out with one and just got done with one and now I have another one. I will tell you about 2 children though on here. One is the challenging one I have now and the other is just hard to get to sleep.
           My hard one is a child who will just sit and cry. He won't go play with the others unless I'm in the room or I lead him to it. He started out crying after supper because he had to leave his sister. He keeps talking about and asking for his sister and daddy. He keeps saying he wants to leave this place. He is one that will curse up a storm but not out of meanness. He has a smile on his face and everything. We just think it was the language at home. There is one thing that gets me about this child or maybe two. Those things are how sad he gets when he just sits and how he loves to play with sensory toys.
          It was so fun today because I saw him rub his cheek and forehead on play mats in our gross motor room. We have these little discs with different design on them and big ones just the same. Different texture. So here I am thinking it could be a sensory processing problem so I go get the discs to see if it is true. It was! He loved the smooth side on his cheek yet he loved the rough sides on his fit. He probably spent 10 mins. walking on the big discs. He also plays with a heavy sand ball that we have in the room and he loves to go bowling with it. He is another one that you just have to keep really busy and changing things up every so often. He cannot stay one one thing too long on he will start to cry.
         Then another little child, one of my girls, has a hard time going to bed. She will move her head side to side and cry and scream if she is not rocked. Well, tonight I tried a new method so she could learn to calm her body down herself. We have some 10 mins gel timers and I gave her one just to watch. She was quite watching it. It was neat to see after a little bit because then she would go from that to her stuffed animal to that just back and forth. She did fall asleep holding on to the timer though so our next step might be to take the timer when she is half asleep and replace it with her stuffed animal.
          See all this stuff I just learned in one day! It is so much fun when I put my mind to it and let go of everything else in my life. This is what I live for. To help those children that need help whether emotionally, physically, or behaviorally. Could be all three. I noticed with all my 3 challenging ones I've had the patience that I thought I would never have. You learn with all three because no child is the same at all. Some speak and some don't. Some cry or scream and some don't. Some knows how to eat and some don't. Some don't want to or don't know how to play with other children and some do. It is the experience that matters in the field of child care or whenever you are working with children.