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A while back I read a book "His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-proof Marriage" by Willard F. Harley. It's a good book that I recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about successful partnership. One of the main goals is to get positive experiences with your partner. In the book they recommend to spend all free time together to achieve that. I disagree with the idea of spending all free time together, but I started thinking, maybe the idea of having positive experiences together also applies to kids. If I think about being at home with kids, what thoughts and emotions come to mind and what exactly are we experiencing together with the children. I took a moment and thought about it. I remembered waking up at night to loud screaming, spending one and a half hours lying in bed, trying to convince two toddlers to fall asleep, and all other annoying things.
Then I concentrated and thought of the good things: Siiri being really polite and smart, being pleased with knowing something that she shouldn't know at her are, Liisa being super cute in a truly devious way, laughing so hard that she almost falls over as she escapes and runs around the corner in only her diapers. 
The first thoughts made me feel how I really wish I could spend as little time at home as possible, whereas the positive thoughts made me feel much love toward my children.I really do want to enjoy parenting before it's all over. It's worth the effort to try if this could make a difference. I started to pay more attention to spending time doing tasks that we all enjoy as much as possible. Basically, there are several kinds of activities that two people of the same household can share. There are the ones both of us enjoy, there are the ones that only one of us enjoys and the other one is doing reluctantly for the benefit of the other, and there are the ones that neither enjoys but must be done anyway (e.g. bed time). Then the objective is to spend more time on activities that are pleasant for both people. If the time spent together is spent in a positive and happy way, then as a result, when you think of the other person, you have fond memories and a positive emotion. The relationship will improve.
Mhh, I keep talking about relationships, in stead of a generic happiness level or enjoyment. Well, at home, the relationship determines the happiness level. There are several reasons why being a stay-at-home mother can feel less than pure joy for me personally. The most important one is that when I am at home, I am not at work. My self image is closely tied with the need to be good at what I do professionally. When my babysitter calls in sick, I'm barely getting anything done and I feel like I want to be in the lab and do something useful in stead of "relaxing" and trying to get the kids to fall asleep. After a productive day at work, I feel many times happier at home as well. But this I can not affect. I found another babysitter as a substitute and now I'm again stressed that things will be changing soon. Other reasons for not enjoying too much time at home include slow pace of life, lack of freedom, lack of social interaction with grownups, lack of control over things (If I had the choice, kids would always enjoy their meal and it would take them 10 minutes to fall asleep.). But when I have a job, I should be able to make the necessary changes that would make life at home more enjoyable.
Talking of relations at home, me and Erkki are good. We don't have much time together but we spend it very mutually enjoyably, watching Star Trek: Next Generation series. We're at the 4th season already. Me and Liisa are good. She's a bit too needy but that's probably due to her age (1,4 years). I'm still breastfeeding, although it's only once a day and sometimes she skips the meal. Liisa is a lot of fun, except when I (in her opinion) neglect her to take care of chores. Then she goes the extra mile to act mischievous - shoveling things out of drawers and banging metal dishes on a glass table. She still responds very well to any positive attention. Siiri and me... Well, that's complicated. She can be very needy. She's also still having night terrors and random freak-outs when things don't go her way. She seems stressed about the world around her. I would interpret her stress as a sign that I should let her be "a child" and stop teaching her things that are meant for older children, like reading and simple calculations, except some of the best times we've had together have been moments when she has a really smart moment and she's really smiling at her success and I'm really proud of her.
But still me and Siiri are having some problems but I can't pinpoint how to fix it. At night when she wakes up crying and screaming, she doesn't allow me near her. "Mommy, go away, I don't want you.You are bad. Go away!". Also, she doesn't really hug me and she often demands that I treat her like a 1 year old - along with dressing her and spoon-feeding her. Okay, so she thinks that I am closer with Liisa and thinks she should act like Liisa to get closer to me, but I keep telling her that I want to play big-kid games with her, not pretend that she's a baby. When she behaves like that, I don't enjoy it at all and it seems to me like she isn't enjoying it either. Back to the theory of spending time together doing mutually enjoyable things, I have started to introduce new activities to Siiri. We now sometimes make cakes together.
She loves it. A couple of Fridays, I have picked up Siiri from kindergarten early to spend time with her alone. We went to the Library and we went ice skating. I would like to have long conversations with her but aside from using me as a walking Google ("what's an ambulance? What's a doctor? Why?") she usually just wants to listen to silence together. I don't think the time we spend together on those Fridays is enough to negate all the bad times we have had at home but it's slowly making a difference in how Siiri behaves with me. 
And it really must be making some difference, because I actually started writing this post about a month ago and I had to delete huge chunks of it because my emotions had already changed too much to agree with what I had written.Last week Siiri had chicken pox
and now I'm checking Liisa several times a day to see if she caught the infection or not. Tomorrow Siiri is going back to kindergarten and she seems happy about it. I am really busy at work. I am giving a presentation at the institute seminar (oh gosh!), I'm helping organize a workshop about transgenic plants (4 hours!!!), I have several scientific projects in progress (gas exchange and molecular level isolations and analyses) and I'm perhaps also writing a review article (I'm most excited and worried about this one).
