Thursday, November 29, 2012

Mercury in retrograde, bad moon--and all that gone

This week has been really difficult with Jacob and homework--we knew it would be hard to get him to re-adjust after DisneyWorld and a weekend with his cousins, but I had no idea how hard! Yesterday was the final straw--he "tricked" me about his homework, pouted his way through spelling, demanded I not watch him. It went from bad to worse, and I'm ashamed that I lost my patience. Then when his dad seemed to be running late I told him to put on his hapkido clothes, and he threw a tantrum, threw things on the floor, was rude to me when I tried to help him. He did not, he emphasized, want to go to hapkido. He was too tired. I will say when Aunt Betty arrived, he brightened within two minutes and began telling her all about how wonderful DisneyWorld was. But clearly, this was not the way either one of us wanted to spend our aftrnoons, and I was left in a bad mood--to say the least.
Then Elizabeth, my garage dweller and yoga guru, posted something about doing moon salutations because of the bad moon. When I queried her today it seems the bad moon was with us for a month but now is gone--gosh, I'm glad I didn't know that for the whole month. And I'm still not sure what a "bad" moon is. I also read that Mercury has been in retrograde. I don't think you can effectively Google "bad moon," but I did Google Mercury in retrograde, and it seems that Mercury has been going backward, not forward, from Nov. 6-26. According to the source I read, it's a time when your plans go awry but also a time of strong intuition and high coincidences.
Did any of that account for my Jacob difficulties this week? Not sure. But today he told me his dad had talked to him and said if he was ugly to me any more, he'd begin to lose Christmas presents--now there's a realistic approach. I talked to him and worked out some guidelines--no "tricking" about homework, because homework is serious business; when I am helping him, he cannot hide his work from me; when we're doing a pre-test, he may set up a carel like they have at test time at school. Result? Today we did the homework easily, with laughter and smiles. Copied his spelling list, putting consonants in one color and vowels in another--and he did it without any guidance from me. Then we did the pre-test, and he got them all right!
It may not have been Mercury in retrograde--today I fed him a huge banana and a great glob of peanut butter which he happily ate with a fork (the way he requested it--sounds awful to me). He eats lunch at 10:30, so I'm sure he's starving at 3:00 and he didn't eat his usual peanut butter the last couple of days. So low blood sugar may well have been as instrumental as Mercury or that bad moon.
But I'm glad Mercury is no longer in retrograde (I like using that phrase now that I know what it means) and the bad moon is gone. I expect good things from December.

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