I realized that all these years, I had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck me under and drag me out to sea.
Okay, so I admit it, I try to catch a few minutes of the Today show with regularity. It isn’t that the reporting is necessarily intelligent nor the stories all that interesting. I honestly think it is simply the comfort of familiarity first thing in the morning. It also provides me with conversation nuggets for the rest of the day when I don’t feel like making small talk about my children (which is always).
Yesterday, this seemed to be the talk of the day:
I wrote this post a month ago, on the day that it happened. At the time, for whatever reason, I didn’t want to publish it, and wondered if I ever would. To spoil the ending, everything turned out just fine. Better than fine, in fact.
So I’m having a mommy melt-down right now.
Of course, it is Friday, which means my five year old will not get out of bed. This means the entire morning went the usual way it goes when Eliott decides not to do anything. But my new approach to this attitude is to tell her one time, “If you do not do all your jobs before school today, or if you are not ready when it is time to go, you will ride in the car to drop Carter off and come back home with me.” (Thankfully, school is currently a reward in her mind.)
You are always exactly a week away from heaven, or a week away from hell. If you stick to your guns and hold your boundaries, blissful cooperation is right around the corner. But if you give up at day three all of your effort will be declared officially worthless. And the kids win.
Apparently this is a lesson I supposedly received more than one time while working at the wilderness camp. John swears he said it to us as our trainer, and repeated it again throughout his private tutoring sessions with me (aka: dating). Somehow, like most of that year of my life, such important nuggets of wisdom all seem like a bit of a blur.
This is what child-inflicted stress can do to a person, people.
This is why we continue to have more children after the first two nearly killed us.
Having forgotten this nugget, I had been recently toying with the idea of implementing some creativity into my discipline style. Before I go on, Continue reading “How to Make Your Child Obey (Part 2)”
The UnderToad 