1) Try, try, and try again. Especially when it comes to food. Especially when the alternative is eating only spaghetti every night. In the first few months that's the only thing Rose wouldn't protest. The nightly fights over food were so tiring they nearly made a pasta sentence worthwhile. Yet, we kept introducing and reintroducing foods and now she might grimace a few times, but she generally likes everything--even foods she swore she hated.
2) There's a fine line between consequence and punishment, and it's easily crossed. Sometimes what starts as a perfect consequence doesn't keep on course. In this case, the child acts out, mom calmly spells out consequence if behavior repeats, child has time to think about consequence before repeating or stopping the behavior.
Then the child chooses to repeat the behavior, anyway. Mom loses her cool a little because of the poor decision on the child's behalf and because the consequence obviously wasn't a good one. Before mom knows it 15 "consequences" are issued in 5 minutes. Dad calls this layering. When fired in rapid succession, consequences don't give time to let the kiddo think through or learn anything. Then they're punishments. Mom will work on this.
3) I think I mentioned this before, but parents seem to love educating me about which of Rose's behaviors are "normal" ones I can expect to continue or even get worse. They sometimes seem to delight in torturing me with this knowledge. A few weeks ago though, I couldn't help but laugh as someone else's kid had a melt down over pony tail holders in the Lifetime locker room. Which leads me to my last revelation: other people's kids aren't perfect, either! Which is probably all the other parents are trying to say.
And our 1st Gotha Anniversary pics:
1 comment:
What a beautiful cake!! Happy Gotcha Anniversary!
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