Friday, April 15, 2011

hard moments=teachable moments (hopefully!)

Whew! This is not quite the Friday I was anticipating. Everything started out "normal". The boys woke up, we watched Sesame Street, had some breakfast, and then I asked Tyler to put his milk in the fridge and all hell broke loose. It's a strange thing and the second time it's happened like this. Everything is going well and I (or Adam) make one simple request and Ty decides this is the moment he's going to test his boundaries and test how far he can push Mom/Dad. One thing led to another and the entire situation snowballed into 4 timeouts and almost an hour's worth of screaming and crying. Seriously?!? It doesn't get much more frustrating at this point in my parenting. I'm not sure what exactly is happening in his little mind and I think (?) he's being developmentally appropriate and even though I may have an idea of what's happening while it's all happening, it's still horrible. It's really horrible. Horrible enough that I want to run out of the house, run a few miles as fast as I can, scream, yell, maybe even punch something, and just to prove my point yell some more. Okay, so it's not feasible and definitely not a good example to anyone, but nonetheless it's what I wanted to do today. Instead for a moment I went into the bathroom and cried and then for each timeout took Matty outside to enjoy the beautiful weather and take lots of deep breaths. In the midst of Tyler's breakdown he kept making requests for me to do other things such as blow his nose or whatever and I kept saying "no, I won't do anything else for you this morning until you put the milk in the fridge." Every time I said it he kept getting more and more pissed and today I was really, really determined to make my point. Before the last time out, Tyler was literally standing in front of the fridge holding his milk and was asking me to open the door and I kept repeating "no, I won't do anything else for you this morning until you put the milk in the fridge." It was ridiculous and I'm just thankful there was no one else there to witness something so out of control. I think that was finally the moment when Ty realized I'm not backing down and he needs to do it so we all could move on which he finally did after the 4th time out. Lovely. Then came the "debriefing" talk. He was crying and all upset and I said something about being a Szajda and helping the Szajda team and being a good team member. His 3-year-old reply was "I don't want to be a Szajda". Lovely. Just what I want to hear. Then he said that I never help him, etc. Lovely. And then I said "so when you leave the Szajda family who's going to feed you, bathe you, give you all your medicines, play with you, take you places, keep you warm, and keep you safe?" I'm going to live with Grammy and Baca was his reply. Okay. That was what put me over the edge. Then I started crying and even though I knew he didn't mean it, it still stung. Long, long story short he finally came up to me on the swings, asked to snuggle with me, and then said sorry and we had a long, long talk and some tight hugs. I love him to pieces, but some moments are much harder than others! It's in these hard moments that I have to pray and have confidence that it brings us even closer together and will be moments from which we learn the most.

I'm just glad it's nap time and even typing this out is helping me take a step back and really get perspective. Every day is a learning experience and on-the-job training. Whew! But maybe I will take a little nap too!

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