Monday, February 7, 2011

Struggling...

Being a parent is hard. Being a parent of a toddler is even harder. We have officially reached the point in Nora's life where obedience all the time is a thing of the past. The thing we stuggle with the most are the things that only she controls. Eating, sleeping and peeing. Unfortunately Nora is very stubborn. She is also very independent. I'm not sure where she gets any of that from, but Ryan says that if you look up the definition of stubborn in the dictionary there are no words, just a picture of myself. Anywho, I was at a loss. I had tried everything I knew to appropriately handle the situation and I was failing miserably. I had reached the point of threats. I had screamed, I had even SPANKED my kiddo (multiple times). Every form of discipline I knew was a joke. I would spank her and she would laugh. I would put her in time-out and then she would start asking to go for "fun". I would yell at her and she would tell me "Mamma, thats not nice". I WAS FRUSTRATED. So today the Parents as Teachers lady came. I told her of my problems and she suggested a timer, a rewards chart and a picture schedule. I immediately thought the timer might be a good idea, so as soon as she left the girls and I were off to Target to buy our timer and some stickers for the reward chart. I talked to Nora about how we were going to Target to pick out stickers for our chart, made the chart and asked her what she wanted to earn. She told me icecream. I explained she had to earn five stickers to get the icecream and she said okay. At naptime we went upstairs with our timer, I helped her set it and I told her you cannot get out of your bed until this goes off. Mommy will be listening and if she hears anything bad going on in here you will not get your sticker. I left the room fully expecting to have to redirect her back to her bed multiple times, however, instead after 25 minutes I heard dead silence. I went upstairs to snag the timer (heaven forbid it wake her up after only an hour) and she was sound asleep!! I'm crossing my fingers that this whole timer thing works. Afterall it did take a damn potty watch to get her to consistently go pee on the toilet. Why can't my child just listen to what I tell her to do? Oh yeah, because she IS my child!

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