The cats were not having any of it- sleeping in their beds behind the couch...
One thing I did do today that I'm super excited about was making these cards! Ohhhhh now I remember why today was a lazy day. Yesterday we started this program that I was super excited about it. It's called Smart Start and it's through the Navy and it teaches kids to throw and kick and catch and run and all this awesome stuff. Well last night I go with all the enthusiasm in the world and it was awful. First of all- I thought that since this program is for 3-5 year olds that the person in charge would take the kids and teach them all these wonderful things but instead she gave everyone a ball and was like okay now throw it back and forth. Well Liam was not interested. So he was just running all over the place. Poor Malia was sitting at a table in a chair she couldn't get out of, not playing with some little toys I brought saying "mommy? mommy??" So we lasted 30 minutes. And I reminded myself for the millionth time I've got to get some authority over this older child of mine. So today I spent a lot of time thinking about what I could do. Disciplining children is no small task but for me it's got an added element of complication because I'm not always sure what Liam understands and what he doesn't. I am fully aware that he understands more than I think he does but from the experience we've had I honestly don't think he understands the concept of consequences. Well I think he's starting to. So before, when I've put him in timeout, I would ask him two minutes later if he knew why he was in timeout and as I was asking the question, I knew he didn't know the answer. But I think he's ready now. So I made a yellow light, red light card and printed out a picture of his timeout timer. So this is going to be the equivalent of the count to three method that his pediatrician sells. We've talked a lot about what different lights mean when we're riding in the car. If you ask him what red means, he'll say stop. So I thought it was a good visual representation the 1-2-3 method. We shall see. But as I was making those I thought it'd be fun to make cards for stuff we do on a regular basis so I can show him a picture of what we're going to do and maybe he'll be a little more cooperative. We'll see how that works too! Here are the cards:
And here's a picture of Zachary covering up Liam as we were going to bed. I think it's so sweet- every night when we head upstairs to go to bed, he checks on Liam and covers him up and makes sure Gigi is near his hands so he can easily find her if he wakes up in the middle of the night.
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