We have a beautiful, intelligent, amazing daughter. I truly love her to pieces.
But.
There are times where she can be incredibly frustrating…Thursday night was one of those times. Yup…another battlefield. After a few days, I feel like I have recovered sufficiently from it enough to think about it without cringing.
Madi was in bed, not asleep, talking and singing to herself like she usually does, and then about 10:15, she decided that she had to go to the bathroom. She proceeded to go without incident and headed back to bed, but then tried to convince me that she wasn’t tired and that she didn’t want to go to sleep. This was now around 10:30 p.m. I was not up to dealing with it, so I told her that I was going to leave and send up Daddy…when she just snapped.
For the next hour, we tried everything we could think of, but nothing was working. She continued to refuse to get into bed and put her head on the pillow, screaming and yelling along the way. About 50 minutes in, Ben and I found ourselves barricaded in the hallway looking at each other, trying to decide what to do next, exhausted and out of ideas. Ben said, “Can you imagine what she would be like if we just let her do whatever she wanted all the time?” It was a scary thought.
So…we ended up taking away bedtime stories for three days, taking away her Bear, other bedtime animals, and then Ben just started picking up toys and carrying them out of the room until she laid her head down. It finally worked…probably because she was too exhausted to fight anymore. Thank goodness.
We had a little talk afterwards about what happens when she disobeys, but frankly, I didn’t think that it was going to sink in. But the last few days, before her naptime or bedtime, she has been reminding US that she doesn’t get any books because she disobeyed. She’s also been on her best behavior so that she could get her toys back…I wonder how long it will last. I’m not holding my breath, because one big drag down extravaganza just couldn’t solve the whole problem, could it? Hah. I doubt it.
Isn’t parenting tough? It is so hard to figure out if what you are doing is “right”, especially because there are a million and one different opinions about the definition of “right”. We just pray really hard…and do the best we can, and well, that is about it!
