This little man has been giving me some serious attituuuude of late. He has definitely reached the point of being ready for Kindergarten, despite his adamant claim that he is “not going”, and we’ve been fighting a little. He would love nothing more than for me to play and craft and read and bake and generally cater to him all the live long day, unless he can watch TV or play computer games. I would like nothing more than for him to play by himself for a solid 20 minutes and never give me a flat out sulky “no” when asked to do something.
But that face. I have such a weakness for that face.
It also helps that he still absolutely loves to cuddle and he’s the world’s best big brother 98% of the time, from entertaining Gavin with songs, stories and cuddles to taking Theo to the potty or inviting him to tackle him and being careful to never fight back in a way that Theo gets hurt, although Theo certainly deserves it plenty of the time.
We’ve now instituted a smiley-face system, in which a day of good listening earns a smiley face on the calendar, and three consecutive days need to accumulate before any computer time is happening, and so far it’s been working swimmingly.
So you know, I guess he really had a rough couple weeks (which also happened to be while Carl was gone, which may have had an impact) and now things are on the up-and-up, so I guess we aren’t really fighting. It’s easy to forget how many good qualities a child has when the bad qualities come through in a surprisingly powerful way, isn’t it?
I’m glad we talked this through.
I can relate to this post so much that I think I could have written it myself!