You guys always ground me after "interesting" nights/moments with DS6. Thank you so much! I have always been SO open to him concerning expressing his feelings and emotions and have no issues with him being him....dear husband on the other hand is a hider and will keep things inside while I show everything on my sleeve and feel it is healthier to express them and that feelings are just part of life. My heart just aches to see DS6 so distraught and beat himself up so much for such little things (I know at the time, they are not little to him). I just get flustered trying to share the right choice of words that it is okay to make mistakes and that the world doesn't end when he does make a boo-boo.
We used to make jokes like Tory recommended and it did seem to lighten the mood and help him calm down the only catch is that the older he got, the more he would make comments like I "needed to stop being so ridiculous" when I did try to lighten it up....he has a wonderful habit of always thinking one step ahead of me......we do the wonderful count to 3 for behavior...gets 2 warning counts and then on the 3rd count he gets 6 minutes time out...it has really worked wonders on curbing some not so nice behaviors....but the catch is he quickly figured out that he can always get to 2 and then stop...so if he is feeling snarfy, he can continue doing whatever "wrong choice" action 2 times and then he can stop before he gets time out...instead of just stopping at count of 1 or not doing the action at all. Same thing with time out...time out is 6 minutes...it took us a few "duh" nights to figure out what he was up to...but right before bed, he would start doing his "snarfy" habits out of the blue and would end up going into time out...and he seemed HAPPY about it. Well come to find out....he was doing it on purpose to put off going to bed by 6 minutes. I confronted him about it and he looked at me and said, "geez mom, took you long enough to figure it out." Doh!
Thanks Grinity for the great info and links....I love our life with our little tornado child and wouldn't trade it for the world, just some days, I sure could use an extra caffeine boost or something!
