The alternate title to this post could be, “How I resisted strangling my daughter and in the end was glad I didn’t.”
So. Here we go.
It was a typical Friday afternoon. Kids were happy, home from daycare, I’m scrambling to make dinner, the hubby is…I dunno, somewhere. The usual.
My daughter is asking for a banana or yogurt or something. I don’t remember. But she’s not really asking. She’s demanding. “Gimme a banana,” she said.
“How do we ask for things?” I say.
“No! Gimme a banana!”
I take a deep breath, resist the urge to get upset and I get down on her level.
“If you want something, you either ask Mommy nicely or you don’t get it.”
She pouts. “A banana?” she asks in a slightly nicer tone.
“What else do you say?”
Silence.
“What else do you say?”
Silence.
My hubby speaks up. “If she doesn’t say please, she doesn’t get anything. Period.”
I figure, she’s two and maybe we need to drill this into her a bit more.
“Say, ‘Please,’ sweetie and you can have a banana.”
She’s glaring at me now and won’t say a thing. So I sigh, look at the clock and decide that yes, this child is going to bed early because I refuse to deal with her attitude for the rest of the night.
I tell her she has to behave or she will go to her room. I bend down and take off her shoes. Tink, tink. I hear something fall on the floor. I look down and see a bunch of little pebbles.
Apparently, they took her outside to play at daycare and ever since then, she’d been walking around with rocks in her shoes. No wonder she’d been so cranky.
I look up at her and almost instantly, her attitude changed. SHE’S SMILING NOW. WOW.
“Hi mommy,” she says, as if the entire previous 10 minutes didn’t happen. “I love you. May I have a banana please?”
Moral of the story? Check your kids shoes before you yell at ’em.
that is hilarious…but poor baby having rocks in her shoes
i’ve come to learn that most times, my daughter’s attitudes have some type of reason or rhyme behind them, especially now, so i’ve been excercising great patience. i’m a sahm and i’ve been on bedrest for 6 weeks now and she doesn’t understand why mommy is always in the bed. so her whole countenance has changed because we were veeeeeeery active before. but the end is near, so hopefully, we’ll start to see the disappearance of finger-pointing, acting like she’s deaf, refusing to get dressed, calling daddy “ma’am” on purpose (we say ma’am and sir to adults) and telling him “NO” to everything.
LOL I am totally having one of “those” days with Savannah and this made me chuckle. Too bad I know she does have rocks in her shoes :-/
HILARIOUS!!!
Ha ha! lol
@Leah – Yes, these two-year-olds are something else, aren’t they? When they have a bad day…oooh, look out! You’ll never believe how relieved I was to figure out what was her problem was. I was thisclose to losing it, but I’m glad I held out three more seconds before I went off. I would’ve felt horrible if I had…
@Mrs. W – It’s so true that toddlers usually have a reason behind their negative behavior. Usually with my daughter, it’s because she’s hungry or thirsty or has gas. LOL. Or, if for some reason her borther is being very clingy, she can’t really express that she wants me to hug her and pay attention to her, so she’ll act out in order to get my attention. It’s a constant guessing game sometimes…