A Little Goodbye November 13, 2012

Yesterday we went to the park as a family. Ellie ran around the playground and played on all the toys, with her Daddy’s help. They climbed up ladders. They zoomed on the slides. They jumped on wiggly bridges. They laughed, they giggled, we had a blast.

Sometimes Ellie gets a little bossy. She knows what she wants and then points and directs Daddy until he does what she wants. Like sit on the right slide, or climb the stairs after her, or help her play on the teeter totter. Andy was a great sport and ran all around the park with Ellie. They had a great time.

After playing we decided to walk over to the food venders and buy chicken and sticky rice for dinner. We found a dry, quiet spot on the grass and had a picnic dinner. As we turned to walk home, trouble started. Ellie saw the playground on our way out and started throwing a fit. She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to play more, even though it was soon to be time for bed.

As a tantrum started, I had an idea. I asked Ellie to say “bye, bye” to the park. Ellie regained composure and waved enthusiastically and said bye, bye. The way she said it was like she was saying goodbye to a friend, but also knowing that she would be back. That she would have fun there again, so she could go home then.

After a long weekend of tantrums and battles, it was nice to have a moment of helping Ellie deal with her emotions in a positive way.

What ways do you distract or disrupt tantrums before they get out of hand?

Age is a Funny Thing September 17, 2012

Somehow Ellie knows. She can’t read a calendar yet, or understand passing of time, but somehow Ellie knows. How do I know this? Well, last week was Ellie’s half birthday, now she’s 1 and a half years old. The evening before her half birthday, Ellie let us know that she was now 18 months old.

How, you might ask? With a huge tantrum when the option she wanted wasn’t presented as one of her two choices. Many people have been warning us that 18 months is the beginning of the boundaries testing stage, the terrible twos. While we’ve had minor tantrums, we hadn’t seen any signs of the battle of wills, so we were caught unaware on that evening. The same two choices Ellie gets at the end of dinner were presented that night. But all of the sudden that wasn’t good enough. Ellie wanted things to go a different way, her way. Since we didn’t agree with her, she let us know as we finished our meal.

It was like a switch was flipped in Ellie, an age switch. She heard that kids start acting a certain way at 18 months, and now that she was that age, she must act like that. We hadn’t told her about her half birthday yet, as we were planning on celebrating by going swimming and eating ice cream the next day. She knew anyways.

It hasn’t been all bad though, because the other big milestone at 18 months, language explosion, also hit Ellie at the same time. She is picking up new words every day right now. Words that we have been working on like down and let’s go in Thai, and words that we haven’t taught her. For example, Ellie had a hair in her eye the other day. She pointed to her eye repeatedly saying, “eye, eye, eye.” I didn’t know what she was trying to say as I didn’t know that she knew that word. A little eye rub and insistence by Ellie helped me figure it out.

Thankfully, 18 months has good things for Ellie, not just frustrations. We are having fun and communicating more and more together every day. Tantrums come and go throughout the day, but we are choosing to focus on the good parts of our day.

What exciting, or frustrating, things are happening in your life right now?