She’s growing up

The past few months have been interesting. She’s starting to flex her ‘control freak’ mussels. Time Outs stopped working. I guess she had been getting so many that they were just diluted and didn’t mean anything to her.<br />n<br />nSo, I had to change my strategy. I stopped saying “TIME OUT”. Instead, I say. I think you should sit down for awhile, just until you feel better. I found that 3 minutes was not enough time to fix the behavior. So, she’s been more willing to sit down by herself. Sometimes it’s 5 mins up to 45 mins. Then when she calms down, she comes to me and says ” mama, I feel better”.. then we can talk about what happened. This has been working well. I found that trying to talk to a screaming 3 year old is very similar to reasoning with a drunk guy. Best to wait til they sober up to make your point.<br />n<br />nAlso, She’s been giving me a lot of resistance. When I ask her to do simple things like, get dressed, brush her teeth, eat dinner…. the list goes on and on… Her auto response is “no” or she pulls away from me. Instead of getting mad at her. I started taking her toys and putting them away. I take the toy of the day, the one she’s interested in at the time. If she wants it back she has to comply with what I’m asking her to do. We’ve gotten to where I only have to take 2 or so toys to get my point across.<br />n<br />nChoices.. we have been giving her choices; this has been good and bad. Many times it’s fine but then she has a problem with sticking to the choice she made. Mostly over food. <br />n<br />nThe one that’s most effective is.. Do you want to do it the Hard way? or the Easy way? she always chooses the easy way. <br />n<br />nOn a positive note.. she’s started doing a little math. She’s found a Disney Princess Math Workbook, and now she wants to do all the pages. We’ve been working in that book for a couple of weeks and she loves it. She now has the skills to work in other books we have. If Disney can inspire RGJ to do math, I’m all for it!<br />n<br />nReading has slowed down. She does have the basic concept but I think she feels it’s too much trouble to sound everything out. She is able to write all her letters in capitals letters. She’s having trouble with the lowercase letters. Clearly we need to work on that next.<br />n<br />nSharing… this has been a work in progress. I think only child syndrome is taking her over. She just doesn’t want to share HER toys with anyone. I am actively searching for a way to inspire her to share. I don’t think being in the camper is helping at all. She’s become more territorial with her things. We don’t host as many play dates and I think she’s getting out of practice. When we go to someone else’s house she shares just fine. They are someone else’s toys… Not a problem.<br />n<br />