Oh, my goodness. The testing phase is in full force. Vince has been testing every word I say. Wait a minute: Just at this exact moment (7:45pm on 9/17/08) I realized it's my fault because I let him slide on the potty training thing. I think he realized I would cave if he put up enough of a fight on the potty training, so he wants to see what else I will cave on. Crap. Now I'm the mom who caves. Vince has been incredibly whiny lately and I'm realizing that it's because we allow it. So, we implemented the no-whine rule. That's going great. Now he started refusing to obey direct orders that he has proven himself perfectly capable of obeying. So we have implemented the no-disobeying-perfectly-reasonable-requests rule. That one is a little different. I discovered that Time Out was completely ineffective discipline for this particular child when it comes to that. We went back and forth to Time Out for about 15 minutes earlier today because Vince refused to help put a puzzle away (our favorite puzzle - a 10 foot long alphabet train, which we also use as animal flash cards). After we finally got all the pieces back in the box, one piece and one Time Out at a time, he lost the puzzle. Then tonight, after a short-lived battle of the wills, I remembered that I'm the grown up and have more power than just to put him in Time Out. So I stripped Vincent of all book privileges. That one's really gonna sting for all of us, because lately that's his favorite thing to do. He goes and gets one and brings it to us and sits on our lap and reads and chit chats with us. But tonight he refused to help put them away at bedtime so I let him watch me remove each one of his books from his shelf. Ouch. He'll earn them back one at a time, but it's going to be rough in the meantime, I'm sure.
This is Vince before he forfeited his book privileges:
It's taken a while, but I finally realized nobody is going to come knock on our door and say, "Hi, welcome to town. Wanna be friends?" So I've been getting more proactive about talking to people when I normally would just smile and keep walking. We visited a twice a month mommy group today. It's called MOPs (Mothers of Preschoolers) and the moms get together in one room and the kids go to a nursery and everybody gets to have some fun social time with people who communicate on their own developmental level!! I'm so glad Vince is finally getting to hang out with more kids. We had Finn Kunz over for a playdate last week and are hoping to make that a weekly (if not more often) date. The boys had a really good time together. Vince had been so starved for attention from other kids that by the end of the playdate he was chasing poor Finn around trying to hug him. Finn didn't realize what he was doing at first, but after the first couple hugs, he started hugging back. I just about melted. It was so sweet. Then the same thing happened to Vince at the park yesterday. A little girl kept chasing him around wanting to hug him and after about 10 attempts he realized she was being sweet, so he hugged her back. My little loverboy! We have another playdate set up for tomorrow morning with some other folks we've become acquainted with in passing.
Oh, Gabe, this is for you: I had a dr. appointment on Monday and baby AJ is doing just fine. He's been moving around a lot, so next time you see me, you can put your hand on the belly and feel him move around, okay? Here's a picture of the growing belly for you. Love you, bud.
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