time out

Meet the time out queen. This girl is giving me a run for my money, I tell you. I can already tell that raising this child is going to be completely different from raising Aiden. I can probably count on one hand how many times Aiden went to "time-out". Ever. Capri practically lives in time out.

At first, I would just go put her in her crib when she needed to cool off (ie., she was being completely ridiculous, hitting, pinching, scratching, screaming uncontrollably...), but that didn't really seem to work at all, and I didn't want the place that she sleeps to be a place of torture for her. We started putting her on the first landing on the stairs, because she wouldn't move. She would stay there until we came to get her because she was terrified of being on the stairs and would neither go up, nor down. That worked for a while, till we went on vacation and came home and she was no longer scared of the stairs, and in fact loved going up and down them. I still think my mom taught her, to be funny. Now, what works for her is we set her in a corner on one of the bar stools, and she stays there....for now. I don't know if she's afraid she'll fall off, or if she's just resolved that she'll be up there till we come for her. All I know is, it's what's working best.

                                               

What's great is that we can threaten her with a time out, and she'll sometimes (rarely) change her bad behavior to avoid going to time out. She also can be throwing an all out raging fit, and as soon as we set her on the chair, it's like magic. She stops. She mostly just sits there. And she stays there until she calms down, or until we feel she's settled down enough that she is "teachable". Then we can calmly and rationally have a discussion about what she did that was wrong, and why she should avoid acting like that in the future, and she politely (or not so politely) ignores us.

  Who even knows if we're really getting through to her at all. Does she look like she's being punished to you?

Here, she's waving to nobody in the yard. I love her silly. I look at that face, and I just want to melt. Then she gets frustrated with me, and comes at me with her little pinchers (She'll look for any exposed skin, and she goes for it with all she has. A lot of times she starts pinching my feet, because that's the only skin she can reach.) and I remember that I have to be firm with her for heaven's sake!

She is every bit the dainty little girl I always wanted, with SO much more personality than I could have ever dreamed up. She is definitely going to be a handful as she gets bigger, and I'm already having nightmares about her teen-age years.