We've been working more firmly than ever toward getting Liam to sleep by himself lately. It's funny how it had always seemed imperative before, but now with Todd starting school in two weeks, it's down-right desperate.
Tonight, Liam was in rare form, wailing and carrying on as I tried to settle him down in bed. I was at my wit's end when Thea came to the door and said in a clear voice, "Liam, remember the M&Ms! If you sleep through the night by yourself, you get M&Ms in the morning, and a star. Seven stars mean a big Thomas train. You can do it, I know you can. You can sleep through the night because you're a big boy and I know you can do it and I'll be right here in my room going to sleep by myself, too, and in the morning we get candy!"
It was like a switch flipped. After a brief pause, the tears dried up and Liam happily chirped, "M&Ms in the morning and seven stars and I get a big Thomas!" He lay down, covered himself up, and was asleep in minutes.
Thanks, Thea! She amazes me how empathetic she is. I think she gets that from her dad. While I often flounder when dealing with the murkiness of other people's emotions, she seems to know instinctively just what to say.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
My dear little big-girl
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8 comments:
she is precious! Love that.
That's my sweetie...i'm so proud of her.
ha, I have to keep this in mind if I ever have kids. Never underestimate the power of candy for breakfast!
BTW I just discovered your blog and spent the morning reading through it, you are uber-cool and I love your writing style! You often say in your posts that you don't think of yourself as a writer but you are. Really!
Thx for the tip on using WordPress to backup, I have always been uncomfortable about not having backups but now I can do something about it.
Oh, thanks, dude! That's really nice of you to say.
And what's great about Wordpress is, you can back up your back-up by downloading it as a file, comments and all, to your harddrive. Suh-weet.
Oh Kelly, your daughter is awesome! Actually, your entire family seems pretty dang awesome. Lucky you!
go, thea go!
oh, and m&ms are how we potty trained girlfriend. they are food of the gods.
PERFECT!! What a great big sister indeed.
I'm guessing she got her brains from you. Just when we're at wit's end, our child does the right thing. (Or at least we try to remember those times when they did the right thing!)
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