In need of a smile.

Thursday  in the early morning  Mystie

Yesterday Hans and I had a hard day. He threw a fit at every minor crossing of his desires and refused any sort of reasonableness. Half-way through the morning I assumed he would probably take a nap during his quiet time and the afternoon would be better. Well, that was at play group. He slept for 2 minutes in the car, then went up for his quiet time. I returned a phone call to Elly, and 15 minutes later Hans was down and appeared cheerful and I was in the middle of a conversation, so I set him up with magazines, glue, and scissors and let him stay up. Jaeger slept for 5 minutes in the car and throughout my hour-long conversation he tried every tactic from his crib to convince me that 5 minutes was enough of a rest.

After I got Jaeger up we had about 30 minutes of “calm before the storm.” Then the boys fed off of one another and both alternately fell to pieces, blaming the other for their fall. One was always the innocent, calm, reasonable antagonist while the other was the emotional wreck of a victim. They didn’t ever both go at one another head-on, only one fell apart at a time, but this see-saw exhausted me. I finally had Hans go to his room with 3 books until Daddy came home (about 45 minutes), and by this time when I told him he wasn’t allowed to cry about it but had to obey without throwing a fit, he believed me.

So Matt came home to an exhausted wife, who immediately gave him the low-down. Hans came down the stairs during the end of the tale, and his steps quickly turned cautious as he realized what was being discussed. So, when I finished, Hans’ head was peaking over stair rail, and it was plain he was unsure of where he stood or what expression he should wear.

Matt told him a few things which made sobriety win out on Hans’ face. Among the comments was, “You must not treat your mother that way; you must be nice to her.” For some reason Daddy’s disappointment in him is often more effective than Mommy’s discipline.

So today Hans has been bringing me little pieces of paper he has carefully folded as presents, has asked how he can help (although come close to throwing a fit when my task for him was not doing what I was doing, but actually putting away his own things), and done his best to initiate reasonable conversation with me. Finally I put two and two together when, after telling me most sincerely about what his current task he had undertaken meant, he ended with, “See, Mom, I am being nice to you today.” Then he gave me his closed-mouth, scrunchy-eyed forced smile that means, “I’m not really laughing, but I am smiling so that you will smile; it’s all for you, Mom; will you please smile at me? Will you please be pleased with me?”

So I gave him a big smile and his smile became his own.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 9:48 am and is filed under Mother. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.