Compromise

As a parent of a toddler, I really have had to learn to outsmart compromise with her. Here is a simple example. Bethany loves our phones. However, she is actually pretty decent at not playing with them. But occasionally she would grab one & sweetly say, "Hiiii, Moommm!" Each of those words would be oozing with tooth-rotting sweetness & just daring me to take a look at her. As soon as I see what she has, she'll give it back. However, I realized we have 2 broken sets of cordless phones hanging around the house *for no good reason, really.* Well, now one of the broken sets is officially Bethany's. Bethany now really doesn’t pay much attention to our phones & plays on the broken real phone more than she does the 3 toy phones she has in her toy box. Now that is a mild example of a compromise we have made recently.


However, a more urgent issue we needed to work out was her all-of-the-sudden, ill-timed dinnertime meltdowns. For about a week, Bethany all of the sudden has had issues sitting down and eating dinner without breaking down into tears. Now keep in mind that we aren’t serving anything out of the ordinary…no we are not extraordinary cooks who like to make up outrageous concoctions. Instead, she’ll just start crying (tears, snot and all) & she’ll then refuse to eat. Occasionally, between sobs we’ll hear Elmo, her way to request her Elmo DVD. However, we have a strict rule in our house---NO TV during dinner! Well, after a few days of our lil' upset dinner guest, we decided to switch out the contemporary Christian cds & movie scores for Bethany’s Sesame Street cds. And you know what…we’ve had 2 meals at home without tears! Talk about a brilliant compromise!

Just goes to show that if you plan on making your life with your toddler to be functional…you always have to be one step ahead!