Sometimes, the reality of raising a little man smacks me in the face. It perplexes me and catches me off guard. When I first saw the look on Ryland’s face after school today, I knew something happened. He had that “oops…I messed up, but don’t really want to admit what I did look”. Every time I see this look, I wonder what is about to come out of his mouth. What is it this time? Well, today, he got in trouble for…wait for it…pretend wrestling in the hallway. Pretend wrestling in the hallway…interesting? I hadn’t heard that one before. Not even exactly sure what that means. Him and another boy were apparently “wrestling” in line without actually touching one another. Well, glad for that. At least he wasn’t really wrestling, right?
Time to get creative. My mission? To think of a correlating punishment.
Got it. “Sorry Ry, but since you can’t remember where we can wrestle and where we can’t, you’re grounded from wrestling with Papa for 7 days.”
Tears poured.
“That just hurts my feelings, Mama. I love to play rough with Pop, it’s my fave thing.”
Well…hopefully this will help him remember.
BONUS. I get 7 days of no screaming, throwing, fighting, messing the pillows up, rowdiness, riling the dog up, etc. I might really like this. I'm a girl...I just don't understand the male need to wrestle with each other. It's just weird to me.
That's a good consequence. When my kids were little Uncle Erick and I attended a "Love and Logic" class. It teaches parents how to give appropriate consequences to the child's behavior. For example - when the presentors son was out all night the father was unable to drive him to a skiing trip the next morning because he was too tired from waiting up all night for his son to get home. In my attempt to try it I would tell the girls that their fighting or screaming caused me to feel stress therefore they needed to help me feel calm. Each girl had to scratch my back, or rub my feet - anywhere from 10-30 minutes depending. It was great back then but now they won't touch me....guess I wore them out.
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