Notes for my sister

January 31, 2018  Okay, I’m not going to lie.  This transition is really tough.  My little girl used to be pleasant and easy, and then a few weeks ago something shifted, invisibly and without warning.  She quit going to sleep so easily.  She doesn’t want to take naps anymore, and going to bed at night started taking forever.              Notice I haven’t posted anything lately?  That’s because naps are gone.  This blog may die before it even gets off the ground!              For moms with kids who are approaching this stage, I guess you’ll know it when it happens.  When your child spends an hour singing out, “Mo-om, I’m awake…”  or “I’m done with my nap,” before they even go to sleep, you’ll know.  My oldest kept napping until he turned 4, then his brother quit napping right around 3.  I felt like I’d been robbed of an entire year of naps with that one.  But kids are different and you get what you get.   Here are some ideas that have helped: 1. Monster juice.  When

January 11, 2018 Recently I was looking through an old spiral notebook, and found pages and pages of sentences.  It made me laugh, since that’s a consequence I haven’t used in a while.  “The rules apply to me…I will control my temper…I speak kindly to my sisters…Mom was right.”  (I must have been feeling kind of vindicated on that last one.)  One quick note:  the whole purpose of the sentences is to make my son or daughter  think .  There’s two details that are really important here:  keep it in the present tense, and word things in a positive way.  Instead of saying, “I won’t burp at the dinner table,” change it to something like, “I have good manners at dinner.”  Instead of saying, “I won’t lie to my mom,” (s)he would write, “I am honest with my parents.”  Assigning 50-100 sentences for an infraction is usually about right. Another consequence we like is running laps around the block.  The other day the boys were throwing markers at each other across the room.  One boy