Blog Post #101

Wow, I am so glad Blogger keeps track of my posts. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known how historic this particular entry was/is/shall be. Let's hope I can live up to my own hype.

Two events which were small in seismic terms but large in effect occurred this week. The first was a long overdue Mommy Makeover, wherein I went to the Salon (and by a total quirk of fate, I go to a Salon, capital S, where I almost always feel under-dressed and generally out of step with the world of fashion) and Dave-Who-Is-Not-Gay gave me a badly needed cut and highlight combo which was so expensive that one of the children is now going to have to go to trade school.

BUT, I look fabulous.

My stylist, Dave-Who-Is-Not-Gay, always spends at least a third of my appointment regaling me with stories of his girl-chasing days before he finally settled down with wife #3 and decided to raise a family. I find this amusing, because my mother, who also goes to Dave-Who-Is-Not-Gay, has never heard these stories, so either he thinks that I think he is gay or he doesn't think that my mother thinks he is gay or someone somewhere wondered if he was gay and now he is not going to let anyone under 50 out of that chair without completely affirming his not-gay status in as many puerile ways as possible.

Or possibly he's hitting on me a little. I did wonder about the backrub before the haircut...

Whatever. He does a great job on my hair and whether he's carrying a purse like Tinky Winky or goosing waitresses at a biker bar, I don't care as long as my highlights come out right.

I'd so neglected myself for so many months that a simple cut and glow made me feel like a supermodel. I've been walking around all week swinging my hair around and smiling and nodding at myself in the mirror ("How you doin'?") a la Joey Tribiani. Some of us mom-types get really good at self-denial when we really need a little more self-respect. I've been in that rut for a while and it suddenly occurred to me that I'm not really taking one for the team, I'm just not taking care of myself. And taking care of me in this small way makes me feel more like taking care of everyone else.

The other small-but-significant event was the arrival of a book.

Backstory: Middle child has been a source of tremendous concern lately. He is prone to tantrums, prone to disobedience, prone to sass, prone to physical responses to parental control. At school he's a perfect angel. At home, he's a terror. He has moments of great sweetness, but lately he devolves into tantrum mode so quickly and so often, that we're hard pressed to see the sweet shine through. Anything that didn't go his way was a signal for him to start having a fit. We were seriously considering counseling because nothing we tried with him seemed to have any effect and the stress of dealing with him was just exhausting, particularly for me. Then my sister recommended we try reading this book called Parenting with Love and Logic.

We'd heard of it, at least the title, in various church groups we'd belonged to over the last 2 years. But it was a parenting book and we were leery of some new parenting fad that wouldn't really last over the long haul or be relevant to what we felt was becoming a serious situation. In the end we bought it to see what it had to say, not because we thought it would be the cure-all for what ails #2.

Enter the book. I've been reading it since Sunday and on Tuesday I had the chance to put some of its principles into action. I used their strategy for dealing with tantrums with my boy and for the first time in weeks -- months -- I feel like I regained some control of the situation without completely draining my own energy. There was no arguing, there was no yelling on my part, there was no loss of temper on my part, no lecture, no harping, no lingering feelings of incompetence or failure for me whatsoever.

In one instance I was able to defuse the tantrum altogether, in two other instances we went through with the whole tantrum protocol and he emerged from it calmer and more in control of himself. That right there is a big step for both of us. Today we backslid a bit, mainly because I handled the situation improperly. This method is going to take some practice, mostly in how I phrase my responses, since some words are triggers for kids (certainly the word "no" for my son either sends him into a tailspin or sends his brain racing to find a way to do what he wants to anyway -- either way he stops listening as soon as it's out of my mouth).

Baby steps, baby steps. I'll post more as I get more into the book.