So everyone said the twos would be so terrible, but I kind of congratulated myself (well, I should be honest..I congratulated Chris) for the fact that Zoe seemed to come through it with relatively few temper tantrums and seemingly well behaved. I imagined that everything was downhill from there; that reaching the third birthday would ring in the era where I would have a beautiful, pristine child with her hands folded in her lap saying "please", "thank you", and "yes, I read that in the Sunday NYTimes Magazine". I thought we were into the age were we would co-exist peacefully, like an idyllic Gilmore Girls episode.
I was wrong.
Very, very wrong.
Don't get me wrong, Zoe has always been a handful. But I didn't think that she was horrible compared to most other kids. Turns out, I may have been comparing her to the wrong kids. Hah. Her new school was a room of 11 two year olds with one teacher, and 10 boys. We had a series of incidents with Zoe being bullied, Zoe bullying and a really difficult era where we could not enforce a peace treaty between her and her shoes. We also discovered that although she generally went straight to sleep for us, if it was a matter of anyone else doing it she was able to put up a stubborn front that would make a donkey take pause.
So we agonized and talked, and agonized some more (yes, yes, I know that everyone reading this is saying...Melissa talked, and Chris did his best to ignore the incessant chatter!). Then we went to tour new day cares. It was quite a day, being escorted through room after room of children, often by people not particularly well versed in the English language.
We finally settled on a Montessori school, full of structure and learning and even UNIFORMS!!! Super cute. We have been very happy there, but the very strict British teacher has really forced me to face the fact that my adorable and precocious little girl is sort of well, the devil in disguise.
My first parent - teacher conference consisted of two scales....Zoe being the smartest and the absolute WORST behaved in class.
Things seemed to be getting better after that, until today when she had a day to rival even my brother's peanut butter jelly riot story. The day ended in her spraying every one of her classmates with a chocolate milk juice box.
The point of my tale..... ADVICE! I feel like all I do is redirect, use time out, and (be aghast) yes, I even occasionally resort to a smack on the rear. But I am admitting defeat! Please, offer words of wisdom. Or at least encouragement as I head back to the battlefield!
1 comment:
When I was little and I was really bad, and I suspect that was a lot, my mother would threaten me with my father. She took care of all the routine disciplinary things, but if I refused to fall-in she would then turn it over to my father, who had an edge a mystique in those days. That struck the fear into me.
I know Chris is deployed, which sucks because you are back to single parent mode, and grandma and grandpa might not want to be viewed as disciplinarians.
But the team of two method worked for me. Talk to Chris about it and see if he can effective over Webcam or the phone. I know he might not be thrilled to spend his Zoe/Mel time laying the smack down, but remember that Zoe has a Dad now, this is what their function is.
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