A blessed night

I just had a great night tonight with the kids. The irony is that it was Tom's night off so I had two kids by myself. It was the normal chaos/busyness when both were still up but after I put Eli to bed, I had Tobey to myself and we had a fun time.

The evening started shaky as Eli refused baby food and ate only a little macaroni and a piece of bread. His fussiness grates on me and Tom often causing us to mock him, behind his back of course. Eli has a special way of making his mouth crooked when he's crying. It's cute and not cute at the same time. There were no big outbreaks between Tobey and Eli tonight, even when we were sending cars down the slide. And Eli and I had a sweet moment where he was wiping milk off my face when he was pretending to feed me milk while I was actually feeding him.

After Eli was down, Tobey and I played Legos and did the bedtime routine, including getting PJ's on, cleaning up and brushing teeth with minimal dawdling. The thing that is so energy consuming disciplining Tobey sometimes is 1) keeping blood pressure down when dawdling is imminent and 2) thinking of logical, effective consequences without making it sound threatening. Both 1) and 2) were in me tonight and dawdling was nipped in the bud with no raising of voice or tone with me. Or as Tom encouraged me the other night after a good night with Tobey, I was "on fire".

Both Tania and Kerri shared at MTO today how their kids know when they're getting mad, even if they are only starting to get frustrated. I'm sure Tobey's the same way, even if he doesn't say it. Tom and I both sense that his behavior goes downhill when ours does. I'm sure the fact that I didn't even raise my voice or intensity my tone tonight, even while I was trying to think of a consequence to his dawdling, contributed to cooperation and less whining on his part. I also think his cooperativeness was from a really good afternoon nap (2.5 hours for both kids!) and a blessing from God.

The night ended with cooperative tooth brushing (on a tip from Tom, I praised him for how well he did the other night and he brushed his teeth without a single whine tonight!) and a sweet time of reading a Bible story. He even asked questions about the story and was interested, unlike the nights where we try to mini-lecture him about obedience and honor from BiblicalParenting.org hoping that something would seep in. When I prayed for the night, he didn't squirm or fool around once. And miracle of miracles, he hasn't come out of his room (yet) at all, unlike last night where he came out multiple times until 10:45PM.

This could have been one of those days after which Tom and I both think, hey, maybe we can handle a third kid. We had a weekend like that a couple weekends ago soon to be erased by some challenging days afterward. But after tonight, instead of thinking ahead, I was just happy with what I've got.