The past few weeks have been kind of rough. Hadley has formed a new attitude, and it is not good. Sass is her new middle name. Zoey Belle has been feeding off Hadley’s irritability, and that hasn’t been good for anyone either. Both of them have been very well acquainted with the time out chair.

In order to preserve my sanity, I have been trying to come up with options for doing some things differently around here. First, I wanted to have a bit of quiet time/solitude in the afternoons so I can regroup and get my bearings a bit. I decided that while Zoey is taking her nap, Hadley would have just 20 minutes of relaxation/quiet time where she would sit on the couch and just be quiet. I figured if she is tired enough to fall asleep 20 minutes would be enough time, and if not, it would be enough quiet for me to focus on gaining back the patience that I would have lost earlier in the day. We are on day 4 of this new time, and today, Hadley has fallen asleep. The last words she said to me were, “mommy, I want to watch my shows…and I did NOT get up too early this morning.” I told her no to watching TV during her quiet time and she pouted. Her pouting lead her right into sleeping with her mouth hanging open. It feels so good.

I am also going to work on implementing a way of having her pick up her own room. (Mostly.) I recognize that she is nearly four and cleaning her entire room by herself can be a bit of an undertaking, but I am just tired of doing it all by myself. I am kicking around some different ideas on how to tackle this one, but soon, it will be something she does with me.