Well hello there...

...trying twos!

Some refer to this as the "terrible twos." I HATE this term! Do some days, hours or even minutes feel terrible? You bet. But I loath the idea of referring to any part of my son's life as "terrible," I like "trying" much better. :)

Brody is such a great kid with such an awesome personality. And in the last couple weeks this little boy is definitely starting to explore exactly what this personality is going to be. He gets the craziest ideas in his head and he HAS to see them through. Like, right. this. second. Even if said plan is jumping off the back of the couch, throwing our snacks around the living room, our playing "earthquake" with our sweet 5 month old friend while he is in the jumper. (It didn't get far Mika, promise!)

If I happen to have the audacity to stop one of these wild schemes, whoa man. It is world ending. We're talking throw ourselves on the floor, wailing, flop like a fish kind of world ending. Another world ending event we've been experiencing is bed time (and nap time). He is so full of energy and life the idea of having to slow down for any amount of time seems insurmountable and torturous.

Hello discipline, we finally meet. Lance and I have been having many discussions as to how we want to handle discipline in our house and what behaviors we find unacceptable. Now I know there are 10,764 ways to discipline a child, these are just the ideas that we have decided to implement in our home and reserve the right to declare them utter failures and abort at any time. :) I'm just going to say upfront we are ok with spanking. We are definitely not ok with excessive spanking, violent and anger driven spanking or spanking for everything. We have decided we will have a list of things we feel are completely unacceptable all the time and those get an automatic spanking. The driving factor with this list is hurting someone, hitting, kicking, biting, throwing things AT someone all make the list.

The other forms of discipline we are sticking with are positive reinforcement, distraction and time out. Positive reinforcement and distraction are ideas we've been using all along. I feel no child wants to misbehave and can usually be redirected to acceptable behavior. And everyone wants to be praised and do a good job. Praise good behavior, that's what the child will strive for. But, Brody is a kid and is trying to figure this thing called life out, and will do things that require teaching and punishment. Enter time out. Our decided time out length is based upon age. So right now, his time out length is 1min 45 seconds. Yesterday was the first day we really started implementing time out. He sat in time out 3 times, twice for dumping his food out on the floor and once fore the earthquake baby incident. And you know what? They worked great for us! He cried through the whole thing of course, but after the second food incident he didn't dump his food anymore and after one time out for playing rough with the baby, he didn't attempt that either.

Now, I know we will have set backs, we will have great days and we will have days that  tempt me to call this phase "terrible." But along with this stage is so much fun. Brody is becoming so loving and affectionate (hello melt into a mushy momma puddle every time I hear that sweet voice say "ah you" {translation=love you}), his sense of humor is starting to develop and finds things hilarious, the amazing way is knowledge grows everyday. And oh so much fun playing! I love this age with all the ups and downs and can't wait to see where this little boy takes us next. :)