Obstacle Chronicles 7/9

Dynisha spent the night with us last night. He woke up in the early morning hours calling for her, but then went back to sleep on his own.

The first part of the day went smooth as silk. The Dynisha and Jamie played with minimal arguing. M arrived a little before noon.

The first real meltdown happened after 1pm. M was playing with Jamie's shape sorter box and Jamie tried to take it away from her. Dynisha intervened and made him give it back. He cried, "It's my shapes! It's MY shapes." He stomped his feet. He put his hands on his face. He went for the sorter again and M smacked his hand. He ran down the hallway crying, "Kalah hurt me!" He didn't want comfort. A few minutes late he calmed down and the shape sorter was forgotten by all.



A few minutes later M got the board to a game that has numbers on it. Jamie again tried to take it from her, "It's my numbers!!" This skirmish was very short lived because M wasn't really interested in the board. Moments later a new skirmish... This time Jamie got M's doll stroller and she tried to take it from him.



Everything was dumped out in the playroom. The disaster was unbelievable. I told the kids they better get the room cleaned up. When M put a pony into the changing table she and Jamie argued because they both wanted to shut the door. Nobody wanted to pick up. Jamie kept running and getting into my bed. I made him go back and help. Every few minutes there was some arguing. Usually because Jamie was trying to take toys away from M or Dynisha because he wanted to put them away himself. Despite this he kept yelling at M to "pick up". He pitched a fit when Dynisha put his yellow car in the car basket. He had a mini meltdown and kicked the floor a minute. He yelled at her a few times, "That's my yellow car!" Several times he told the girls, "Don't touch me!" When I investigated, they had touched his hand or something.

Jamie got irritated at M for making clicking noises with her tongue. He kept telling her, "Don't say that." I had to ask him what he was talking about because I didn't hear anything but silence. Of course, since he told her not to she had to double her efforts to make the noise, which aggravated him a lot. I told her to stop to restore peace.

Hours later the room is a worse mess than what it started. Dynisha says there's too many toys and we should just throw them away. I say, fine and get her a garbage bag. She starts filling the bag quickly. I tell her, "Throw Mr. Bear in there, too. He's laying in the floor." Mr. Bear is her lovey. She begins to cry. I said, "See, it was really easy to throw their toys away, but when you have to throw away just one of yours it's not so easy." I told her that cleaning up the room is just as fast as throwing toys away. You pick it up and put in in the bin or on the dresser instead of in the bag. There's no difficulty difference.

I might have gotten through to her, but Jamie was another story. My little lesson backfired and had an unexpected result. I went outside for a minute and came back in to M screaming. Jamie was throwing everything in the trash. I told him to stop and he just kept on doing it. I told him, "No" and it wasn't sinking in. I walked out to think for a minute and decided to best plan of action was to make them take a break and come talk to me. I tried to explain to Jamie about cleaning up. Then I went into the room and began directing them what to do. If I left for even a second things melted down again. With three very agitated kids, it was not going smoothly at all.

At the end of the day, the room is not clean. I gave up.

Other than that we just had our normal bathroom arguments. I don't know why he doesn't want to go. He has very good control. He'll hold it forever and a day.