1. I read a bedtime story with a British accent. ("STOP! You don't SOUND like that!")
2. I read a bedtime story in my best imitation of Holly Hunter (which is pretty good, if I do say so myself). ("MOM! You are NOT Elastigirl!")
3. I asked Coco about her day at the same time she started to say something. ("You KNEW I was talking and you still INTRUPTED ME!"
4. I asked her to sing the peace song she said they'd sung at school. ("You don't know the PEACE SONG?!" *sobs*)
5. Zuzu kept talking about how much she's looking forward to Field Day at her school. ("You're making me LEFT OUT!" (*wails*)
* The real reasons she cries are almost always that she's tired or hungry. She's a pretty easy one to figure out that way. (Although I'm still kind of offended that she doesn't like my accents.) But in response to these after-school melt-downs, I've started packing a snack to give her in the car. I heard recently that we can think about the "dinner hour" when feeding our kids--basically, anything they eat in a two hour window can be "dinner." So I've been trying to bring a healthy snack and think about it as her appetizer or first course for dinner rather than a snack that will "ruin" her appetite when I pick her up from school--makes the drive home SO much more pleasant.
I totally started doing the same last year cause my then 8-year-old was a beast when I picked her up from school. We decided she needed a) a car snack and b) a few minutes to tell about crap that happened at school so she could get it off her chest. Worked well.
ReplyDelete