Nana Holds From Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power

Happy New Years’ Eve day! Thanks for taking the time to join me today for a little break. Grab your coffee and come on in for more of those significant moments in this journey with a very special little boy!

So life was settling into some sort of “normal” routine and the realizations that come with this huge responsibility were also taking root in our lives. We were learning the importance of follow-through with this little guy, which you cannot really put an amount on, because it depends on the situation. We weren’t trying to exasperate this little guy, though at times he did exasperate us! The truth is we both have learned from our original parenting experiences and both of us know too much now to parent blindly and not follow through with directions and/or some sort of discipline and/or consequence for bad behavior.

Time out became our weapon of choice and as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, time out happened less and less. Don’t get me wrong; we weren’t any kind of drill sergeants, and I can hear you saying, “poor little guy has had it so rough.” You are right; he has but we know that we know that we know that to discipline him was/is to love him. The key was doing it without anger! To let him run amuck was not going to be doing him any favors in his

future, nor anyone else for that matter. Besides, we get to see the result of his mom and her parents not parenting him every time he comes home from a visit with them. And I don’t say that to be disrespectful; that’s what they know, or I should say all they know, but George and I have received more tools and we are accountable for what we have learned.

Every time he came home from a visit with them, we noticed a couple of things right away: He was very, very aggressive and often mean and his listening skills had diminished somewhat. All of that would require an attitude adjustment. At first it took a couple of days for the adjustment, and that was with me, George and Suzanne doing the adjusting. (We’ve actually got that adjusting period down to about thirty minutes!) My new prayer became: “Give me the mind of a two-and-a-half-year-old.” And it worked! God heard my cry and that’s exactly what began to happen. We were able to parent/discipline him with patience wrapped up with love.

Yes, while Bryce is working at his new job, God is working in this house through this little boy, separating what is bad from what is good and leaving us more complete, more Christ-like!
Have a safe and memorable New Years’ Eve and be sure and come back tomorrow for my New Years’ wish for you! We’ll pick up with Nana Holds next week because we have our first W0W (Weapons of Warfare and Words of Wisdom) of 2013 on Wednesday!

Blessings to you,

Evinda