Ah, THERE's the rabbit hole!

My perfect recipe for a rabbit hole day: slightly sick child (she has the chicken pox, it hardly shows except she is very difficult to talk to and is more stubborn, like transitions are even harder than they normally are....but not sick enough that it stirs all my motherly sympathy, you know?) + sleep-deprived mother + no one else around (husband away at family event, no visitors due to chicken pox). I still try teasing her to get cooperation, but I find that when she's, what's it called, noodling, BAM! I become a bitchy dictator.

More later, Kiki is on...and I'm crying about it! What a strange day....

[Later] Okay, funny, but perhaps it was the posting, but I've been looking back at the day and there are two big revelations:

(1) I really recognize the difference between an encouraging household and one that's not now. Because I had SEVERAL episodes today where I was essentially saying "Look what you did! What a disaster, I can't believe you screwed up/are screwing up like this!" I mean, I might say some of that stuff normally, like "The room is a real mess now," but today I was really being judgmental. And it did NOT feel good, and I did NOT like the message I was sending. On the positive side, I had had ambiguity about whether I was creating an encouraging household, and now I'm much more confident that I usually am!

(2) Fiora did some really great things today, despite having the pox and having a cranky mama. We went into the front garden to pick strawberries in the afternoon, and I got pissed off that she STILL hadn't figured out that non-red strawberries are sour and that she wasn't listening to my well-earned wisdom that if you pick non-red strawberries you'll end up with fewer ripe sweet ones tomorrow. Despite me blowing my top (back to my button about feeling like someone's not listening to me), I kindof turned things around by deciding to do something I actually WANTED to do instead of watching her pick strawberries that I really wanted to become juicy red strawberries (which wask useless behavior on my part), so I started cleaning all the debris off the garden steps, and then discovered I could use it as mulch in a weedy part of the garden. Cool! I even invited Fiora to help me, and she did (once), and after that she played on her own up at the top path in our front garden...which is actually a big achievement, since previously she often took the steps down the driveway which resulted in both of us going inside (being in the front garden was contingent on not going into the driveway without an adult).

Soon after, she invited ME into the driveway (there are a few strawberries there), which was nicely done. And there, instead of trying to go for a walk in the neighborhood (which I often don't want to do), she wandered onto the lawn on the other side of the driveway (never has she made such a choice before). I really appreciated that, we kindof wandered there and I started weeding (looking back, I'm proud of having the flexibility to do gardening work wherever she was instead of getting stuck somewhere on some particular task!). Then she wanted to get in the Fit (car), which she loves wandering in, so I let her get in. She took off her diaper there, and I said that was okay (it was wet), but I left one door open and asked her to let me know if she needed to go potty. A few minutes later, I look up from weeding and she's standing next to that door and not moving - turns out, she's pooping on the driveway! At the time, I was kindof angry because I had to clean up all this messy poop on the driveway, and she hadn't let me know it was happening...but in retrospect, she had listened to me request her using that door if she needed to potty, and had done what she had to do. (It was a messy poop, and I suspect some urgency!)

So, anyway, lots of good stuff going on, too, and most of that I can link back to good habits I've been working on this year via PoT. I'm really proud of not tuning out, even though I really wanted to several times, and I think Fiora rewarded me for that.