My Beautiful Boy

Happy New Year and I hope that all my blog readers have a fantastic 2010.

As I woke this morning to the start of a new year I woke to the familiar sound of my children fighting.  Who needs an alarm when you have children!

So the first day of our new year is no different than any other day, the day was still full off teasing, fighting and swearing.  Thankfully, we had a good night last night bringing in the new year and so I at least was in a good mood and could tolerate it to a reasonable extent.

Now, if you’ve read my blog you will know that Corey is my middle child and he is our problem child.  Corey will become angry at the drop of a hat and lose his temper and swear over absolutely everything, even something as simple as asking him to brush his teeth.

So if asking him to brush his teeth results in a heated argument, imagine what kind of response I get when I ask him to do something like help with the dishes.

Well today I actually got Corey to help with the dishes without having to fight with him.

How did I do it?

I don’t even know what made me think of it at the time, but here is how I did it.

I asked Corey and the other 2 boys to come and help with the dishes.  Corey did the usual and said ‘No, I’m not doing dishes, why should I’.

Why should I?????

So instead of getting angry with him or yelling or even just arguing with him, I just said ‘ok fine’.

Then I calmly walked into the laundry and I started pulling his dirty clothes out of the dirty clothes basket and throwing them back into his room.  He walked in as I was doing this and said ‘What The!’

Once again, I remained calm and simply told him ‘I’m not washing your dirty clothes – Why Should I?’

Corey picked up his clothes and put them back in the dirty clothes basket and said ‘fine I’ll do the dishes’.

No yelling, no arguing, he came and helped with the dishes.

So I was quite happy with having discovered a method that actually worked and got the result I wanted without the arguments and the swearing that we usually get.

I need to keep my mind open to look for other similar situations that I can use to get the desired result with such little confrontation.

Fingers crossed that we can reduce his anger and swearing and make him a happy little boy again.