Holy Guacamole

There is a particular activity Mar likes to do wrong on purpose (Learning Breakthrough). I've let it slide for a very long time. Today, I finally said, "Ya' know, everyone else has to do it, so how 'bout you just sit and watch while they all take turns OR you can do it correctly the first time."

Can you hear that? It's the sound of a very large rocket careening for earth.

She took a dive. As things go, she did not act out right away. It showed up in bits and pieces and ended with her slamming the bathroom door in her father's face many hours later after doing her best to sabotage a family bike outing.

When I entered her room later, she was trying to hang things over my loving words spray painted on her walls. :)

I asked her to lie down on the bed, head on the pillow, so I could put one arm around her (she didn't have to look at me or any of that jazz). Well, she did the squirmy game, and we were slowly migrating off the mattress. Her head was sinking deeper, and she was almost to my belly. "Honey, please keep your head on your pillow."

My smartie grabbed the far end of her pillow (just above where my head was stationed) and whipped that thing down in lightening speed ... so that what wasn't under her head was tucked neatly down along her stomach. Have I told you she's a genius?

Of course, it was so obvious and so very talented ... I couldn't NOT laugh. Deep, cackling belly laugh. She tried hard not to respond. She's great at hiding any hint of happiness with a whining voice. Well, the whining and the laughing and the pillow wrestling and the wiggling ... all turned into a giant tickle/wrestling type thing (I'm not sure where the red pom-pom came from, but at one point we were doing cheers in one another's faces to distract and then go in for a foot tickle and such). We were SO LOUD, and the whole family took turns coming to watch Marah's giant rage ... only to find us cackling and flopping each other all over the room.

It was exhausting, but it was just what she needed. She did NOT want to talk about her feelings. She DID want to rejoin the family, but she could NOT bring herself to do it. She needed a segue. I gave it to her.

Tomorrow I will tell her very clearly she WILL do Learning Breakthrough every single day, and I expect her to do it wrong every single day, and she can be sneaky about it or flaunt it, but it needs to be very, very wrong (this reverse psychology does not work on Mar, and she will take great delight in actually following the reverse psychology instructions). In all honesty, anything she does with that program is helpful, and it is absolutely not worth her feeling so stripped of control. She has been doing so many positive things lately. Yet, I pushed. It was just too much.

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