Amelia's Intervention

So for a while, Amelia has been getting increasingly difficult to deal with. (Not 100% of the time, obviously. She's still been a lot of fun a lot of the time, but when she hasn't been fun, she reeeeally hasn't been fun.) When she was contrary, she would throw bigger fits, scream louder, hit more, and do it all longer and more frequently. (I know, a difficult two year old—call Ripley's.)

Anyway, a conflict was building between Amelia and the caretaking trust (me, Naomi, and Jenee)—and Amelia was winning. We decided that we were not being consistent in the way we disciplined Amelia, and this gave Amelia a window (or maybe a garage door) through which to push or exceed boundaries of acceptable behavior. Last week we launched Operation Strict Discipline, which largely consists of the timely and consistent administration of timeouts, and things have been steadily improving. One of the ironic (but not surprising) aspects of this improvement is that, not only is Amelia behaving better, but she is happier as well. As are we all!