This morning I had had it. The children weren't being kind, gentle, gracious or even friendly to one another. My daughter was wanting to hit her brother over the head with a small, wooden toy. My son wanted to make monster sounds at her, bear his, "claws" and push her down.
Normally I would step in. This morning I decided I was mad enough (at something entirely unrelated to the children) and I let them fight it out. I wanted to see what would happen.
I told them I was not going to help them and if they didn't like what the other one was saying or doing, then they could go somewhere else. And then I watched and waited. Interestingly enough, the physical fighting part was over fairly quickly. They were annoyed at each other for a very short while and then they were the best of friends, happily running off together on some adventure that got them locked outside without jackets on in forty-degree weather.
In short, they worked it out. It's important that we help our children learn that physical violence isn't the best way to work out differences. They're young and they are learning to express themselves in words and in order to do that, they need to understand how they feel. It's a lot for three-year-olds (wow, still strange thinking I have two children of the same age right now.)
But sometimes, children need to be physical. They're not monks in meditation all day and it's not fair for us to expect them to behave as such. I didn't see either of them doing anything dangerous or harmful; they were just mad and wanted to express how mad they were (at what, I really don't know.)
I'm going to see how they work things out on their own more in the future.
The Big Boy Update: My son is learning things at school. He successfully zipped his own jacket two times today, including lining up the initial tab to start the zip. He also wanted to talk to me all about the second hand, minute hand and hour hand on the clock today. He was quite interested in counting out the seconds, even if he wasn't sure what he was counting towards.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter likes to color. Okay, scribble. More like make a mess on a piece of paper. But things are starting to take form of late. She does more curvy lines and tries to make something specific, telling us exactly what she's drawn. Today, she colored in a shape on one of the dry erase boards. She worked very hard to stay within the lines. We had talked about this a while back, but she didn't have the fine motor skills (or perhaps inclination) to do it. She was quite pleased with herself today when she colored in the penguin's body. Then she immediately got the eraser and wiped it clean so she could do it again.
Fitness Update: Five miles. This is an interesting five miles though. It's not running. It's not even outside. Today we spent time in the house, went to a two-hour birthday party and then came home. It's bedtime now and we're still in the house. My iPhone tracks steps and apparently I've done almost twelve-thousand steps today, racking up over five miles of distance walked...mostly in the house. I knew I moved around a lot in the house, but I had no idea.
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