Terrible Almost Twos

Well, we've reached the point where Addie needs to be disciplined.  Unfortunately, we've also reached the point where time outs are hysterical, swats on the butt are hysterical, loud yelling is hysterical, the silent treatment is hysterical, and calling boarding schools for early placement as a threat are also hysterical.

I do not say this lightly - it sort of makes me feel like a failure as a mother that my daughter is not afraid of me.


Not that I want her to fear me in a children-are-to-be-seen-and-not-heard sort of a way from the 50s.  Or the 20s.  Or whenever that was the thing.

And also not in the way where I want her to fear me because I might beat her within an inch of her life for losing the remote to the TV (though that is understandable and would probably hold up as self defense in a way in a court of law).  For the record, I'm not into spankings or anything of the sort.  My parents never hit us and I was plenty scared of them a lot of the time. Not that I think people are wrong for using that method of discipline - do what you need to as a parent is my new favorite motto. But it's not for me.  Lots of people think the fact that I let my not even 2 year old chew gum is deplorable.  YOU DO WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO TO GET BY, and if a piece of gum is gonna silence my child for a trip to the grocery store so that I can have a peaceful shopping trip instead of a tornado nightmare trip where she knocks down a stack of oranges and empties all of the whole bean coffee from those plastic dispenser things onto aisle seven within the first three minutes of arrival, guess what? I'm gonna give her the damn gum.  But a lot of moms wouldn't do that.  So there you go.  We're all different.

The way I want her to fear me is enough so that when I suck in air really loudly she's afraid to run into the street instead of what she's doing now which is looking at me with a sneaky twinkling in her eye and then running as fast as she can into the middle of the street.

*sigh*

I'm working on it.

In other news:

Someone is 8 weeks old today!

I didn't want to share this photo because it's crazy gross, she's mid-puke here.  But then I realized it was photography witchcraft because she was smiling when I took the shot, there was no puke anywhere afterwards, so pretty much I took a photo of a vampire puke.  Or Amish puke.  Amish can't be photographed right?  

I walked out the other day to find Rody like this in the seat of shame.

I'm not sure how he got here or what he did to deserve it but it's been two days and no one has moved him.

It must have been really bad.

Helping me water in the nude.  Is there another way?