I Did Fall Off The Face Of The Earth

Wow, how time flies! I had some great posts for the Christmas season, but for some reason they never made it to the blog. Did you think that I had been distracted from the blog world forever? Did I really fall off of the earth? Obviously not. But since you have been so patient, I thought I would give you one of my brightest ideas for teaching patience to my children.

I love it when children begin to finally play with toys, although we always seem to give them toys that they are too young to know what to do. There is always the old standby toy- building blocks. My children might be different from everyone else's. It seems that whenever I try to impress them with a great tower of building blocks, all they want to do is tear it down. So let the training begin...

When one of our children consistently knocked my tower down I introduced the word "wait" with a simple hand gesture of stop in front of the tower. After a few seconds, I then would say, " OK, knock it down." (That was easier for them than the wait) Surprisingly, after a few minutes of practice they figured it out. A few sessions of this and they were pros at the "wait" & "knock it down."

At the dinner table, some time later, our hungry tot began to grunt and yell indicating that the process of getting the food to him was not fast enough. A few minutes of that can really make a meal painful. But I am not too slow, I remembered the wait game and began to implement it immediately. Did it work perfectly?

As hard as it is to wait a moment to knock down a tower, I have learned that food holds more power. You know like the commercial that says, "Behold the power of CHEESE!" It has not been as easy, but slowly there is progress. I can go the long haul as long as there is progress.

How do you teach patience? Share it here in the comments so we can all benefit.

Bryan