Bad Teddy

We put our Christmas tree up last week, since then that cheeky little monkey Jack has been trying to remove all of the ornaments. He will go up to the tree with a gigantic smile on his face, shake his little pointer finger at it and say "no, no, no", look at me with that sneaky smile, and then proceed to grab at anything within reach. Obviously he knows that he is not supposed to touch it, so in an attempt to get him to leave the poor tree alone, I started putting him in "time out" whenever he takes off/breaks an ornament.

Time out has had no affect on him whatsoever. If anything it's had a reverse affect and has unleashed his inner monster. He has since become fond of the temper tantrum, complete with ground dropping, head banging, kicking, screaming (my personal favorite) and tears... It's like he's decided to get back at me for having the nerve to give him a time out.

Because of his reaction to the time out, I thought I would take a different approach to get him to stop harassing the tree and did a little role playing thing with his favorite Teddy Bear- where I made Teddy touch the tree and Mommy got very sad and told Teddy no, that it wasn't very nice, blah, blah, blah. Oddly enough that seems to have gotten the message across to Jack because he hasn't bothered with the tree much since then.

The funny thing was that Annabelle, who was watching this whole thing, started to imitate me by making Teddy touch the tree, but rather than having a friendly little chat with Teddy like I did, she immediately whisked him off to have a "time out" on the step. Like little sponges, they are...




At least she was kind enough to sit with him during his "time out".