Thankfulness Day 4: Grumpy Children

If you have kids, know kids, or have seen kids at any point in your life, you know that they fight. They fight with each other, with their parents, people in authority...actually, they'll fight with pretty much anything. Paige has even been known to yell at things that she walks into (she's a klutz, just like her momma!).

My three have been particularly testy lately. They won't obey, think of others, or even say anything nice about anyone or anything.

And it's been driving me nuts.

I've been struggling, trying to find the silver lining to this problem, and I hadn't thought of anything that could be good about them fighting over everything all the time.

Until yesterday, when they all just blew me away!

We'll start with Paigey. She was sitting at the table working on a school project. Ryan climbed up in the chair next to her and tried to help. She kept yelling at him, and moved all her supplies farther and farther out of Ry's reach. He ended up standing up and leaning to get them, but ended up slipping and falling head first onto the floor (he's okay!!!!!). Paige was crying and crying, and we thought she was just mad because he was bothering her, but come to find out it was because her leg and foot hurt. When we asked her why it hurt, she said:

"I tried to catch Ryan with my leg...I couldn't get my arms over fast enough, but my leg was there so I tried using that...and he fell on it."

Later she was eating some Sugar Babies for a special treat from her Halloween bag, and after she ate a few, she handed me the bag to finish. I asked her why, and she then said:

"I know you love them too, Mom, and there's only one bag. I thought I'd share with you!"

Nate has been exhausted lately, which means he's a ball of noisy energy that is completely out of control at all most times. Getting him to sit still has been a challenge, even for meal time. Last night I was sitting on the floor with Ry, and he was running circles around us, but stopped long enough to give me a hug and rub my shoulders :)

Ry is smack dab in the middle of the terrible twos. You never know what he's going to do next. I was working on a very time consuming, labor intensive, detailed Christmas present last night (it's the only way it'll get done in time!), and there are lots of little parts to it. Ryan came over last night, and he looooves to destroy things, so I began to panic. But instead, he asks if he can help, and he helped me choose parts, helped lay them out, and was really encouraging about the whole project.

It was just really encouraging to see yesterday that the kids really are listening to what we say (share, think of others, protect them), and thinking about others. We didn't want to send them to bed last night, but wanted to spend more time with them. However, they missed nap time as we were at Pete's parent's house fixing our car (Pete hit a raccoon last week, so he was just putting his fog light back in), and they needed their sleep.

I'm thankful for grumpy children...because it helps me to appreciate the good moments even more <3


Are you experiencing a frustrating situation that is hard to be thankful for?