Derailing

   Tator loves routine. She is usually in bed at the same time everynight, because we haven't had a lot going on in the evenings, so we haven't had to go anywhere. Her routine has stayed pretty much the same for weeks.

   Thursday night Bunny had softball practice which caused us to be out an hour past Tators bedtime. I was sick driving home knowing that when we got there Tator was going to find something to throw a fit about. I could tell by her body language in the car it wasn't going to be pretty.

   After I parked the car and started to unload the little ones I looked right at her and said "I'm ready for whatever you want to dish out. I realize its way past your bedtime and your totally out of routine. We're going to walk straight in the house, go to the bathroom, brush out teeth and go straight up to bed. Anything you want to throw a fit about on the way there is fine. I'm ready for it."

   She said "she wasn't going to throw a fit about anything." She did coroperate until we got to her bedroom. She started to go on about how bad her room smelled (looking for a fight) and how she didn't understand why she had to have that room and couldn't share with someone else.

   So I did what I call derailing. Now if your reading this and you aren't parenting a child from hard places this will make absolutely no sense at all to you and you will think I'm a total nut, if you don't think that already. But if you are parenting a child from hard places you'll totally get it.

    So I leaned over, gave her a big hug and kiss and said "Good morning, I'll see you on Monday" turned around and walked out of the room.

   There you have it. That is what I call derailing. I stopped her from going into a total fit over how her room smelled. Instead I left giving her something to think about. She was like "what" and started to laugh. Seeings how it was Thursday night and I would see her in the morning (Friday).

   Which by the way her room does have a mysterious smell and I can't figure out what it is.