3 and A HALF

I have to mention why it's important to say that Nolan is 3 and a half. That half is VERY important. You see, that half has been an overnight shift of sassiness and independence that tries the most patient and understanding person in the world...which I fully admit I am NOT!

Oh where do I start about this week? I must say that I've been pretty proud of our disciplining and how it's working but once we hit that HALF mark our normal tricks up our sleeve are not working...in fact they're failing miserably! Usually if Nolan has a bad day a school, we take away his cars and puzzles and he's right back on track the next day. So when he had a bad day on Tuesday we did that but then he had even a worse day on Wednesday....stealing kids pillows at nap time and waking them up. Thursday was another rough day and three days with no toys is more of a punishment to us than him we decided! We even resorted to spanking although I can count on one hand how many times I've spanked him. I am so desperate to see what will work! So Friday morning we decided to not make such a big deal about thinking that he might be loving all this attention he's getting albeit bad attention.

I called at lunch time to find out that our son (oh this is so embarrassing) pulled down his pants at school and did a little dance for all his friends to see. I promise this is not behavior he learned from us! It sounds funny except when it's your kid and you do the walk of shame down the hall to pick him up. I was really upset about it and called our doctor to see what is causing him to be so defiant. He has a new teacher that started about 3 weeks ago and she seems very nice and very structured which is very good but we think that he's responding to this change. She helped me brainstorm too that we might need to take him off his allergy medicine that I coincidentally gave him the same number of days that he was pulling all these bad days in a row. We immediately stopped that and have had a wonderful weekend. I hope it was the medicine but only time will tell. Our doctor recommended not even talking about school this weekend-that we all need a break from it and we just need to have some family fun time. You know us...we are practically the inventors of forced family fun! But it actually wasn't forced this weekend-it really was fun!

Friday we went with some friends to an outdoor family friendly concert and both boys loved it. They had lots of fun activities for the kids. It was really good to talk with our friends because they all just shared stories of their 3 and a half year olds that make us think that Nolan is a saint! Saturday night we went to Central Market for Burgers and Bock and listened to Justin's coworkers band play and once again it was actually fun! We even got some yummy gelatto and here's proof of how much fun Nolan had.

In the midst of all this frustration with disciplining him. Here is a recap of hysterical things Nolan said:

"Mommy I wanna go buy a hula poop!" (hula hoop)
"I'm sorry for being disRECEPTACLE." (disrespectable)
"My mommy spanks me all the time!" ( to the church nursery worker!) He is such a liar!

We spelled his name on a little craft crown he made at the family music night and he said, "We forgot M SPOT!" He meant that we forgot to spell "Nolan M."