Good child, bad child

I'm still at home with Naomi today, monitoring her finger and making sure it's healed a little more before we bring her back to daycare tomorrow. I love being at home with Naomi, especially now that she's older and more interactive, I have so much fun spending one on one time with her, it's a treat that's so rare these days with our busy work and weekend schedules. Though now that Naomi's older, she is getting more and more willful. We've had days where Austin and I put her to bed exhausted after nearly a whole day of temper tantrums and whine fests. We've struggled on ways to discipline her mainly because she's just so little and honestly has no way of understanding what she's doing is wrong and is probably just frustrated in most cases.

Today however, as I was digging in the freezer trying to find a pack of frozen dumplings that I was going to cook up for her lunch, Naomi kept walking over to the freezer to try and play with the drawers. I kept pulling her away and trying to distract her (yea our freezer is jam packed and it took me awhile to find the dumplings). Finally, her bandage ended up falling off through all of her struggles, and digging, and despite that she still wanted to dig through the freezer some more with an open wound. I finally ended up picking her up despite her screaming and kicking protests and decided to try giving her a time out. I put her in the corner of our kitchen, which was a struggle in and of itself since by the time she had her arms and legs wrapped around me. After getting her stranglehold off of me, and having her on the floor, she sat there, but wailed and cried loudly. It broke my heart. I found the dumplings immediately after that, and in what was less than 30 seconds, had naomi back up and was carrying her back upstairs so we could re-dress her finger. She was clearly upset but just rested her head on my shoulder, almost in resignation and acceptance of her punishment.

After we finished dressing her finger, which for the first time, she sat absolutely still and held her hand out for me, Naomi was in a great mood. We went back down to the kitchen, and it was like I had a whole different kid. While I cooked her dumplings and broccoli she walked around the kitchen with her Izzy doll, played with lilo and stitch and literally sang and hummed the whole time. While we were eating lunch, she ate everything by herself with her own fork and completely cleaned her plates, drank some of her water, then smiled and signed "Thank You" to me. She was rubbing her eyes by then and we cleaned up and got ready for nap time. After a quick song she was in her crib, and hugging her toys and blew me a flying kiss and waved bye bye, and within 2 minutes was fast asleep. Have to love that little kid, even when she makes me feel guilty about giving her her first time out!! =P