Sassy Pants

Now that Grace has gotten older, she doesn’t like the Nick, Jr shows anymore. There isn’t a lot out there for her age group. Disney Channel seems like it would be good, but if I was watching them with her and they are terrible!

There is one that I like – Good Luck Charlie. The parents are involved, the family is close, the kids don’t get away with everything, etc. Much of the rest of the shows are just dumb. The jokes are dumb, some of the characters are dumb, etc. And many of the younger characters are disrespectful and it’s laughed at and tolerated instead of corrected.

And then Grace started being sassy. Part of it is her age, I know. Part of it is what she sees on TV.

So for about a year, I curtailed her Disney channel watching. And she was really a stickler for it. She didn’t watch it at Maw maw’s house when I wasn’t around because I didn’t want her to. So after many conversations, I relented and we started watching some of them again, but I was watching them with her so I could point out the sassy stuff, and again – just dumb. She likes to sneak off to our room and watch by herself, but we are good about tracking her down.

We’ve made Sunday our family day and last Sunday she was terrible. She lost “personal TV privileges” for the rest of the week. Again, she tries to sneak off to watch it by herself. We’ve also been dealing with a lot of screaming and fit-pitching, so I got a spoon. And every time she starts screaming and pitching a fit for no reason, she get smacked with it. It’s worked before and it’ll take about 2 weeks of being consistent with shutting down the fits and reinforcing our expectations of her behavior.

Some days are good, some days are bad. She is testing boundaries. I’m having to reinforce to her that there are some things that our family does and does not do. She can be so sweet sometimes, though. Some days she’s helpful and full of win and awesome. Fridays have become our “date” night and this Friday we went to see “Little Mermaid, Jr” at my school. It was amazing. It was a musical and they used wheelies to get around the stage. We were really impressed.