Catching Up II: Birthday Drama

Child number Three turned eight a couple of weeks ago, and that's a big deal in our church. Her actual birthday was marred a bit by a repeated disobedience the night before, to which the natural consequence was losing most of the birthday celebration for her birthday the next day (it was either lose that or her friend birthday party the next day). In case you're wondering, B. has a bad habit of just taking off to go play and not tell me where she is going. We have talked and scolded and warned and tried logic and grounded and spanked once...this is something that scares us, particularly with the recent spate of young girls going missing, only to turn up assaulted and dead days later. Well, this particular Wednesday I was really starting to panic because I had called all of the friends she might be playing with to no success, and it had been thirty minutes of calling around and yelling her name outside. I sent out her two older brothers to go look for her, and fortunately she had just been playing outside at a friend's house up the street, and her mother hadn't been aware the girls were outside together. Phew! But I was angry and scared and, although I calmed down quite a bit by the time she got home, I knew I had to do something that would be painful for her in order to help her remember. The only thing I could think of that would make that kind of an impact would be to cancel any birthday celebrating the day of her actual birthday: no cake, ice cream, presents, or anything. I told her it would be just a regular day.

Well, she reacted as I knew she would -- many tears. In fact, she wouldn't come down for dinner. I didn't force her to join us at dinner because I figured she needed time to think about her choices that day. The hard thing about parenting, though, is that sometimes when we need to follow through on consequences for our children, it hurts us too. I look forward to the kids' birthdays and I try hard to make them special -- nothing over-the-top or anything, just special by cooking their favorite food for meals that day (they get to give me a menu) and having a few wrapped presents to open. We have a cake or whatever other type of birthday treat they want and we sing the usual Happy Birthday song. And I was so sad the whole next day about her not getting to have her birthday.

When she came home from school she asked me if there was anything she could do to earn her birthday back. We talked about why this had happened and about the choices she had made, and then I told her that if she would get her afternoon chores done we could do a little bit. She did try hard, but I ended up having to take a neighbor's two children for the rest of the day because they were having some emergency family things she needed to attend to, and so the rest of the day was just chaotic with people. I had to run into Provo as soon as I was done teaching to pick up Pengbo from my brother-in-law's house (it was Justin's day to go to Idaho), but on the way home we stopped at the grocery store to pick up some ice cream and bakery cupcakes. It was crazy and fun, but by the time I had O. take the neighbor kids over to their house to go to bed, poor B. was overwhelmed by the afternoon. I scolded her for leaving a few things on the stairs that I had asked to pick up as part of her jobs, and she sat down on the stairs and burst into tears. I suddenly realized what kind of a day it had been for her and so she sat on my lap for a bit as I wrapped my arms around her and talked gently with her. She agreed to come watch some Muppet Show episodes with me while I folded some laundry and before the end of three episodes she was sound asleep on the couch.