Silent treatment

Connor, though agreeable and of a very sunny disposition, is also a very forceful, even stubborn little creature, though in different ways from Jamie. Disciplining him has proved interesting. As he turned two, he clearly had the idea that if he didn't like what we were saying he could just not listen. Inevitably, this led to conflict. Sarah instituted the "naughty step", to which we would send him for not listening. At first, this OUTRAGED him. He would just scream at the first mention of this sentence being imposed and the whole time he was relegated there. But soon, for whatever reason, he came to like the naughty step. It may have started when he started trying to send Jamie there. Jamie was not amused, you can imagine. But now he will gleefully disobey us and march off saying "I go Naughy step!" We're working on some alternate methods.

What's funny, though, is that Connor's method of having a temper tantrum is in essence to go silent and pretend that the rest of us don't exist. He drops his head a makes a kind of poopy-face and stares off into the distance. It's a real miscalculation on his part because a) it's fairly cute and we enjoy seeing the face and b)after Jamie's drag-out screaming tantrums, it's really quite easy to wait Connor out. Sometimes we actually forget he's staging a protest at all and go about our business. Eventually, he will come out of it at the offer of putting cars down a ramp.