Llama Can You Hear Me?

For those of you who love movie musicals and thought this post would be about Yentl, I’m sorry to disappoint. To my knowledge, neither of our girls have become Jewish or decided to disguise themselves as boys to enter religious training. Having said that, if our life was a musical and we periodically broke into song, this is what I would have chosen to sing this morning:

“Llama Can You Hear Me?”

And yes, in my mind, I can sing like Barbra Streisand. Thanks for asking.

Our youngest is going through a rough stage. And by “rough stage” I mean that she’s completely annoying. Actually, she’s only completely annoying at times, but those times seem to be happening more and more frequently over the past few weeks.

This morning is a good example of what I mean. Within an hour, she had acted like she didn’t hear me when I repeatedly asked her to perform a simple task around the house and continued to disobey me as I stood in her face and made VERY clear what I expected her to do during a separate instance. This quickly became a Code Red Llama Drama Alert, and she began screaming like a crazed hyena.

Her hearing has been checked by a medical professional (and she always seems to get the message when I announce that cookies are available), so I’m confident that her problem is not about hearing, but about LISTENING – which is an entirely different, but very important, issue.

My philosophy is that if your children don’t listen to you on the little stuff – like this morning – they’ll never really hear you on the big stuff. And when you do, as a parent, draw that line in the sand, you cannot back down because at that point, you’re making a point on principle. It’s no longer about the simple task you’ve requested; it’s that you made the request and you must be obeyed.

After spending some time in her room and regaining her composure, our little llama was able to come out and join me again – and she’s been a joy the rest of the day.

Good thing, because I was THIS close to cutting my hair and studying the Talmud.