total respect

Toren just recently entered a new phase, the “I don’t like you phase.”  When we would ask or tell him to do something he didn’t want to do, or if he had to do a time out for some reason, he started telling us, “I don’t like you.”

After about the third or fourth time of Toren saying that to me, I decided to have a little talk with him.  I told him that it was actually very mean to say to people that you don’t like them.  Plus, it wasn’t really what he meant.  What he really meant was that he didn’t like what we were doing at that moment.  So, I had him rehearse saying, “I don’t like what you are doing” a couple of times and tried to help him understand that saying that sentence would be a more appropriate response when he is upset.

Almost a week passed before we had an issue when I got frustrated with him.  He was at the table eating.  I’m fine with him playing around a little while he eats, but he was eating pizza and was playing around with it, then dropped it.  Dropping it one time was an accident and I was fine with that.  But he then dropped it three or four more times, making a substantial mess, at which point I got annoyed, told him to sit up straight, lean over the table, and hold on to the pizza with both hands.

With a thick layer of sadness, he looked up at me and said, “I don’t like what you are doing.”

Win for Toren.