Last week a “memory” came across my newsfeed in Facebook.  It was About that time my kid ate off the floor. Here he was a year ago during that lovely incident.

eating off the floor
My little boy looking pleased with himself (and his lunch on the floor)

Ironically, when I saw this memory, I had another delightful parenting moment. It started off well enough – my four year old son and I decided to quickly make a chocolate chip cookie bar dessert before we would venture to the Y for my yoga class. He’s been helping more in the kitchen, so I thought this would go smoothly for us, and for the most part, it did.

He got out a wire whisk (that he also uses for mixing scrambled eggs), and started mixing the dry ingredients that I measured and poured into the bowl. When it came time for me to use the hand mixer, he didn’t want to share. I explained to him that the batter becomes really difficult to mix with a whisk, and finally, he grew frustrated and bored, and let me finish mixing and spreading the cookie dough into the pan.

As everything was spread out in the pan, my son came back into the kitchen wanting to add jelly beans to THE ENTIRE pan. Not sure how jelly beans would bake and also not wanting to ruin a full pan of a chocolate chip dessert, I asked him to stop sprinkling jelly beans all over the dough. He was NOT pleased to say the least.

What then ensued was a thirty minute tantrum – uncontrollable crying and thrashing about. I gave him his blanket and let him work it out on his own. It was so odd, being that I couldn’t remember his last proper tantrum.

When he finally calmed down, I showed him that we could spread vanilla frosting on top of the cookie bars and THEN put as many jellybeans or sprinkles we wanted on top. This is really delicious – just like a piece of cookie cake! We sampled pieces of the still warm cookie bars, and both of us agreed that it was yummy.

Later I ended up cutting the “jellybean chocolate chip bars” and storing them in a separate container just for the kids. Just last night though, I bit into one of these bars and had a bite of hard jellybean! Yuck…

This tantrum certainly reminded me that my son is only four, and such outbursts can still happen. With two kids, now six and four, I have had MANY tantrums under my belt, and I think I’ve become better equipped to handle them. Instead of forcing them to see reason, I just let them go and have a good fit hopefully out of my hearing distance. The jellybeans were a big deal to him and his master plan for the dessert, and thus worthy of a proper tantrum.

It reminds me of a friend of mine who is a music teacher. She told me that she had a back room in her class, and she let a student who was having a tough time go into that room and have a good scream. After the student returned, he said, “Thank you Miss, I needed that.”

Don’t we all just need a scream, fit, tantrum at times?!