Saturday, November 7, 2009

Bagel Diversion

I’m currently reading the book World Wide Wave by David Meerman Scott. The book title caught my attention because I have always been fascinated with how it only takes one person to affect several if not thousands. The wave is spread by a trigger, which is different depending on your audience. My audience is my children which I’m always trying to look for their trigger.

At home I'm the negotiator, trying to bring peace to the family tribe. This is a thankless job. I have devised ways to combat the daily challenges that arise and hope I'm fast and ingenious enough to settle the one off situations. Which reminds me of an instance this past week with my border-line ADHD (at least that is what we are hoping) seven year old. He comes into the kitchen asking for the bagel he spied the night before. I think his stomach has a brain. The bagel had been already eaten by one of his older brothers so I could just feel the waves of the impending explosion. So my mind was working double time to come up with a clever response to him. When he was rummaging around the frig trying to find the bagel I quickly asked him;
“So, what would you think you would like for breakfast if there were no bagels?” In which he blurted out, “there are no more bagels?”, which I confirmed.
I could see his mind working double time and he replied;
“I can make a bagel……get me two pieces of bread.”
I didn’t set that coming, but surprisingly if you give your kids a choice to solve things they do so in the most interesting ways. Of course that’s our Timmy.
I’m not always that quick in thinking of clever ways to side track an episode, but I’m getting better with practice. Okay, so this is my fourth child and I should be an expert. But my reply would be “They are all different and have different triggers to handling their different ways.
Kids ask adult questions all the time because they are curious. By turning the table and asking them how they might handle a situation, then they own the problem not you.

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