December 9, 2006 - Saturday
Last weekend after the boys watched a movie Harry got a little sassy. That happens a fair amount and it's not at all surprising. It's the TV fog that we all get to some degree or another and the sometimes difficult re-engagement of ones brain that often has to follow. I took him aside last weekend to point it out to him and suggested that he'd better be careful if he wanted to keep watching movies. Of course, that was a week ago and that's more than forgettable to a 6-year-old. This afternoon right after he and Jeremy finished watching Star Wars VI (we'd actually laid off the Star Wars movies for quite a while), Harry started giving his mother the lip again. But I was right there and pulled him aside right away.
"Harry, you were nasty last weekend after you watched a movie and maybe it's just too much trouble for you to watch movies without getting nasty. I think you better be very careful this week if you ever want to watch a movie again."

That didn't come out quite like I'd hoped. For all of the boys' lives I've been very leery of issuing any kind of if/then threat that I wasn't ready to back up and clearly 'never watching movies again' would just not be practical. But, I'll say this: having taken that approach so consciously all there lives and having backed most everything else up, the boys know that such threats are rarely idle and Harry wasn't ready to try me. His demeanor changed pretty quickly.


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