Self Control Revisited

Well, we've been working on Self Control for about a week now, and I thought I'd give you a little update on how it went. First, I have to say thank you to those who mentioned that they would be praying for us. It was so appreciated! :o) Thanks also to the creative ideas from Naomi and Marcy (daughter and mother) who commented about what your family did to encourage the Fruits of the Spirit!

As a reminder about Self Control, I posted the words in our kitchen (ha ha, obviously that was a reminder for me, as our kids can't read! That's ok though, I needed the reminder.) Seth and Haddie wanted to write their own reminders when I was writing mine, so I asked them to write about Self Control on their papers. Here is Seth's. According to him, the blue and green marks he made said, "God, I love you." Yeah, I thought that was pretty precious.

Here is Haddie's paper.

My friends whom I mentioned before, wrote about how they had Fruit of the Spirit trees. When a child in this family displayed a Fruit of the Spirit, a sticker representing that fruit was placed on his or her tree. A treat or reward was given when the tree grew enough fruit!

Eventually I hope to make higher quality trees that can be re-used, but here's the tree I made for Seth (Haddie got the same one) for the time being.

To be honest, working on Self Control was good, but tough. The second day was particularly hard. Lots of pushing buttons went on between Seth and Haddie. At one point during the morning I felt so overwhelmed by cranky, crying kids that I had knew I needed to do something quickly or else I'd be joining them! We laid a couple blankets on the floor and all three of us had "calm down time" while we listened to some music. I was pleasantly surprised how long that lasted (about 15 minutes - the picture was taken at the end when they were getting up), and how well it worked. After our calm down time everyone was more able to use Self Control. :o)

Yay, getting along and using Self Control! This was only a couple minutes after we got up from the blankets. Seth was quite the gentleman and even helped his sister up into the chair so they could play together!

Thanks again to those who prayed for us as we worked on Self Control! We are seeing small steps of improvement, and we will continue to work on this. This week we are adding Patience!

Oh, by the way, I'm doing better with the chocolate over-indulgence! ;o)

We hope you are all well. Thanks for stopping by!