The Whining Will Drive Me Mad

Hindsight being what it is, I know that I have brought the Whining Curse upon myself. In my younger, stupider, judgmental, pre-child days, I often looked at parents of whiners in disgust and said to myself, "My children will never be allowed to whine." What I should have said to myself is something along the lines of, "My children, once they have reached an age where they can understand exactly what whining is, will hopefully be handled in such a way as to keep it to a minimum whenever possible." It's all well and good to tell the whining 4-year-old, "I can't understand what you're saying when you talk to me like that. When you can talk in a regular voice come find me," and then walk away (this method does work, by the way. I used it when nannying and also when babysitting and also when teaching Sunday school. It is an amazing trick. Thank you, Mom.) It never occured to me that the whining would start long before the age of understanding! How do you get a 14-month-old to understand that it is not an acceptable means of communication? Especially when her only other means of communication is limited to senseless babbling? Or crying? Or screaming? I don't blame her for being frustrated. It's just that my patience wears thin after a while. Then we're both frustrated.

It's actually a good thing no one else reads this blog. It is full of complaints! But I guess it's better for me to write them down and get them out of my system, rather than complain out loud to people all the time. I've known people who struggle with complaining and after a while it's no fun to be around them. I don't want to fall into that habit. Think positive thoughts, positive thoughts! How about this: I only have one whining child when I could have two or more?

Okay, so on to a positive item: I found a crib on Craigslist today. It doesn't look as nice as the other one I found (the seller of the first crib finally wrote back to me today saying that they sold it) and it's about forty minutes away instead of ten, but the seller accepted my offer of $25. It's dark wood which I don't really like; however, it occurred to me that I might be able to paint it white. Paint isn't that expensive and I know that DH's parents have all the brushes, etc., that I might need. If I am going to paint it I'm tempted to do a color, like purple or green, but if we have more kids (which hopefully we will) they'll probably use it too so I don't want it to be too gender specific. I'll probably end up with plain old white. But white is better than brown, in my opinion. We shall see.