Bananas, Books and Bed

 We seem to have dual case of Ethiopian stubborness. Selah has always been a bit stubborn, if anything, it has progressively gotten better. Ms. Bella, however, has just decided that she likes some things on her terms. Since she literally only eats cereal (for breakfast) and whole grain bread (for lunch and dinner), there is not a lot of wiggle room in the food negotiation department. The stunt of the last few days is that she comes to the table and asks for a banana or bread, then refuses to even take one bite of it the minute I give it to her. Now mind you, if I offered her a cookie in place of her request, she would wolf it down. So, after a few rounds of this, I decided that when she asks for something, I would give her a very small amount, but I would then make her eat it. So, yesterday's breakfast banana request was our first rough round. She asked for a banana, I gave her half (next time will only be a fourth). She then refused to eat it. I told her to stay in the chair until she ate it. She sat for over 30 minutes. She got down twice and I plopped her right back up and told her to eat the banana. She then took a bite but held it in her mouth and started crying. 

I carried her over to the time out bench and told her to stop crying. She cried and spit the banana all over her sweater and bench. 

Both she and Selah don't want to get up when they know that they are returning to the same scenario. She refused to come back to the table. After several rounds of that, I laid her in bed. After only a few minutes of laying in bed crying, she agreed to come back to the table and ate the banana. 

We had only one small round of crying about bread yesterday and cereal this morning before she ate them - maybe 10 minutes instead of yesterday's hour. Progress.... 

I made a deal with Alyssa that if she would do the work of selling all the school books that I have piled up in the storage room, half the profit could go towards her mission trip. She brought them all up, made a store on Amazon and listed probably 100 books. Five sold last night. It's a win/ win for me as well - money towards next year's curriculum and clearing off the shelves.

The good news is that even when JD is out of town, I have a little buddy that sleeps with me. It's a king sized bed, but sleeping side ways still takes up more than his fair share.