Progress report

Taylor has been with us for 18 days now and things are going well. She loves school and has made a good friend that she is going skating with this weekend.

A big part of the reason she is here is because she was constantly fighting with her mom and sister. She would throw a tantrum and has a sassy mouth when she didn't get her way. Well the whole family knows how disciplined Brittanie is and how hard we are working to get Katie to be as disciplined as Brittanie (which is going GREAT by the way). So my niece/Taylor's mom, asked me to get Taylor under control. Taylor had been begging since October to come to my house. Well now when she gets bored and wants us to take her somewhere, instead of throwing a tantrum like she used to do, she cries. The first time she cried, I believe she was genuinely homesick. Now I see the pattern and realize that every time since then, she has been using her tears to manipulate us into taking her somewhere. It isn't like she was used to being on the go 24/7 because she wasn't! But she thinks that since we can afford it, we should be on the go all the time. We aren't like that. We like our time at home. I had been letting her call home anytime she wanted. But I have put a stop to that because she was calling home begging her mom and dad to come get her. She will be just as bored, if not more, down there and will go back to fighting with her sister and mom, which I think is what she misses. Well she is here to break that cycle and get a good education. She was tested in Louisiana and they deemed her to have the maturity of an 8-year-old. Well she came here acting like she is 8 and she is going to go back acting her age, which is 12. We will NOT be manipulated by the crying any longer. I have taken the phone away so she can only make calls home on Monday afternoons and she has to sit in front of us while she talks and if she starts to cry, we are taking the phone. She is just rebelling against the discipline and using tears to do it because she knows a tantrum will get her a sp an ki ng. So far, things are going well. It has been 4 days since I took the phone away and she started to cry one time, the first day after I took the phone, and I told her to dry it up because I'm not like her mom. If I say something I mean it and all the begging and crying in the world isn't going to change it. She stopped immediately. We are enforcing the same rule on her as we did on our kids. You can cry but you have to do it in another room with the door closed because I don't want to hear that crap. My girls learned to soothe themselves from an early age and were never cry babies because of that. Taylor is going to go back to Louisiana no longer being a cry baby in May. As I told her Tuesday, she begged to come here, her parents thought it was best for her to be here and they are right. So she is going to live up to the promises she made, which was to stay here and to learn to behave, and take responsibility for her actions. And I put it plainly...."You are NOT going home until May 25th so stop asking or you will be grounded." She hasn't asked since.

Yesterday she was all excited to talk to her new friend, Katy, on the phone and make plans to go skating Saturday. It was great seeing her all excited and that mood stayed until she insisted on waking up Brittanie's new hamster, Gerard. He promptly bit her. It didn't break the skin but she whined about it too long. I told her she has already had a tetanus shot. It came from PetSmart so it doesn't have a disease, because their pets are tested, and even if it did, it didn't even break the skin! She couldn't have caught anything anyway. She didn't cry though. I was very proud of her. Before we got tough on the crying, she would have cried, called home and cried more. She is starting to grow up and I'm proud of her.

She did get mad at me last night because I made her and Katie get out of the kitchen so Brittanie and Randy could have a goodnight kiss. Sometimes Taylor forgets that Randy is Brittanie's boyfriend and not hers. She did not like being ordered out of the room like that. But I didn't let that get to me. She has to learn. Brittanie said Taylor does that immature "EWWWW" thing when Brittanie and Randy kiss. Well who wants that around when you say goodnight? Normally they go outside for their goodnight kiss but it was way too cold last night.

Anyway, it is going to take some work to get her out of acting like a cry baby and start to mature. But it is well worth it. I love her. She is just a normal kid....they want their way and will use any tactic to get it. It's our job to make rules and stick to them. I am glad she is here. I love having her around.