A special day

As a parent you learn that each child has their own personality, beautiful and strong, and complete with their own challenges at times. Our second child, Jackson, is my most sensitive child overall. He's full of beautiful emotions, though at times they tend of become intense and bubble over. I don't know everything, that's for sure. But I'm pretty confident in the parenting interventions we offer overall. Drawing from my professional experience as a social worker, Josh and I try hard to focus upon the strengths of our children, offering positive reinforcement whenever possible. Even developing the individualized plan now and then to support Jackson through phases that can be overwhelming for him. A month ago poor Jackson seemed to hit a rougher patch behaviorally - and honestly, it was hard for the rest of us as well. Generally, I think most parenting challenges are met nicely with more love and support directed towards the child. (Of course that's if limits are already pretty sound overall) So something I had pinned on Pinterest a while ago came to mind when I was struggling as a parent last moth.

The general idea is to make a special day to celebrate your child, apart from their birthday. Their birthday is to celebrate growing a year older, but the special day is to celebrate all of the things that make that child special. Seemed to fit the bill as I was looking for a way to shower Jackson with positive attention and help him get out of that funk. (Being one child of four can make harder to give special, individual attention to each child - so it's all the more important I think that we try) We talked about what day he wanted for his special day...a weekend or a weekday. What did he want to do on his day? What did he want to eat? And so on.

Jackson chose to make a Monday afternoon and evening his special day. Off the family went to bowling and dinner at Chili's - his picks! He's a sucker for those arcade games too, so $10 split between the kids there made him feel like a King :)

While bowling Jackson got to go first, he chose the music in the car (Bon Jovi - his favorite) to have a dance party to, and chose to eat out at Chili's. During dinner we all told Jackson why we are so happy he is part of our family. Said our favorite things about him and retold our favorite Jackson stories. It was so much fun. To hear him giggle as we recounted all of his wild little boy adventures, I think he spent that entire afternoon and night grinning. It was perfect. The waitress even thought it was Jackson's birthday as he was the star of the day for us.

The experience was great for me, seeing my child purely happy when he had been struggling lately was pretty awesome. Whether the special day helped his behavior or not, it was worthwhile. He had another day to hear how thankful we are for him. And his meltdowns did quiet down significantly after that! Ryan and Caroline are planning their special days too. Ryan wants to go swimming as a family at the Y and Caroline is eyeing some indoor bouncy house place I think.

It's hard being a parent. You get no argument from me there. But what an honor and responsibility we have to get it right. Not perfect, but overall to get it right. We are raising people. When I take a step back and remember that fact, it makes me want to stop raising my voice and do a bit better next time.