Parenting Tender Mercies

Tender Mercy #1 Tonight as I was singing the good night song to the girls, Lily requested "the new one". It took me a minute to figure out that she wanted the new primary song for next year, I sang it once last week after hearing it during the woman's conference. As I was singing it, Lily got a big smile on her face and at the end of the song she told me, "Mom, I feel so happy inside! I feel love!" It was a wonderful opportunity to explain to her that she was feeling the Holy Ghost testify to her of her Heavenly Father and Savior's love for her.


Tender Mercy #2 We've been doing children's yoga this week in an effort to help calm Lily's anxiety. She can get worked up and stressed pretty easily. I found some great videos on you tube that both Lily and Lucy love. Yesterday while she was doing a puzzle she got extremely upset that I wouldn't jump in and do a difficult part for her. She started yelling, crying and ran off to her room. Once she calmed down and we hugged, we did some yoga. Right after yoga she returned to her puzzle and finished it without any difficulty. Afterwords she said, "I wish I didn't cry and run off to my run like that.". We talked about some strategies she could do to calm down when she feels frustrated like that again. I asked what she would do if she got frustrated at school and she said, "Turn on a yoga video!". LOL, I don't think that will be possible, but maybe she can do the deep breathing techniques.

Tender mercy #3: Lily has been looking forward to being in her ballet studio's annual Nutcracker production since the beginning of the summer. However, she recently learned that her class will have the roll of the mice. She was so no okay with that! Her solution? To wait until next year to be in the ballet! She would rather wait a whole year to be in the production than have to be a mouse! Well 2 weeks ago while we were at the library she picked out a audio book. I thought it was too advanced for her to listen to, but I let her check it out anyways. It has been sitting in our car since and we were instead listening to a collection of fairy tales that I had picked out. However, the fairytales CD was left in Mushu (our Odyssey) when he went to the car repair shop (someone accidentally ran into the side of our van). Yesterday while we were running errands I needed to nurse Lexi, so we stayed in the car, parked in the parking lot to do so. The girls were not happy about that prospect, so I threw in the only audiobook we had, which was the one Lily had picked out, Nancy Drew and Clue Crew. Get this, the story was about a girl being upset about having to be a mouse in the Cinderella ballet production! Nancy Drew had to be a mouse and she had a good attitude about it, but another girl was not handling it very well. We related it back to Lily and she saw how she was acting and changed her mind about not wanting to be in the nutcracker this year. I really think that was the only thing that would have changed her mind. We had even read Fancy Nancy and the mermaid ballet to help her and that hadn't! It is true that Heavenly Father is in the details of our lives.

Hopefully next I'll be writing about some tender mercies in the potty training department with Lucy. That girl is so smart, and can pick up on anything so quickly, when she wants to. The thing is, she just doesn't want to very often. I think that sometimes I also have to just remind myself that she's a 3 year old.