A Hard Lesson

Yesterday poor Aspen had to learn a lesson the hard way......

Here's a little background - We had baked two different types of Christmas cookies the day before to give to the girls at our favorite coffee shop (Coffee's On). Aspen loves to help me in the kitchen and had a great time with me. As I made the dough into balls and he made his into snakes. Lots of snakes. And I allowed him to eat all of them after they were done cooking.

Okay, so fast forward one day. We were now going to frost all the cookies so that we could make our delivery. The first kind of cookies were going to get chocolate frosting made from real chocolate bars. As I was chopping the chocolate up to get melted, I told Aspen that he was not to eat any of the chocolate (mean I know, but he had eaten lots of cookies the day before and had told me that he wasn't feeling good that morning). A few minutes later I glanced over at Aspen and he had the guiltiest look on his face. And he was chewing something very, very slowly....... "Did you eat the chocolate?" I asked him. Trying to decide what to say he slowly nodded. "Oh Aspen! Didn't I just tell you not to eat any chocolate?" I asked "Why don't you meet me in the bathroom." The bathroom is where we do spankings and sometimes time-outs, and I needed a few minutes to think of what the punishment should be :)

I kept cooking for about another minute while I tried to think over what to do next. It didn't seem like a spanking issue. But time-out didn't seem to fit either. I quickly asked God what I should do in this situation and went to meet Aspen. He was there waiting for me. "let's talk about this mom" he said (a common stalling technique). I told him that because he could not wait like I asked, he would have a 3 minute time out and that he would not be able to eat any cookies today. His jaw dropped and he exclaimed "No, mom! Can I have a spanking? Can I please have a spanking instead???" That's when I knew that God had guided me to pick the right consequence. It was a hard one for him and there were a lot of tears. All day he would ask me if he could have a cookie, already knowing what the answer would be, but tesing none the less. Something I have realized that we need to work on is self-control. Hopefully that is a lesson that will stick with him. I think it hurt far worse than a spanking ever would :)