She can't be old enough

My daughter is growing up before my eyes. But with a little help from Mommy and Daddy.  You see, she's our baby girl.  So much so that we still call her baby girl.  But we both feel that we have been kind of holding her back.  She has desperately been trying to grow up and do things on her own but I would just do them for her so everything would be fine and great.  But, the mornings and nights while getting dressed were starting to become unbearable.  What the heck?  I'm not a loosy goosy mom but this girl has got some skills.  So we needed a plan of attack.  Out of desperation and lots of prayer, I quickly googled my favorite parenting guru John Richmond.  I don't read many parenting magazines or blogs because they tend to really stress me out (I prefer looking at pretty pictures instead).  But Mr. Rosemond was there for me in the throws of post-partum and I could never thank him enough.  The very first question on his website was from a mom who had a little girl that was giving her a hard time about getting dressed in the morning.  His answer:  Set a timer for 10 minutes, if she doesn't get dressed by herself in that time, she goes to bed early.  Do this for a week and let me know how it goes.

Well of course!  Why didn't I think of that?! It was an answer to prayer for me.  

So we did it for a week except we changed that she couldn't ride her scooter to school in the morning.  And if she gives me trouble in the morning she can't have TV time in the afternoon.   And we only had one little setback.  It was Daddy's idea to give her a treat at the end of the week and his surprise to her (and me) was getting her ears pierced.  

And here she is:

(look at those shiny earrings just like mom!)

  Pray your heart out if there are parenting things you are having trouble with.  Even if you think they are too small for God;  they aren't!  If it's big to you, it's big to Him.  

Just a note:  This was after we tried the sticker chart thingy.  It worked fine but when the chart was full she just fell back into her ways.  I'm usually for positive reinforcement but for this case something just had to be done.