Parenting

Tonight I sit in a pretty quiet living room watching TV and trying to enjoy the peace, but a little boy keeps coming down and bugging me. Rewind 2 hours ago and Mason, Tanner and a friend were outside playing tennis in the driveway. I kept hearing them outside and finally I heard Brad yelling and then Mason runs in crying. Apparently, Tanner got mad at Mason and threw his tennis racket at him, hitting him on the leg and leaving a pretty good bruise. We are really tired of the boys fighting. They don't do this with other kids just each other. It is hard to determine who is at fault. I always seem to miss the beginning of the disagreement. I can totally see why Tanner gets so mad at Mason. Mason is always trying to one up his little brother. He makes sure to always let Tanner know how much older, smarter, or better at what ever activity they are doing. This makes me mad, because I try to explain to Mason he is older than Tanner and should be better at most things than him. That does not mean he should rub it in to his little brother. Tanner has a short fuse and when Mason pushes his buttons Tanner loses his mind and usually just screams at Mason. It occasionally results in violence like tonight. Tanner doesn't like to lose at anything and needs to learn to control his competitive nature and not lose his mind when he thinks he is losing or about to lose. I have banished both boys to their rooms for the rest of the night. I took Tanner's game controllers, but not Masons. I think since Tanner hurt Mason his punishment should be a little bit worse. You would think I was killing Tanner. He has come out of his room at least 10 times. Within 5 minutes he was declaring he was dying of thirst. He says he is getting all stuffy being closed in his room. He is hungry. He is sorry. Can he please just apologize to Mason, etc.... On the other hand I haven't heard from Mason at all.

I don't know how to get them to get along better. Tanner has such a sweet side. While we were at the rodeo carnival Mason kept trying to win a basketball by shooting a ball into the hoop. He wasted many tickets trying to win. Tanner finally tried it and made it on his first shot. Then he told Mason he would try again to win him a ball. Unfortunately he missed. The rest of the night Mason kept trying to steal the ball from Tanner and Tanner kept yelling at Mason to leave his ball alone. That was fun! Then when we got home Mason just had to use Tanner's new ball even though we have at least 3 other basketballs. Tanner would yell to me to make Mason stop using his ball. I hate for Tanner to be selfish, but it is his ball. Where do you draw the line?

Oh well, I don't really know how to handle this, but hopefully being punished for the night will work. On another note here is a cute picture of Tanner's cat. The other picture is of Tanner luring the ducks from the pond with bread into our driveway. It was funny watching all these ducks following him down the street.