Sometimes awesome, Sometimes really hard

After 8 PM when we put our children to bed we have our time. We sit at the balcony and talk about what we learned during the day, we have crackers and alpinito, we review the day's pictures or check fantasy football, ArdyBoi of course. We are having rough days lately handling structure/obedience. Well, it is not really the whole day, Angie and Cristian are truly enjoyable, their laugh is contagious, so sweet and loving, but lately when Angie gets  into tantrum mode as I call it, it can elevate our level of stress to the clouds. And I think it is because we want to get her out of that mode quickly, but when she wants something she wont let go easily.

I do think we have a lot of progress :  we have established a routine, at night Cristian has one or no bad dream incidents, we all have very happy waking up, and a good sleep, we have our code for 'muy bien', a handshake, Angie opens up better, and more importantly we understand them both better. We can predict when there might be a meltdown. I think they do get us as well a little better. We also realized today that Angie needs the same attention that Cristian has from Mami y Papi. We need to work on that too. 

Ah! it's amazing how much Spanish Ardy has learned in 10 days.  

Today Nata rescued us and took us to Archie's on her birthday. Highly recommended. We enjoyed awesome pizza while the kids were on a separate table preparing theirs with a dedicated chef. They were so into it. Then, I saw Angie's face having Pizza for the first time ! unforgettable. We had a great time! 

We talked with Nata about our issue with Cristian hitting us when he does not get his way. Interesting hearing how a teacher of 2-4 year old kids deals with it. Cristian had his first timeout today for hitting mami y papi. Did not go well, I gave in after 5 minutes. After that, just the word 'rincon' for the timeout upset him to tears. Not sure if he's already cured (yeah right), or how he will handle it next time.

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We know things get better with time, as everybody says, for us Angie and Cristian are worth it, and yes, we already started feeling improvements now :)