Must resist urge to staple child's mouth shut

A skill that #2 posesses is the ability to come up with multiple solutions to a problem. Usually this is a skill that is to be encouraged.

Tonight however I would gladly trade that skill in for a new model.

This evening #2 has been using that skill repeatedly in an attempt to get her way.

The issue at hand? Valentines.

Of course she came home with a million of them yesterday, and of course I have no intention of keeping a million tiny cards around the house for months to come. I informed both children that they could choose two Valentines to keep. #2 was not happy but did go off to make her choices without TOO much complaint. That of course was because she was stockpiling her resources so that she could sustain the issue for the remainder of the evening. As I am sure it will come to no suprise to those of you out there with children, she just COULD NOT decide on just two because there were five she wanted to keep and she was prepared with detailed reasons why she should keep them. I of course stuck to my original decision that 2 was the maximum to keep. This of course set off repeated "ideas" about how she could keep more. This goes on for awhile, as I naively think that my continued response of, "you may only keep 2 Valentines" would shut down the old idea factory. Obviously it did not work and I had to resort to one of my favorite parental mantras, "The decision has been made, I love you too much to argue and I will not discuss this topic anymore this evening." This of course meant tears and more attempts, even a threat that if I did not want to listen to her idea tonight then I would never get to hear it. I was able to keep myself from shouting Hallelujah, banging a tambourine, and dancing like I was at a come to Jesus meeting after hearing that threat, because I WANT NOTHING MORE THAN TO NEVER HEAR THIS IDEA. In fact at this point I am completely anti-idea, I want to hear no ideas from anyone ever again.

Because you see the Valentine Idea Project couldn't be left to just Valentines. Oh no. That would be a waste. We had to argue other ideas that had been ixnayed as well on other non-valentine related topics.

Thankfully my idea girl is now in bed. I have addressed the issue without any raising of the voice, and I even kept the grouchy voice away. That was impressive. I have had a MASSIVE UGLY case of being irritable the past two days, and really have had to exert strict control over myself to keep from yelling at everyone simply because they talked to me. It is hard to win friends and influence people that way I tell ya.