I made the executive decision not to bring Zoey out for dinner last night.
While our pledge has always been to bring her wherever we are going, it wasn’t possible yesterday. As a toddler, Zoey is generally well behaved and easy to bring on outings. However, since she started playgroup twice a week, she has developed a habit of throwing tantrums if she doesn’t get to nap in the afternoon. Now here’s the catch – I kept trying to make her nap but she refused. When I picked her up from playgroup today, she was asleep and slept through most of lunch. Therefore she was sufficiently rested for most of the afternoon.
And so what I learnt yesterday was – Toddlers are going to make poor choices. As much as I like to allow my daughter to be an independant child, sometimes I have to toughen up and decide for her that she should not be playing and should be napping instead. When she had a melt down on Wednesday, I should have taken the hint and instead of allowing her to continue playing, brought her home.
Failure to do so resulted in unhappiness on both our parts. I am late for dinner with friends while she struggled to sleep and now is sleeping without dinner.
Lesson learnt.
However, on the bright side, not bringing her out enabled us to have a nice evening out with our friends. CY and XH are a couple we haven’t caught up with in a while and the dinner became supper as we chatted late into the night. It was so liberating to talk to real adults about topics ranging from education to life to politics to business. I hadn’t even realised it was past midnight when we finally got up to pay the bill. They were also kind enough to give us a lift home.
So I guess I have to be thankful Zoey threw a tantrum 😉