" I give you kisses because I love you! "

Hearing these words come from your 3yo is enough to make any parent's heart melt. These were the words we heard, not even for the first time, this morning while cuddling in bed (making a salami sandwich -- Adam is the salami).

And then, not even 12 hours later, comes the horror. If you want to go outside and play with chalk after the movie is over(he got to watch a movie, that should have been treat enough for him to do anything I asked) you have to go potty first. This caused significant whining to start. This often happens. What toddlers have against using the potty, or even worse, washing your hands, I don't understand nor will I ever. It's like asking a college freshmen to write a 10 page paper. But in the potty case it isn't even something new! I digress. The whining happens, but once we start actually get into the bathroom he's fine. Until... washing hands. Adam is not afraid of water. At all. Never has been. This is a great thing when you're doing swimming lessons. Not a great thing when washing hands. He knows he's not supposed to push his hand up next to the faucet and make it spray. He was 99% of the way there when I caught him, made him stop, finished washing (and drying) his hands for him and sent him to time out. We use time out for everything, its generally effective in that Adam really doesn't like it. When dealing with a strong willed child nothing is really effective if it's something he really wants to do, but those things aside, timeouts work well for us. Halfway to the timeout corner comes the screaming. We don't do screaming on the way to timeout. He's already going to timeout, screaming gets an immediate spanking. Ironically this actually does usually help him calm down, regardless of what you might think. He did stop screaming. Our timeouts are 3 minutes, but they don't begin while he's crying and carrying on. I got a lot of dinner prepared tonight while waiting for that timeout to start. After the timeout comes the talk, about what happened and why. In total, from the time we started potty until we were completely done with timeout was about 30 minutes.