For Mother’s Day, Max made this little vase full of flowers for me in Sunday School. It is so cute the way those little squares of colored tissue paper are just slapped on there randomly. I love it. He was so proud to give it to me. I love looking at it everyday, every time I walk into the kitchen. It reminds me of everything I love about Max. Lately, I have been dealing with his fits. I really think he does this when he is overly tired…but he will just do this scream-cry thing – which now includes hitting and kicking (highly stressful to me) and he goes on and on…and it usually starts out over something little like he wants some toy or something but he doesn’t communicate that to me and he expects that I should just know and when I don’t he gets even madder. This whole thing happened again yesterday. When I got home I realized I had left some stuff I needed for my class at work, so I packed all my kids in my neon and headed back to school. Well Max was screaming before we even left. Later on the way there, I found out it was because he had wanted to bring on of his Rescue Heroes…(but I had no clue) He kept screaming almost all the way out to my school…12 miles. Finally he just cried himself to sleep. I had a headache when it was quiet again, and Savannah and Karson were upset too, and I don’t blame them, being trapped in the car listening to that. Max has been like this since he was a baby. When he was an infant we learned that just holding him really tight would finally calm him down so he could fall asleep. Yesterday, I was having flashbacks of him throwing these kind of fits when he was a toddler. Me with a newborn and a 4 year old trying to calm him down in the lobby of the church after the service as people would walk by and stare. Not one of them ever offered to help me out. Anyway…I ended up taking his privelege of playing with toys away for the rest of the day yesterday. It worked great because Sam said he was awesome while I was at class. Today he did good too. I don’t know how to handle him when he gets like that. He is so different from my other two kids. Sometimes I feel like our personalities clash, and sometimes I think maybe he just needs so much more extra love and affirmation because he is the middle kid. I don’t know if what I am doing is the right thing. I really wish Max would have come with an instruction booklet sometimes. I hope when he is young we can help him learn how to handle his frustrations appropriately so it doesn’t turn into something worse. It’s kind of scary, ya know. What if I don’t do the right thing and it affects the way he handles stress and frustration his whole life?