Meltdowns at Lunchtime

On Tuesday, I had a busy morning with the kids and things just were not really clicking.  Nothing specific went wrong and there wasn't one thing that I can point to that made it a rough morning... but it was a rough morning.

The three big kids all have dance class together, and then every other Tuesday, there is a Mommy and Me dance class following their class.  We usually stay for the Mommy and Me class, which all our kids love, and Addallee gets to dance around too, but it makes for a long morning for the kids.

Then, we had to help Daddy drop off our truck at a local mechanic, so we picked him up and he ran us home, and then took the suburban back to work.  No big deal, except it was a HUGE deal to our little two-year-old daddy's girl who was tired from the morning of activity and didn't understand why Daddy wasn't staying home with us.

As I was frantically getting everyone's lunch, Caroline was just finding reason after reason to sob and cry.

Tracey, meanwhile, was trying to explain to her why Daddy had to go to work.  She was trying to give Caroline hugs, she was trying to rub her back, she was trying to make her smile, and Caroline was getting more and more upset at everything.

I tried to explain to Tracey that Caroline was just so upset that nothing was going to make her feel better and Tracey was being such a wonderful sister, but Caroline was just too upset to appreciate it.  Tracey and I agreed that it doesn't feel good when you're trying to be really really kind and make someone feel better and they just keep crying.  Talking aobut this ended up making Tracey cry as she said, "It hurts my heart."

So now I have two crying girls at my lunch table and I finally had their plates of food ready.

Since Tracey was so kind to Caroline, I let Tracey choose her color plate (the choices were orange, green, and purple).  I knew Tracey was going to choose purple because both Tracey and Caroline always want purple.

Tracey, still sniffling from being upset, said she wanted green.  Then she looked at me and said, "I want Caroline to have purple because maybe that will make her feel better."

I nearly started crying on the spot.

With Tracey, it would have been a big victory for her to, under any circumstances, yield a favorite color plate to someone else, to think of their feelings.  But for her to have a heart of kindness toward Caroline, even after Caroline had been hurting her feelings was an act I've never seen from my daughter before.

I spend nearly every minute of every day -- day and night trying to become a better mom, and feeling guilty for the ways I fell short with my children every day... but seeing Tracey do this, and hearing her selfless heart toward her little sister was like balm to my soul.  Small as it may be, Hubby and I are doing something right for her to show such a strength of character.