Being Kendra_ Cribs, Cocktails, and Getting My Sexy Back - Kendra Wilkinson [16]
Enjoying the day at a park near our old house in Pasadena.
My son is not a perfect angel. Sure he’s “perfect” to me, but he’s not a perfect angel. He has his tantrums just like any other kid. When he doesn’t nap (and every day he gets older, his naps become less and less of a guarantee) his tantrums start. And disciplining isn’t easy because he’s only just now learning the word “no.” It’s hard on little Hank, but we’re not afraid to use that word. He needs to know, and we as parents are the perfect people to explain it to him. The world is not going to cater to him, so he might as well get used to it now! But we like to keep a clear difference between getting in trouble and the word “no.” When he gets in trouble he’s going to cry because we take something away from him or have to give a loud shout at him. Drawing on the walls calls for a big fat “no!” He’s got to learn what he can and can’t do, and we are going through that stage right now.
We can always tell when those tantrums are about to come. They usually start bubbling up when he doesn’t take a nap, because he starts to get cranky. He doesn’t know what he wants, he runs in circles, and he cries and points at things he thinks he wants. So we’ll shove every piece of snack in his face, or water or juice, but he doesn’t want it. Then Hank and I usually start arguing! “Maybe he wants this, maybe he wants that! Well, if you had done this! Or if you hadn’t done that!” We just want to be able to help him and fix what’s wrong. Sometimes arguing is just a reflection of the fact that we want everything to be right.
The tantrums can go on for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. If he’s teething we’ll put medication on his gums, but ultimately he doesn’t know what he wants. We try to teach him to tell us what he wants by pointing, but sometimes he just points to the sky. I can’t give him the sky, as much as I’d like to, and it gets really sad and frustrating to watch a meltdown. The best I can do is try to comfort him and get him to settle down, hopefully with a nap.
Of course, we aren’t always in the comfort of our own home when a meltdown comes. Hank Jr. had a big meltdown on a flight from L.A. to Minnesota. Hank and I hadn’t seen each other in a couple of weeks while Hank Jr. and I were living in Pasadena and Hank was playing for the Minnesota Vikings. We had been Skyping each other a lot all week saying how excited we were to see each other. So my emotions were definitely running high. Hank Jr. and I got on the flight with my assistant, Eddie—I was in one seat with Hank Jr., Eddie was in the other—and a producer to film the whole experience of Hank picking us up at the airport and me running up to him to say how much I missed him. It was a late-afternoon flight and the second we took off Hank Jr. started to cry. From then on, he was uncontrollable. The entire flight he was screaming, crying, and kicking. This was an almost four-hour flight and by hour number two I had had it. There was nothing I could do. He would not sit still; I must have picked him up fifteen thousand times to put him in the chair and take him out of the chair and put him back in and take him back out. I tried to give him anything I could to distract him—toys, milk, juice, water—but nothing would work. It was the flight from hell. Luckily, most of the people in first class kept saying to me they were parents themselves and totally understood what I was