Help for Yelling Moms

[BTW--this is NOT a sponsored post!]

I swear, I have probably Googled "how to stop yelling at your kids" at least 20 times since "stop yelling at kids" debuted on my New Year's Resolutions list back in 2012.

So how is it that it's taken me over a year to stumble upon The Orange Rhino? It chronicles the life of a mom of four boys who challenged herself to go for 365 days without yelling--and she actually achieved her goal earlier this week.

Readers of my blog who have been keeping tabs on my struggles know that even though I'm still stumbling, I've made huge strides this past year toward my yelling-less goal:

• I've identified some of my hot buttons (when my little guy asks for his third scrambled egg, what I hear is, "get up right now and serve me! You're needs are not important!" which makes me yell, the subtext of said yelling being, "YES I AM IMPORTANT!")
• I've accepted that I'm a Highly Sensitive Person and/or have some sort of auditory sensory processing overload issue that can send me into a nasty fight-or-flight tailspin if, say, the TV is blaring, somebody is playing Angry Birds at full volume, both boys are whining, and my husband asks me an innocent question all at the same time
• I've chosen to stop beating myself up for being an introvert (I mean, would anyone berate herself for being an extrovert, or anything else that makes you you?) and finding ways to accommodate my needs.

But back to this Orange Rhino Challenge. I started small (one day without yelling), but I started. The first day, I yelled twice, but caught myself and stopped. Yesterday was about the same...but the important thing is that I stopped myself. What I like about this challenge is that you can enlist your kids' help (they can hold up little stop signs when they sense your temperature is about to rise, or you can ask them to give you a daily grade or evaluation), or train yourself to remember your goal whenever you see something orange (I made a big ol' batch of orange play dough yesterday, and also forced myself to re-focus when I pulled a pair of orange undies out of Pie's dresser drawer).

As someone who likes to laugh a lot (I yell hard, but I do laugh hard, too), I recommend starting with this list of 100 Alternatives to Yelling, which I will print and hang on the fridge today. There are a lot of ideas that make me smile, and you can's smile and yell at the same time, right?

(P.S. I just thought of one more alternative to yelling that I've used in the past...when I feel like I'm about to blow, I sing the theme song from "The Match Game." Yes, even I'm a little to young to remember "The Match Game," but you'll know the song when you hear it. It's so damn annoying you have to laugh at yourself.)