A little background, my motivation, and my plan

My son Garrett is 16 months old.  I love him with all my heart.  Each day I look at him and marvel at how amazing he is and my love for him grows daily.  I owe it to him to be the best mom that I can be.  I know that I'm already a pretty good mom, but there's always room for improvement.  

The first year of Garrett's life has quickly blown by and as he started a new year he also started developing quite an independent personality.  All of a sudden I realized I didn't know what my limits were.  Garrett continued to show me what they were by testing them.  At first I just struggled through the tough days of biting and hitting and screaming and tried to find the motivation to get out of the house.  I felt tense and negative, telling my son "NO!" over and over (and now, of course that is his new favorite word!)  I felt pressure from books and parenting classes and groups to be positive, but I didn't know how to muster up the positive energy when the little monster came out instead of the little angel.  I needed to form a parenting philosophy of sorts, something I could believe in.  One that I could remind myself of during my struggles in parenting, one that could guide me in my day to day interactions and activities with my son and one that would help him learn about limits, choices, and consequences, so that we could start enjoying each other more.  I knew that the first step for me needed to be dealing with his difficult behaviors.  Contrary to some of the reading I'd done on disciplining young children, I believe that it is important to teach kids that there are consequences for their choices and I certainly think Garrett is smart enough to understand those consequences.  (For example, he hits the dog with the spatula, I take the spatula and the dog goes upstairs.  If every time he hits the dog with the spatula I take it away from him and he can't play with the dog anymore then he'll learn pretty quickly that he shouldn't hit the dog and hopefully that behavior will stop.  It will stop won't it?)  I believe you can deliver consequences in a loving and respectful way without using threats, physical discipline, or anger.  BUT, I didn't really know how to do it and what I was doing still felt negative.  I was telling Garrett "NO" a lot, even though I'd been told to try to limit that, I was giving him short "time outs" in his crib even though I knew I didn't want to give him a negative association with his crib.  I was getting tense and frustrated and I even yelled at him a few times, once swatted his bottom, and once flicked his cheek after he bit me.  I didn't like the mom I was becoming.

SO... I bought a book: Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood, Practical Parenting from Birth to Six Years, by Jim Fay and Charles Fay, Ph.D.  Here's a little background on the book and the authors.  Actually I'm just going to let you read about it on the website yourselves, because it turns out the whole Love and Logic thing is a big deal, its an institute!  The Love and Logic Institute, Inc. website is: http://www.loveandlogic.com/  These guys have a lot of different books for parents and teachers that follow the same principles.  Uh oh, sounds like a gimic, but I'm going to give it a chance because I really like what they have to say.
So here's the plan:
I'm going to read the book (Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood) chapter by chapter.  After each chapter they suggests "experiments" you can do to practice the techniques they've gone over in the chapter.  I'll blog about my thoughts on the chapter and then do the experiment and blog about the results.  I think this project will keep me accountable and consistent and is more for me than anyone else, however, I'd really love if other parents wanted to read along with me and do the experiments too so we could share reactions, results, and ideas.  I'll start sometime this week.