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I think you and Mr. Blue are very perceptive and on the Right Track with making a Special Role just for LG. Good luck! We'll be thinking of you next Friday night!
I think the tzedakah box is a brilliant idea and will help him learn not just that he's important, but that giving to others is important. Excellent idea!
Can't wait to hear how it works out.
Excellent idea.
It sounds like you're working through it with sensitivity and creativity. I hope the tzedakah box works!
That's a great idea. I hope it helps. We dabble off and on in adding a "parents bless the child" blessing but it is a new idea and we keep forgetting. Perhaps you could add that, and do LG's first then BB's.
We also give money on Friday night (when we remember) and it is partly allowance-y and partly tzedakah. The wonderful (if probably fleeting) effect is that almost anytime S. gets money, she puts some in tzedakah! Oh, the parental pride!
Send him to his room on Mondays. Fridays you can fix. I promise you, it won't be long before you actually get to (get this one) talk to each other on a daily basis. No, really! I'm not lyin'! It comes back. Good thing you still like each other!
I'm so proud that the yogurt-and-duct-tape tzedakah box idea is proliferating throughout the land! As a fellow Shabbat Meltdown Parent, I wish you all well.
FWIW, RW and I have had many a lovely dinnertime conversation courtesy of MG's habit of discovering she has make an extended visit to the bathroom right at the beginning of the meal. The downside is having to get up halfway through dinner to help her wipe. Yich.
Elswhere! We too have known the pleasures of the dinnertime conversation both made possible by and interrupted by the untimely arrival of the poopies.
Yay for conversation! I hope the tzedakah box works, and it takes Baby Blue a while to start demanding her own quarters.
Also, I can't figure out what Pirate's Fwooty could possibly be, so please write that post, or at least tell me what exactly it is.
In these here parts (and by that I mean Taxman's family because mine never did it), getting a bracha on Friday night is all about age order. As in, when Taxman and I got married, I knocked Taxman's brother down a peg because I am older than he is. He was 23, so he could handle it 
; anyway, this is a way that you could maintain LG's birth order significance (to him)--he gets the Shabbat kisses before BB.
Is he at a point where he'd have the ability/willingness to have some special Shabbat prep assignments? (Helping with challah/menu, setting the table, making napkin swans, picking out flowers, etc.--all things BB is too young to do.) Potentially that would reduce the chance of him baiting banishment.
Tzedakah box is a good idea, too 
How about a challah cover? That would definitely tap into his artistic abilities, albeit not on a weekly basis.
I think Kate's on a good track. Maybe LG could make the challah cover with his markers on some cloth?
I'm just curious -- is he old enough to just not like religious celebrations? At some point in my life (I think I was older than that) I got to the point where I chafed at any kind of religious experience. It just seemed like a game that adults wanted to play and I couldn't figure out why.
I was an atheist in the making, even at an early age.
Ooh, I third the idea of LG making a bee-yoo-ti-ful challah cover. And a tzedakah box. And also getting him involved in the preparations more, if possible. J. always gets excited for Shabbat, but I think mainly b/c he loves challah and juice (could LG choose the juice at the shopping trip?).
We do the bracha for the child here ("May you be like Ephraim and Menasha*, may God make God's countenance/face to shine upon you, may God grant you peace.") With only one child, there's nothing about order, but he still runs away and hides in the sofa sometimes when it's time to do the parental blessing (with a hand on his head). Not sure why - may I should ask him if he'd like us to change the wording or something? Anyway, it did lead him to ask the rabbi who Ephraim and Menashe were (I believe she said Moses' sons who were just particularly good people - there's probably more and she put it at a kindergarten level). The female version is "May you be like Ruth and like Esther." (Sometimes I break into the song from Fiddler, modified a bit for modern times)
Sometimes (especially when he was younger) we'd play a tape by Robin Helzner (Shabbat is in the title, but I forget the whole thing) and he'd sing along during dinner. Would Shabbat music help or hinder, do you think?
You can call CPS right now, but we let D light the candles for Shabbat. Parentally allowed use of matches -- what could be more fascinating? And he's actually gotten quite good at understanding that he has to hold the match horizontally so as not to burn his fingers.
Damn, Elizabeth, I'm impressed at D's bravery. LG is scared stiff of anything having to do with fire. Maybe I've done too good a job of stressing the dangers of our gas stove?
The decorated challah cover and the birth-order brachas are excellent ideas. Thanks so much! It's like a female minyan for Shabbat parenting hacks!
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