Choose your battles?

I feel like I spent a lot of energy conducting discipline around here today.

After thinking about how I'd been yelling a lot in a span of several hours (I did not handle the discipline all that well obviously), the phrase "Choose your battles" came to mind.

"Ok," I said to this nice little voice in my head, "Let me think about which battles I should have chosen to avoid today." And so I started cataloguing the days' discipline issues...

Should I have avoided the battle over making Colsen stay in his room when he gets sent there?

Should I have not gotten all riled up when Colsen walked in the room with his head covered in hand soap (the expensive stuff, too!), and I had to stop teaching the other 2 kids and go up and give him a shower instead?

Or maybe I shouldn't have made a big deal about Colsen using scissors to cut his own hair AGAIN, right in the front where it most obvious?

Or could I have refrained from yelling when he poured Burt's Bees oil on my bedroom carpet -- RIGHT AFTER I told him to stop touching anything in my bathroom, and in fact to not even to go in there?

Should I not have chosen to correct the kids when they did not address our elderly neighbor properly when she stopped by for a visit?

Or maybe I shouldn't have been upset when the 3 older hooligans woke up Miles from his nap, way too early, during a time when they were supposed to all be in separate rooms -- but weren't.

Perhaps I could have not gotten mad at finding permanent marker scrawled all over Strider's textbooks, thanks to a younger sibling.

Or maybe I shouldn't have had a battle with Strider over his constant interrupting when I was trying to have 5 minutes in a row of actual school time?

And maybe I shouldn't have chosen to discipline Strider for taking "justice" into his own hands when he sent Colsen to "jail" when Colsen was in fact supposed to be in bed for a nap.

And maybe I shouldn't have chewed everyone out for constantly touching, losing, breaking and moving my stuff.

I don't know... I guess I could have skipped some of these battles, but they all looked pretty important to me at the time... and I'm not even far enough removed yet this evening to see their significance fade...

Probably the key is in how I'm viewing these incidents as "battles" and not sweet and lovely teachable moments through which I can grow closer to my children.... but tonight, they just feel like battles. I think I need some sleep -- and to read some good parenting books. Again.