My children are getting more independent every month. This is good, it means I can get things done without worrying where there are every second. This is bad, it means they can get into trouble while I'm busy not worrying about them.
For the most part, my children are good kids and don't mess with things they know they're not suppose to get into. They don't have a fascination with the knife block, the oven burners or the gasoline can in the garage. They don't try to destroy furniture, damage the walls or jump off the deck. But they're toddlers, and toddlers invariably get into trouble just by being themselves.
Today was a challenging day for my son. He had "strong feelings", as they call it in Montessori school, about pretty much everything and everyone. As a result, I had some strong feelings myself which resulted in this thing I do called iYell.
Trying to keep my children in the same room of the house resulted in dramatic conflicts, mostly instigated by my son. I was having to separate them, negotiate conflict resolutions between them and eventually they just didn't want to be in the same place together. Or maybe I told my son he had to go elsewhere, I can't remember.
Two toddlers in two places can be a recipe for mischief though. At one point I discovered my son had left the house and I didn't see him in the back yard. He had decided he wanted to, "go and play with Ryan and Kiera" (who live two houses over) and was wandering across their back yard. So I spent some time outside shouting at him from the deck that 1) he hadn't been invited, 2) Ryan and Kiera were still at school so could he please come back home.
During this time, my daughter had gone into the pantry. She's good at getting her stool out and climbing up on the shelves, perusing the various items and selecting things she's not allowed to have. If the items are in containers she can't open, say like a Nutrigrain bar, she smashes the pouch around until the bar is mush.
This time, she's found the bowl of candy packets with things like gummy bears, sour worms and Mike & Ikes. Through a leap of toddler discovery, she figured out how to open the pouches and was on candy packet number three when I came back into the kitchen. She was very pleased. She showed me her handiwork. As a result, that candy bowl is now somewhere very high up away from the pantry.
Later in the day I realized I didn't hear my son making noise in the living room any more. He had been playing with a parking garage toy for a while and I had hoped he was still there. When I called down asking what he was doing, he casually said, "I was just having a chocolate popsicle."
Wait, what? I knew he could open the freezer, but I didn't think he could get to the shelf where the chocolate popsicles were. I didn't think he would know how to open the wrapper either. So I came downstairs and looked at him. Chocolate marks were all around his mouth. It appeared he had been successful. But where was this popsicle and the stick and was it all over my oriental rug melting now?
He told me it was in the trash. It wasn't, but what he had done was great (aside from not being allowed to just free snack on chocolate popsicles in the middle of the afternoon). He had gotten a single popsicle, closed the freezer, taken it out to the porch, eaten it and left the stick and wrapper outside. He came back in, made sure the dog came in with him and closed the door behind him.
We will be working on asking for snack and not helping yourself in the weeks to come it appears.
The Big Boy Update: Several quotes from my son over the past few days:
- Dad asks, "do you want more dinner?" My son replies, "no I'm way too dessert hungry."
- I said out loud that we'd lost the dog, meaning that she had gone outside and not returned quickly. My son said, "does that mean we don't have a dog anymore?"
- At dinner at a sushi restaurant tonight, my son stood up on the booth seat and looked into the check out area at the front of the restaurant and said, "I see Pahmer." Both Uncle Jonathan and I craned our necks, but we still couldn't figure out who Pahmer was. My son was helpful enough to pick up some rice a few minutes later, saying, "this is Pahmer."
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter was in a store with me yesterday. As we walked through the aisles of the big store she said, "hey mom, I found a bathroom." I went to where she was and sure enough, it was a bathroom. She recognized the sign beside the door.
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