Consistent Routine? Says who?

06.08.06

            The parenting experts tell you to be consistent and follow a routine, which is great advice…  except the KID keeps changing.  Every time you think you’ve got things settled and going well they enter a new phase of development.

            The first months are about getting to know each other.  Establishing trust (when I’m wet and hungry Mommy comes and fixes it), determining likes and dislikes (I like to sleep in bed with Mommy and Daddy and I dislike sleeping in my crib all alone), and figuring out everyone’s role in the household (Mom’s the caretaker, Dad’s the fun one, Baby is the anti-sex).  Babies pretty much stay where you put them and aren’t naughty on purpose.

            Then Baby starts crawling and you have to child-proof the world at knee-level.  You follow her around moving objects higher and picking loose change up off the floor.  After a couple of months you’ve got it licked well enough to actually take a nap on the couch while the child is awake.

            But once you get used to this new level of relaxation Baby starts pulling herself up on furniture, the television,  the stairs… and when you weren’t looking she learned to reach whatever it is that you own of value, and you have to child-proof the house all over again. 

            I’m here to tell you that this never EVER ends. 

            And eventually the child that was once making trouble because of downright adorable curiosity has now escalated to causing chaos out of pure maniacal naughtiness.  Suddenly you’re living with a spoiled, irritable (and irritating) little tyrant who is almost 3 years old and sharp as a tack. 

            Whoever made up the whole “terrible two” thing must have killed their child outright before age 3, that’s what I think.  “They” claim the terrible two’s are difficult because there’s a language barrier - a child has ideas and wants and needs (and opinions) that she is unable to express, and therefore overwhelming frustration leads to temper tantrums.  Perhaps, perhaps.  Our girl did some amount of flinging her small angry body onto the floor, kicking and screaming, and we consistently and routinely stepped over her and continued on with our day.  If her yowling was too gruesome to ignore we carried her to her crib without ceremony and left her there without an audience.  She mostly outgrew such tantrums within a couple of months, and things went pretty smoothly for a while except for the “nightmare at bedtime” drama, which trust me, is more consistent than less so, but never really works.

            The closer my girl gets to 3 years old, the faster her language and thinking skills develop, and nearly every day I find myself wondering, “Where the heck did she learn that?”

            But let’s back up to child-proofing the house and so on.  Here’s something that as a novice parent I just didn’t have foresight about – kids get taller quickly, and your stuff is never safe.  For one thing, they like your stuff better than their own stuff, and if they’re not tall enough to reach your stuff they’ll soon learn to drag a chair over to where your stuff is so they can reach it.  Or forget the chair and just climb up the cupboard handles.  The fingers of my Little Miss are always reaching something they shouldn’t be, whether it’s a pair of scissors or a box of cookies.            The difference now is that she knows I don’t want her in my stuff, but it gives her great joy to defeat my every effort.  And because her keen grasp of the language we speak allows her to express her wishes and opinions she’s started A) wanting whatever it is that she wants NOW; and B) having tantrums again.  Bigger tantrums.  The ones where, when I attempt to relocate her to her bedroom, her whole body goes cooked spaghetti limp so she’s really hard to carry.  And she can climb over the gate at her bedroom doorway, so time out isn’t even time out.  It’s time for the “climb over the gate, go downstairs, and laugh at Mom” game.

            This morning she wanted to go outside and play while it was storming.  When I said no, she did this voice thing that’s half-holler, half-really-annoying-whine, and exclaimed, “I can’t do ANYTHING!” and pummeled her little thighs with her little fists.

            I was struck dumb.

            Where the heck did she learn that?  She doesn’t hang with any teen-agers that I’m aware of.  And god help me if I’m getting a glimpse of what she’ll be like in 10 years.

            I asked, “What do you mean you can’t do anything?”

            “I can’t play outside, I can’t watch a movie, I can’t go to the park.  I can’t do anything.”

            I’m still just baffled.  “We rented a movie yesterday.  You can certainly watch it.”

            When she wanted cookies for lunch, I heard, “I can’t do ANYTHING.”

            When it was nap time, she said, “I can’t do ANYTHING.”

            I could go on, but I think you get the idea.  This is the same kid who told me after her bath last night, “I need to turn on this fireplace (electric fireplace in Mom’s room), it ‘laxes me.”

            “Relaxes you?” I ask, again dumbstruck.

            She’s too smart.  I really think I’m in for it.

            Sometimes things stay the same.  But not if you live with a kid.