Kate is all about pushing boundaries right now. Thankfully she is generally just nudging them, but she clearly puts her toes on the other side of the line and then looks at me as if waiting to see what I’ll do. It’s just little things, like touching something repeatedly after I told her no touch (while staring at me), getting up on something right after I made her get down, drawing on things like the floor and desk when I have told her we don’t do that.<\/p>\n
The worst one was at the doctor’s office. She likes blowing bubbles in water. So for some completely crazy reason she recently decided that blowing bubbles on chair seats is hilarious. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing for a while, making big “Bbbbbah!” sounds on the vinyl, until she said “Bubble!” While at home this is just kind of a weird thing to do, in a freakin doctor’s office it’s so gross! I was getting quite frustrated with her and was using my sternest mommy-voice telling her to stop it, we don’t blow bubbles, no touch! And she would laugh and dive back at the chair again. I had to stop her somehow and she clearly wasn’t going to listen to my verbal command so I picked her up, sat her on my lap, wrapped my arms around her and held her tightly so she couldn’t get down. She struggled and whined and cried a little bit. I calmly said, “Mama said no bubbles. You have to listen to mama.” Unlike removing her from the chair, which she seemed to think was a funny game, she really really did not like being held and unable to get down. But I think it at least made an impression. She still tried doing the bubbles again though, I had to do another impromptu time-out.<\/p>\n
The laughing at me thing is what has me kind of stumped. She [usually] listens when Den uses his daddy voice – I’ve seen her fling an object to the floor and slam her butt to the ground as if by having a really fast reaction time she’ll convince him that she was never in fact standing on the chair grabbing that thing-she’s-not-supposed-to-have. But me? She laughs. I don’t even pull out the mommy voice very often, I don’t really have reason to and I try to reserve it for special occasions. It doesn’t matter. It’s apparently the curse of being the mommy. So I will pull her off something and she’ll laugh and laugh like it’s a fun game we’re playing. I take things away from her – like the crayons – and she does get upset at that and it seems to be pretty effective since it’s an immediate, related consequence. If she can’t use something properly then she doesn’t get to use it. But things like climbing on the table or the back of the couch? I can’t take those away. A natural consequence would be her falling on her head, which is of course the consequence I am trying to avoid. I’m not really a huge fan of time-outs, mostly because her cognitive skills are still lacking to be able to understand my explanations, but I think it may end up being what works.<\/p>\n
::<\/p>\n
I had plans to write more, but apparently Kate and I have gotten sick. I no longer have any desire to sit here, and coughing keeps interrupting my few thoughts. A day on the couch it is. Blah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kate is all about pushing boundaries right now. Thankfully she is generally just nudging them, but she clearly puts her toes on the other side of the line and then looks at me as if waiting to see what I’ll do. It’s just little things, like touching something repeatedly after I told her no touch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[475],"class_list":["post-4022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kates-second-year","tag-kate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4022"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4026,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4022\/revisions\/4026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}