Click me!
My daughter is (hopefully) in the last throws of her nightly show of defiance towards bed time. The moments between cries of “Daddy….DADDY!” are growing longer and the strength of the cries are growing weaker.
It’s been a day full of tantrums and distractions around the house. After a long day of party-party-party yesterday, we finally got back to the house just west of nine-thirty. My daughter, amazingly, had opted not to sleep on the ride home and was in full protest mode last night when we put her down. Around eleven thirty, I went into her room and laid her down next to me on the floor. By a quarter after midnight, she was finally asleep and I put her in her crib.
Our surprise was huge when she woke up just after six in the morning. We took her into bed with us, which bought us another hour of sleep.
During the course of the day, she took a half hour nap while I was stollering her around town. Other than that, no nap was asked for, and none was taken.
My wife and I could have used the sleep.
In any case, my daughter reached that weird point of tiredness where everything…every gosh darn thing…is an emergency or a point of contention. She drew her line in the sand around her, and she’d be darned if you were going to move her to do anything that she did not want to do. For the most part my wife and I coped. The key to my daughter’s stubbornness is not to ignore it, or try to go around it. You need to seize it from directions that she’s not expecting. You surprise her right out of her stubborn mood, and then you and she can make progress.
Such was the case tonight. We’d finished dinner. We’d washed the dishes. She had watched a few Youtube videos. It was time for bath and bed (and beyond).
Naturally she wasn’t going anywhere.
Taking matters into my own hands, I seized my daughter by the waist and inverted her.
“Would you like me to carry you upside down up the stairs?”
“Yes!” she giggled.
So I proceeded to do that.
I discovered a few steps up the staircase that my daughter’s rear, which was much closer to my nose than it would otherwise be, was…not so fresh. To put it another way, my nostril hairs were burning.
Of course, now I had made a pledge. She was expecting me to continue to carry her in an inverted position so as to add a new dimension of enjoyment to the otherwise mundane task of going up the stairs.
There are times in life when you learn what parenting is all about.
My time was not that moment I just described. Mine was a few moments later, after I had laid her down on the changing station and looked down to pull out some wipes. I noticed…stains…on my pants.
“Honey?” (My wife had followed me up the stairs, laughing at my discomfort)
“Yes?”
“Is…is that poop juice on my pants? Did my daughter get poop juice on my leg?”
Three or four years ago, this thought would have caused a panicked reaction. I would have lost my sh*t so to speak.
Now, the prospect of confirmation that our daughter’s diaper did in fact fail to contain merely brought a small wave of irritation over the fact that I had just washed these jeans.
