Wowza

I am patiently waiting for my husband to finish a quiz, so I decided I would post for all of my faithful readers out there! ha Guess what? My child knocked over his highchair and broke it. Evan was able to fix it when he got home, but it required drilling and rigging to get it back to working condition. I didn't realize that toddlers could break highchairs. Guess that shows how much I know. :-) I don't really know exactly what happened; I was cooking and had turned my back for a minute only to be startled out of my skin when the highchair hit our tile floor. Nathan looked pretty shocked himself. The only bad thing is that he watched his daddy fix the highchair then tried to knock it over again once it was fixed because he wanted to see what his daddy had done to the chair. Hmmmm.

Okay, I'm going to post something I think I've done right as a mommy, since today I've felt kind of like a bad parent (just think along the lines of my kid hitting his friend in the face as a greeting and screeching like a banshee most of the evening). When Nathan was about twelve months old, he started pulling all of his bibs out of his highchair. So we started the routine of not letting him do anything else until he had put every single one of them back. I felt kind of bad sometimes because he would really struggle with getting the bibs to stay in the highchair; they wanted to follow his hand right back out. And occasionally we would have fits because he didn't want to put them away, but we always won. I've always tried to make him put things back where they belong (especially in the kitchen) after he is finished playing with them. Sometimes I help; sometimes I don't. But I have noticed lately that he is starting to get the hang of putting things away without me telling him to do so. The last couple of mornings he has gotten out my plastic lids, played with them while I made breakfast, and put them away once he saw me getting the food ready to put on his highchair. It was kind of funny because he would get his "on a mission" look on his face while running around picking up the lids that he had strewn everywhere. ha Another funny thing is that he loves to help me put his toys in his room at night. We clean up the living room, generally before his bath, and he helps me take his big toys back to his room. Tonight he kept signing and saying "please" and "more" because he wanted me to find more toys that he could take back to his room. ha Aren't I just a wonderful parent?!!

Oh yeah, about the hitting. I really have no clue what was going through his mind. He was so excited because I told him that our neighbor and her little girl were coming over, and he was running around the living room chanting her name. Then she came in and walked up to him. He made his excited noise and then raised his hand and hit her in the face (downward swipe with his hand). ?? Soooo, maybe I'm not such a good parent. ha That was a slightly embarrassing moment for me.