Silly Saturday – I Can Do It Myself

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Well, we’ve entered that dreaded independent stage.  I know it’s a good thing that you child wants to gain independence.  I certainly don’t want to be helping him do everything for the rest of his life.  Still it’s bittersweet seeing my baby grow-up.  Plus being a Type A mom means that it’s not always easy for me to deal with.

It started a few weeks back when Nick wouldn’t eat anything that he didn’t feed to himself.  Oh my did that get messy!  You should have seen the pudding mess (I would only let him eat that by himself if he had really dark colored clothes on).  Luckily he’s no longer as stubborn about having to do it himself, and he’s gotten a lot better at it.  A lot of the food still gets on him, but he can eat easy to scoop foods (like yogurt) all by himself.  Oh the joy in being able to enjoy my own food instead of having to feed him every other bite.  I think the best part is that he can now eat breakfast all by himself in the mornings, letting me run around like a crazy person getting everything done so we can leave.

Next we come to the toothbrush.  Brushing Nick’s teeth has always been a pain.  I used a wash cloth to wipe his teeth for as long as I possibly could, but when I kept getting bit I had to stop that.  Nick hates have his teeth brushed, and our dentist is a big advocate of not forcing it so he won’t think of brushing as an evil thing.  I made up a song to sing while we did it, and that worked for awhile, but with new teeth constantly coming in Nick still fought it.  At this point it’s hit and miss, but he will do it happily if I let him do it himself.  Of course he does a lot of chewing on the toothbrush, but he’ll move it around a little too.  I know that he can’t do a good brushing by himself and I should really brush his teeth (I do try and sometimes he’ll let me do a little), but something is better than nothing I suppose!

This week Nick has a new, “I can do it myself,” moment.  He wants to brush his own hair.  Now luckily he still lets me brush it firt, but as soon as I’m done he wants the comb so that he can brush it.  I suppose he feels I don’t do the best job on it (oh he’s so me).  Of course to be fair he has to brush my hair sometimes too!  I’ll say one thing….this kid can sure be cute!