Bathing

Christopher is sprouting a tooth!

Just one on the bottom row, the left front one. We haven't seen it, but Tony started to feel it day before yesterday. They'll all be coming in soon, I imagine.
He seems a little crankier at bed time, but other than that, it doesn't seem to bother him much.
We'll keep you updated as further enamel develops!

Boys on the town

The Dog food incident

I'm sure in every family's lore there is a "stubborn first child" tale. In my family it was "the dog food incident." When I was about 3 or 4, I guess, I dumped out our dog's food bowl and refused to help clean it up. I sat there for 2 hours and still refused. So finally my mom or dad wrapped my tiny fingers around a nugget of food and transferred it to the bowl, just so that we could all go on with our lives.

Well, we have had several dog food incidents with No. 1 son and will probably have many, many more [sigh]. This morning it was over unloading the dishwasher, which is one his chores. Not too hard, he mostly has to move 10-15 dishes about 2 feet to the kitchen cabinet. Sometimes he does it cheerfully, sometimes he resists. This morning, it was resist. So I took his hand and molded it around a dish and moved it over to the cabinet. Each time he hollered "Stop!" I asked if he was ready to cooperate. He finally was after about 4 dishes. Then he did the rest in his cheerful manner.

Every time we re-enact the dog food incident, I am reminded of hearing that story from my own parents. And I feel the exasperation every parent feels when Junior takes 10 minutes to complain about something that would take 1 minute to complete. (Mostly dishes and getting dressed in our house.) I'm sure there's a better way to encourage compliance, but when we are 10 minutes from departing for summer school and have asked him to do it 3 times already, and put his promised donut reward on the line, and he still doesn't do it, this is the method that works... I just need to remind myself to remember that for every one dog food incident there have been 5 or so cheerful cooperation incidents... And that if he can learn the lesson, which for him is "do your work quickly so that you have more time for fun," he will be happier when he is grown and has "real" work to do... I have no idea what the lesson for me is. Probably "don't ask a four-year-old boy to do any chores 10 minutes before walking out the door."