Monday, July 2, 2012

I'm the baby, gotta love me!

I've seen it happen on TV and heard about it through other parents, but I'd hoped it wouldn't happen to us. It has.

When you have a kid who's just out of toddlerhood (like ours) and are expecting another one soon, sometimes your kid can have some infantile regression issues. They wanna be the baby just that much longer.

They've spent 3 years growing and learning and being proud of the things they can do for themselves and suddenly they just want to whine and suck a nük and all that. She's dry all night and then she's willfully peeing in her Pull-Ups when she gets up.
She is finally big enough to help put things away in the fridge, but she refuses to feed herself.
It's a magical time. (barf)

Well, a couple months ago a well meaning friend of ours (who's a mommy blogger and is inundated with free stuff) gave us a fancy-pants bottle for the new baby. It bounced around the back seat of my wife's car for a while until our daughter found it.

For a while she used it to feed her baby doll, until the regression kicked in about a week ago. Suddenly she's sucking on it and pretending to be the baby again.

It stayed in the car until yesterday when I brought it into the house fully intending to throw it out. Somehow our daughter convinced us to even put water in it so she could drink from it. (Sometimes you 're so blinded by whining and pestering you do dumb things. You gotta pick your battles.) She proceeded to pop the nipple off and spill the water all over her floor. Lesson learned.

When she went to bed last night I put the bottle on the top of my desk, again, intending to throw it out.

I forgot.

This morning, soon as she got up, she was asking for it. When she saw it on the desk the whining amped up even higher. This was getting to be a problem. She'd run around with it hanging from her mouth like a dog with a raggedy chew toy.  How the hell was I going to get rid of this thing without traumatizing her even more?

So, this afternoon, I'm sitting at my desk and hear her at her potty. Knowing the signs point to "poopy" I intercept her (bottle in mouth) and redirect her into the bathroom to perform the proper "post-potty cleanup."  She dances ahead of me, shaking the bottle in her teeth like a proud lioness with a gazelle... the nipple slips...

plop


...the bottle drops right into the toilet.

"Whelp, there that goes," I said, pulling it out of the bowl.

"But you got it out!"

"Nope. Into the trash."

"It'll dry off."

"Yes, and then it will have dried potty water on it. Into the trash."

"Oh. Ok." And she scampered off totally over it.

I pat myself on the back for solving that problem so easily. Parenting is easy.

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