I had a play date with a friend yesterday and we were having a wonderful conversation about naughty children. Ever have one of those? Yeah – I thought so. We were talking though about how the majority of blogs and stories you hear about people’s children is always the sweet, wonderful, well behaved stories. Now I totally get that it would probably be wrong on quite a few levels to have a blog dedicated to only recording the bad days you have, but at the same time I think something like that would do everyone else a great deal of benefit.
We talked about how when our child has a day like Landon had the other day that it makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong as a parent or something is wrong with your child, when in fact it’s probably just a bad day, a normal part of child development and the way a typical toddler or preschooler expresses their anger/frustration/not feeling well/tiredness.
Funny we should have that conversation. That same afternoon the boys were “painting” on the aqua doodle, playing nicely. Riley was having the time of his life chewing on painting with the paint brush. They looked like this:
Then something happened. Riley put his paint brush down and Landon wanted to trade. Seems fair? Not when you’re 1. Riley started crying because Landon had his paint brush. After I told Landon he could take a few minutes (read 5 seconds) of a turn he would need to trade back. Riley didn’t want to give up the new paint brush now, but Landon did want it back – and why won’t this stinkin’ baby share with me! After that, which literally took place in about 10 seconds they looked like this:
I was laughing. I probably shouldn’t have been, but since I’m talking about the honesty of parenthood, I was laughing. Then I pulled out the video camera. Super mom!
After the video I did pick up Riley and distract him with some random toy and he was once again happy.