Day 6: Whatever tickles your fancy

Oh, motherhood.

Last night Livia and I were in her bedroom, cleaning up her toys before she went to bed. I started picking up her books and asked her to clean up her play food. Soon, that plastic food was the only thing left on the floor, and she had yet to even touch it. "Livia," I said, getting stern, "you need to clean up your food. You can do this, you've done it before."

After 5-10 minutes of fruitless persuading, I very literally made her start cleaning up. I held her in my arms and carried her back and forth from the pile of plastic food to the bin in which they belonged. This was working, and the job was halfway done, but it was tiring and well, rather ridiculous. So I told her to finish up.

It was a full half hour from the time we began that 3/4 of the food was put away. I was quickly losing my patience, but trying not to show it. At this point it had become a battle of wills, and there was no way that I, as a parent, was backing down. Suddenly Livia looked at me, a glimmer of defiance in her eye, and then promptly kicked over the mostly-full bucket. And THEN, when the food didn't actually spill out, she picked it up and dumped out every single piece! Oh, the cheek of it all!

There are no treats or tv shows in the Baldwin household today.

As I bathed her, just after this event, I couldn't help but think that were my parents able to see it, they would have burst out laughing and told me I had it coming. Because, you see, I was exactly that kind of toddler. And the parent curse--you know, the one where "i hope you have children just like you"--well, it works.

It would be kind of nice if motherhood was all about keeping your children happy, wouldn't it? But it's not. You have to teach them, too. And some lessons are just hard to learn.