Growing Up as Hard as She Can

I see my little baby, and she isn't a baby anymore. She's a kid now.

A kid, with a full vocabulary and the ability to carry on conversations with herself. "Where's paci? I don't see it. Oh! There she is. Hi, paci," is an exchange she might commonly have with an inanimate object, one of many.

She is developing patience. She isn't very good at it, but she's trying doggedly to get better at it. As I make her dinner, she hangs on to my knees, burying her head in the leg of my jeans, begging please and suggesting, "Dinner's ready!"

She tells us what she feels like eating. When we tell her no, that we're out of watermelon or that a cookie comes after dinner, she shrugs it off and eats what's on her plate -- or doesn't eat it, and asks to get down to play. Her appetite is healthy and she has passed the picky phase that saw her eating butter noodles with Parmesan cheese for weeks on end.

She's a brat, but we're working hard not to spoil her. It's easier said than done.

I have a philosophy now when it comes to raising her, and when I stumbled upon it, it felt comfortable and right. The philosophy is: allow her to fit into the life that we already live, and avoid molding our lives around fitting her needs.

This sounds like I'm saying that I make her eat sushi-and-sake dinners, take in an 8pm Friday night showing of "Cowboys and Aliens," and leave her to her own devices while I check my email. That isn't case. (Okay, so the last one is partly true.)

What is really means is that I use this philosophy to stop myself when I realize that I'm spending too much time trying to guess what Sadie wants and what will keep her happy. I need to be better about deciding what the routine is, telling her exactly what that routine will be, and then expecting her to go along with it.

Take, for example, the process of getting ready in the morning. We eat breakfast, change her diaper and put on her daytime clothes, then move her into the bathroom where she brushes her teeth on the sink and I comb and brush her hair. On any given morning, this simple routine might be ambushed for a dozen different reasons. Perhaps today is the day that she re-discovers a book on her bedroom floor at the exact moment that I'm trying to move her to the changing table, and she demands to be able to bring the book up with her. Perhaps she would rather put the toothbrush aside and instead, put the cap on the hairspray bottle and take it off half a hundred times.

There are ways to keep her happy throughout the process, and I've learned them all. Swap out a forbidden toy with a safer one. Distract by singing songs, by making funny faces in the mirror, by promising "five more minutes and we're done." It didn't take long for Sadie to figure out that all it would take was a passing whine and her mother would contort herself into any position necessary to fix the problem.

One day I asked myself: "what would happen if I didn't fix the problem?" And instead of trying to fix it, I just let it happen. The whining continued, but it eventually wore itself out. Occasionally, it did lead to bigger fights. One toothbrush war in particular ended with blood shed on both sides, as I forcibly wrangled a toothbrush into her mouth while she screamed bloody murder and tried to stab the pointy end into my eye.

But by and large, the tactic worked. Go along with the plan, expect her to do the same, and make occasional -- but infrequent -- concessions to her changes of mind along the way. What I want her to do is to see that Mommy and Daddy are PEOPLE. We are not robots, designed for the express purpose of giving her happiness and new toys and occasional bites of their delicious pumpkin pancakes. WE ordered those pancakes. Because we were hungry, and IHOP sounded good, and you live with us now so you were lucky enough to be included on the trip. That in an of itself does not mean you have a right to grab the pancakes off of our plates, push a piece into your mouth, declare it "too much," and let the pancake molecules rain out of our mouth onto the IHOP floor.

My hope is that as I get better at applying my new philosophy, Sadie will come to understand that she is not the princess in the throne room, seated with a long line of admirers come to pay respects. I want to teach her that she has the ability to affect the feelings of people other than herself. I know that this is something that kids her age are only just beginning to comprehend, but I see the beginning of it in her and I want to encourage them. A boy cries at Target behind us and she turns to me and whispers, "Baby cry."

"Yes, the baby is crying."

"You hear that?"

"Yes, I hear it."

She focuses harder. "Why baby cry? Baby sad."

"Maybe he's sad. Maybe he wants his mommy to hold him instead of his daddy. Maybe he's tired and needs a nap." I watch her face, as she struggles to understand why another baby would be upset when she herself is not feeling upset, and what that might mean.

At home, I ask her for a hug and she pushes me away without another look, more interested in the new toy we've just bought. Then she catches sight of my face, which I have exaggerated to look extra sad. "I feel sad," I tell her. "It makes me sad that you didn't give me a kiss."

Instantly she leans forward and blows me an exaggerated kiss, followed by a bright smile that shows she expects everything to be better, now that Mommy is happy.