metaphortunate | best mom

Well, today was great. By some miracle, Rocket let us sleep until my alarm went off, instead of going off like an air raid siren at 4:30 am like he has done the rest of the week. Like, I am so fucking exhausted that yesterday on my way to work after dropping the kids off I actually hallucinated a green light and walked out into traffic.

Luckily, the drivers in the neighborhood around my work are well used to looking out for people staggering out into the street to messages from street lights that only they can see, so nothing bad happened, but still. It was not good. I'll be asleep within the hour if I can possibly help it, because I can think of no better use for this Friday night.

This morning while we were waiting for the bus the Junebug got the bright idea to back up a few steps and take a running headbutt at my legs. While I was wearing Rocket in the Ergo, incidentally. "Ow," I said. "I don't like that. It hurts. Please don't do it again."

The Junebug, obviously, laughed. "That's funny!" he said. Then he took another headfirst run at my legs, at which point I did a smooth aikido pivot and let him run right past my knees and fall on the sidewalk. You know, they say three-year-olds are too young for natural consequences, but I dunno - he didn't try it again!

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Random stranger from network: my experience as a nanny is that three-year-olds are too young to consistently pair the natural consequences with the thing they are a consequence of, but the really important word is "consistently." They're pretty good (again, ime) with stuff like your example, where the natural consequences are immediate, clear-cut and "loud" (that is, are definitely something they know they DO NOT WANT TO HAPPEN AGAIN right away).

They're often less great through to awful with "I'm hungry because I refused to eat earlier" or "I'm cold and wet because of my decision to jump in the huge deep puddle" or "my cousin doesn't want to play with me because I hit him on the head with a wooden block."

Yes, god. Making a connection across time is still tricky.

When we were on vacation one night the Junebug refused to eat his sausage at dinner and then he woke up in the middle of the night hungry and we explained that he was hungry because he hadn't eaten his sausage and he was just going to have to go back to sleep because there wasn't any more food till breakfast. Well, he took it to heart; for the next few days he woke up in the middle of the night crying that he hadn't eaten his sausage. Despite having eaten well at dinner all those next nights.

I don't know. In my experience, "It hurt so maybe I shouldn't do it again" is a concept two year olds get just fine. And, honestly, what better natural consequence/lesson that mom is not actually your punching bag could there be?

I hope you are sleeping right now, by the way. And you sleep ALL NIGHT LONG and it is GLORIOUS. <-- my wish for basically every parent on earth, or at least those with children under six