What Am I Teaching?

The other day, Caleb was in his highchair eating breakfast. He finished up and said, "Mom, down please?" I told him to wait just a minute as I was in the middle of something I wanted to finish. He asked a couple times very politely and I gave him the same response. Then he said, "Hey, mom?" and when I looked at him he picked up a piece of cereal, looked directly at me to make sure I was looking, and dropped it on the floor and then did the same with another piece. And of course, I went right over to get him out before he decided to drop more. I tried not to show it, but I thought it was kind of funny. A little manipulator, huh? But later, I felt so horrible! He had asked politely a couple times and I told him to wait just a minute. Which he did. He knew (because I have taught him by my actions!) that if he dropped a piece of cereal on the floor that I would respond immediately. Isn't that exactly opposite of what I am trying to teach him? I should reward him for asking politely!! I know it's not always possible to respond right when he asks, and yet, I'm sure whatever I was doing that day could have been put off for 20 seconds to get him down when he asked politely the first, second, or third time! It definitely gave me some food for thought and made me reevaluate some things.

Then the other thing that gave me pause to think happened a couple days ago. We came home after dark and there are these flying beetle nasties that come around this time of year that are attracted to light. One of them followed us inside and I admit that I let out a few screeches. But in my defense, it was like totally dive bombing at me! I kept ducking and giving a little screech. Yes. In case you haven't figured it out from my 30 billion posts about nasty creepy crawly things...I HATE them all! Anyway, Chris caught it and threw it outside. I didn't think any more about it until a few days later when we saw one outside and Caleb did something funny. Caleb imitated Chris by pretending to throw it outside and told me how "dad throw bug" and then said, "Mom say Ahhhh!!!!" and imitated how I had screeched! And everytime we see a bug, he says, "Mom say AHHH!" I was totally laughing at his version of events. But I thought about it later--I had no idea he was watching the scene go down! Let alone that he would remember it several days later! Yikes! I wonder what else I'm doing that my little sponge named Caleb is picking up that I don't know about! I always knew he was watching, but I guess to see it illustrated so exactly was crazy! So scary! Again, it made me pause and gave me food for thought.

And this last part is totally unrelated except for the fact that I have a funny kid. Here is a fashion show he put on for me the other night. I like the poses and faces he makes:









So in case you were wondering how you could wear that blanket or cup of milk on your head...now you have some new ideas.