I suppose that there will be (and there have already been) many times when I feel like little EC is ‘growing up’. I’ve had that sense a lot in the last two weeks or so, as she has started to master all sorts of things that we have long helped her with.
I don’t remember when she started putting on her own underwear, pants, and socks, but it was a long time ago. Well over a year ago, long time. But the shirt always eluded her…after all, you can’t see yourself put on a shirt, you have to do it by feel. After watching a similar-aged friend of hers put on a jacket by laying it out on the ground just so, and then flipping it on to himself, I tried that strategy with her for shirts and it worked. So by March she was putting on her own shirt and just like that, we no longer had to dress her at all. (EM had to spend some time teaching her the concept of ‘matching’, which I was happy to ignore…but that’s pretty much done now too.)
In the last two months, here are some things she has started to do (correctly, consistently) for herself, in relatively chronological order:
- Brush her teeth
- Wipe #1
- Do a complete bath (washing, drying, brushing hair)
- Wipe #2
Actually that list came out shorter than I thought it would, but the difference in feeling is incredibly large each time we realize that she’s able to do these things and we don’t have to monitor them anymore. Last night EM and I sat and had a conversation over the end of dinner while EC gave herself a bath and reappeared ready for story time and bed. That’s a sea change!
We’ve had some issues in the last couple weeks with wetting. I’m not sure what happened that she suddenly started doing that again…it had been at least a month of nothing but dry underwear. Now she just seems to need to go often and almost as often doesn’t catch it. So we’re back to setting a schedule: before and after nap and bed, every hour or so otherwise, etc…it is slowly getting better. She doesn’t wear a diaper at nap time anymore. She was on track to lose it for bedtime too before this started. So I’m hopeful.
We got her a new bike with 20 inch wheels two weeks ago (her previous push bike had 12 inch wheels and was way too small). With the seat all the way down, she can just support it with her feet on the ground. As of today, we’ve taken it out six times for maybe 30 minutes each and she’s more or less mastered balance and pedaling. Today was the breakthrough on steering. I’m hopeful that before long we’ll get the breakthrough on starting and stopping. Then I’m going to need to get my bike fixed because it’ll be off to the races!
School starts two weeks from today. At not-quite-4, she’ll probably be one of the youngest in the class, but not only am I confident that she’ll fit right in, I do wonder if maybe I should have tried to pass her off as a kindergartener. We’ve noticed that in social situations she always plays much better with older kids, even up to 7 or 8.
She’s been pretty flexible the last few months. With the coronavirus and the shutdowns, we’ve been lacking in lots of her favorite things to do. We’ve spent significant time in three states and four cities, done one day-long and one four-day road trip, and she’s gone from sleeping on a nice bed at Grandma’s to an air mattress at Nana’s to the couch in a hotel where we are now. Every day she goes with me to our apartment to work on getting it fit for habitation, and she has put up with me having anywhere from zero to six hours’ worth of conference calls on weekdays.
The last month or so has not been ideal for her, with the instability of it all, but she has taken it so well that I take her good mood for granted. I probably shouldn’t. But more on that next time…when I talk about my strategy for dealing with her mood swings, and how I realized that while the strategy was working on her, it was probably working even better on me.