Our little Pumpkin is growing up so fast. I feel like every day I look over at her and she is doing or saying something absolutely, incredibly “grown up.” Take, for instance, the photo of her chowing down on a ham and cheese sandwich in a booster chair (not a high chair) at a restaurant. Sooooo grown up. All these realizations, however, caused me to get a little ahead of myself this weekend with a brilliant idea I’ll call “Project Project” (and, which, at the end of this blog you will see was really Project Fail).
It all started with our little darling being eaten half-alive by mosquitoes (reference prior post about car filling with mosquitoes, etc.). Seriously, her little arms and legs look like an urgent connect-the-dots game-gone-wrong. I try to keep her slathered in alternating all natural (read: ineffective) bug repellent, and then Benadryl spray and calamine lotion but I just cannot seem to stop them from flocking to her and, in turn, her from scratching.
Now I’ll be the first to tell you she is the absolute sweetest thing on Earth and I’d eat her up myself if that wasn’t socially unacceptable, illegal, and just downright creepy, but I couldn’t stand for her being so miserable and had to made the decision this weekend to deny her the absolute sheer joy of going outside. I thought a weekend mostly inside might start her on the road to bite recovery.
In addition to the inside-ness of our weekend, I also laid down an internal mandate that I would keep her in long sleeves and pants to try to distract her from scratching. It being +100 degrees outside, this seemed a little like child abuse – particularly since she kept gnawing at the sleeves and trying to rip them from her arms with her teeth like a wild animal – but I had run out of options (and, besides, I also caught her trying to lick the calamine lotion off of her arm, so I was really desperate to combat her disgusting but creative efforts at resistance).
So inside and covered we remained, save for the occasional outing to church or to Nona and Pop’s (oh, and the one outdoor adventure to the Farmer’s Market). Now, being inside with a very active 15-month explorer is tricky because her attention span is de minimis, though her curiosity is not (part of the reason I couldn’t get a good picture of her in her long-sleeved get-up – she wants to look over my shoulder at the photo before I’m done snapping).
So Sunday afternoon we played, we read, we did all sorts of fun inside-things. At one point on Sunday afternoon, following a much-too-short naptime, Pumpkin got mesmerized by the television while sitting on Dada’s lap. Unfortunately for him, the show that got her was Toddlers and Tiaras, which he happened upon while channel surfing. She was absolutely taken by it, which meant we were forced into watching it ourselves. I was mortified. These women! These children! It was a train wreck.
I smugly assured myself I would never be such a pushy and over-involved mom. I was going to let Pumpkin find her own joy. Heck, I had even spent part of that afternoon learning about Montessori-style education programs for her. I would never be like THOSE moms.
Then came my bright idea. Project Project. What better way to spend a stuck inside kind of day than doing arts and crafts. Pumpkin loves art – looking at pictures, colors, listening to music. This was going to be awesome. It just so happened that I had invested in some Color Wonder paints and papers and was just waiting for the day when it seemed right. This was that day…or so I thought.
I gleefully pulled down the still-packaged art supplies and prepared a place on the fridge for what was sure to be her first of many masterpieces. I got down on the floor with her and took a deep, expectant breath. No sooner had I let that breath out then I realized I had just set myself up for failure. Pumpkin – still very much my little baby – was dunking her hand in the finger paints and then clapping the ooze between her hands happily. I couldn’t even get her to LOOK at the paper. Even when I forced her tiny finger into the paint and onto to the paper, ooh-ing and ahh-ing in an eerily high pitched voice, she still couldn’t be bothered to give the paper a second glance. She did, however, look at me with a what-in-the-heck-are-you-doing-to-my-hand kind of way. I was quickly deflated. That let-down was followed by the sudden realization that I was on my way to becoming one of THOSE moms.
I packed up the art supplies and pulled out one of her favorite books I had read a hundred times, along with a Mickey Mouse doll, a shape sorter, and all the other little Pumpkin favorites I could find. I wasn’t pushing my Pumpkin Picasso anymore. She’d get there in time and I was going to savor THIS time instead.
I did, however, hang up mine and Hubby’s masterpiece, since I had already cleared the space on the fridge and all.
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