Declaration of Independence
Okay, yes, I know. All children are independent. So there’s not really any news in this.
But I’ll tell you anyway, because I think it’s funny.
Sarah (yes, 20 month old girl, not older brothers) has been showing all sorts of signs of independence lately. I don’t know if it’s because she’s a girl, or because she has two older siblings whom she idolizes — but it seems like she’s the most insistently independent of our children, earlier than the others as well. Here are some of our favorite examples:
Walking up and down stairs
Like most children in houses with stairs, soon after she learned to crawl Sarah started crawling up and down the stairs. However, my experience has been that most children, after learning to walk, continue crawling up and down stairs for a long time. Not Sarah. Once she had learned to walk, there was no way she was going to condescend to crawling up and down stairs. Literally within a couple of days she refused to crawl up or down stairs. For a short time — probably a couple of weeks — we had to carry her up or down. Very soon, however, she was pushing the limits — she watched Adam walk down the stairs putting his hand against the wall for balance, and she was right there doing the same thing. The first couple of times she was pretty slow, but she did it. Before long, she perfected her own technique — she walks down along the banister side and reaches up and wraps her hand around the banister, using it to support her as she walks down. Or, if Kelli or I is going down at the same time, she’ll say “hand!” — meaning “give me your hand!” — and she’ll walk down holding our hand for balance.
Talking
Sarah has definitely learned to talk faster than the boys did. She already says 3-4 word sentences — many of them complex ones.
She’s also picked up on a lot of the nuances of speech. For instance, when Sarah first started talking she called Brian “Bri!” and Adam “Ah!”. At the time, we were frequently calling our kids by a nickname where we’d say their name, followed by the letter “B” — as in “Brian B.,” “Adam B.,” or “Sarah B.” It wasn’t long after Sarah started talking that she adopted this style for Adam too — she started calling him “Ah Bee” (pronounced like “Abby”), and continues to call him that now even though he’s explicitly asked the rest of us not to call him “Adam B.” anymore. So when he’s crying she’ll say “Ah Bee had!” (“Adam B. sad”).
Eating
Long ago, Sarah refused to sit in her high chair anymore, preferring Adam’s booster chair (which he wasn’t happy about at all, of course). Luckily we have two identical booster chairs, from when Brian was younger, so we just pulled out the old one and dusted it off and started using it with Sarah. The booster chairs are sort of “travel high chairs” — they have a tray that fits on the front, although we just use Adam’s as a booster, letting him sit at the table. For a month or two Sarah was content using the tray, but sure enough once we let her try sitting on the booster with her plate on the table, there was no going back. Lately she’s even been eating her lunch sitting in my chair (with no booster, of course =). Since then, a couple of times she’s tried to insist on sitting in my chair for supper. She usually gives up when I try to sit in her booster, though (“my chair!”).
Tonight, we had some pseudo-oriental dish (don’t get me wrong, it tasted great, but I’m sure it was more American than Chinese). Sarah had meat and broccoli on one side of her plate, and rice with sauce on the other side. Her eating followed what has pretty much become her standard routine lately. She would poke and eat as much as she could, then she reached her fork over to me and said “poke!” Then I’d scoop some food onto her fork, then she’d grab it out of my hands (or, pretty soon, I’d just put it on the plate for her) and she’d take the bite of food and put it in her mouth.
Oh, and I can’t fail to mention drinking from cups. She’s long insisted that we let her drink from regular cups, rather than “sippy” cups (spill-proof cups with lids). Tonight she had a sippy cup of milk, but she wouldn’t touch it, and was quite insistent about drinking water from a regular cup, just like the boys.
Reaching high
Sarah’s dresser is an old-fashioned one that has a space on top that’s intended to be used as a changing table — it has high sides and a back, and then a low (about 1-2 inch) board on the front. We don’t use it for changing her, but we keep stuff up there like diapers and pacifiers. When she wants a pacifier, she knows to look there. The trouble is, she isn’t tall enough to see on top of the dresser, even though she can stand on her tiptoes and stretch up and reach things that are in the front half or so of the top. So she’s devised a trick that shown a lot of cleverness and strength. When she wants a pacifier, she’ll grab the rail on the front of the top of the dresser, and she’ll pull herself up so that she can see the top of the dresser, to figure out where a pacifier is. She’s not strong enough to hold herself by one hand, so then she lowers herself down to the ground and, based on where she saw what she’s looking for, she’ll stretch up and reach without looking to grab it.
Bathrooms and brushing teeth
Sarah is so absolutely insistent about bathrooms and especially brushing her teeth, it’s crazy. For a looong time we’ve had to insist that Brian keep the bathroom door closed whenever he’s finished using it, or invariably Sarah will end up in there with the water on. One time she even locked herself in — absolutely. She had gone in, closed the door, climbed up on the stepstool, and was playing in the water (in the dark, no less — she hadn’t bothered to turn on the light and the bathroom has no windows). Not only that, but she had opened the drawers to get out combs or something — and the drawers are right in front of the door, which opens in…so we couldn’t open the door more than half an inch. Finally, painstakingly, I was able to close the drawer (no way would she do it!) by shoving thin things through the crack in the door and pushing the drawer closed by friction. She wasn’t even scared — she was just upset that we made her turn the water off!
Anyway, a couple of days ago Sarah learned that she can finally open doors herself. Ah, a new world of discovery and meyhem. We now insist that Brian closes and locks the bathroom door when he’s done using the bathroom. We’ve given him a long skewer of his own to unlock the door (our doorknobs just have a little hole in the middle that you push something into to unlock the door, so we’ve kept some appropriately-sized wooden skewers on the doorframe above the locking doors for a long time now. Of course, Brian can’t reach them up there, and he was quite insistent that he’s now old enough to be trusted with a “key” to unlock the interior doors.)
For Christmas, we got Sarah her own toothbrush (plenty of times we’ve caught her in the bathroom, water on, Brian’s toothbrush in her mouth and even once with toothpaste smeared all over the counter). So yesterday when Brian was going in for his nightly “teeth and potty” routine she fairly insisted that she should be allowed to brush her teeth. So after he was done I took her in and brushed her teeth. Tonight the performance was repeated, only she got really mad when I told her that she had to put away her toothbrush when we were done.
Going out
Sarah loves to go outside. Anytime anybody says anything about “leaving” or “going” or whatever, she will immediately say “hock! hoos!” (“socks! shoes!”) and will run for the front door. And unlike the boys, who will insist that they want to go but run away when you actually try to put on shoes, socks, or coat, she will stick around and even try to do as much as she can — one of her favorite words is “hip!” (“zip!”, as in “I want to zip up my coat/pajamas”).
Dressing herself
This is probably the funniest one of all. Adam refuses to ever get dressed anyway, and he definitely won’t dress himself. Sarah, on the other hand, frequently insists on dressing herself. A couple of days ago she came out in the morning and she had dressed herself completely, perfectly.
Tonight, the kids were downstairs, and I asked them to run up and get their pajamas on quickly (they wanted to watch a movie). Brian fussed; Adam buried his head in the couch cushions. I got up and offered to get the boys’ pajamas and bring them down to them. By the time I had gotten them to tell me what pajamas they wanted, I looked up and saw Sarah halfway down the stairs. She had already taken off her pants, turned on the stairs light, went upstairs, got her own pajamas, and was headed down. I grabbed a diaper for her along with the boys’ pajamas, and came back down to the living room.
When I got there, I offered to dress Sarah first, since she had gotten her own clothes. She refused. She asked for her diaper, but then she refused to even let me change her. I didn’t quite understand what she had in mind (asking for a diaper but not letting me change her?) So I started working on Adam. Then I looked over, and she had unsnapped her “onesie” (the little body suits that snap together at the bottom, for those of you not up on the baby lingo). She was almost done undoing the fasteners on her diaper (not an unusual thing for her — if we take too long getting her up in the morning she will have almost certainly removed her pajamas and her diaper). I told her to stop and once again offered to change her — no good; she tore off into the office where Kelli was at the time.
When she came back, I just ignored her for a bit and worked with Adam. When I looked over at her again, she had opened up her diaper and spread out the sides etc. (the normal stuff we do before laying a child on the clean diaper). She then sat down in the middle of the diaper (backwards — she had the tabs on the front, alas). Then she reached down, grabbed the front (well, the back) of the diaper, pulled it up in front of her, and started reaching to the sides to try to figure out how to fasten it on herself.
Kelli convinced her to let her help put on a diaper, then Sarah came back by me, but once again she wouldn’t let me do a thing to help her put on her pajamas. She insisted on putting her feet in the legs, and kept getting mad at me whenever I even held them or pulled a bit.
The best news of all this, however, has been that we’ve finally found a motivation for Adam to learn to dress himself. When we ask him to get dressed, and he says “I can’t!” then we point out that Sarah dresses herself…and he’s suddenly more willing to try and get himself dressed, too.