Climbing Structure to the Rescue

I’ve been in a mood where if the kids are doing something they aren’t suppose to be doing, I set the boundaries firmly while removing the stimulus from the equation. Whatever they were fighting about gets taken away until they can get along for a period of time without it. Also, instead of nagging them to finish something, I just leave it be (if it’s not something super important) and go about doing other things until they are ready to complete the ask…but now all by themselves.

Late one evening, I was trying to wrangle my 5 year old daughter and 4 year old son. They were acting particularly crazy already because they had a rowdy shower time with my wife. When was brushing their teeth, they didn’t want to listen at first, but my son finally came over. After brushing his teeth, I was going to pick him up to spit out the toothpaste into the sink. I asked a few times, but he wanted to put something back in the playroom. He could have easily done that after I helped him up to the sink, so instead of helping him up, I started flossing and brushing my daughter’s teeth.

He asked me for help after he finished doing what he was doing, but I was already on to the next thing. My wife told him to go to the bathroom and climb up to the sink himself to spit out the toothpaste. Instead of listening to that suggestion, my son decides to drag an entire play structure over to the sink in the playroom so he could spit there. It reminded me of the Men In Black scene where Will Smith is taking a test with no table and everything is round. Instead of just taking the test, he goes across the room and drags this heavy metal table loudly over to his chair to complete the test. That’s basically what my son did and I loved his problem solving attitude. I couldn’t help but smile (while hiding the smile from my son). It was one of my favorite movie scenes and now I got to experience the real life version of it observing my son.