Y3 - 32/365: ...And I Helped!

Ah, Mommy's little helper...separating the whites, I see! The problem here is that these are CLEAN clothes being casually dumped onto the floor.

As a new mother, there are bound to be countless number of things one learns on the fly.

1. When all goes quiet...baby is likely doing something they shouldn't be.
   
   In this case, it was the laundry. Granted, someday I will be ecstatic for his assistance -- perhaps when he is a moany teenager jonesin' for a ride somewhere I can say, "only if you do the wash," for example.
    
2. Never underestimate what baby is capable of getting into.
   
   Originally, I thought the drawers under the settee would be too difficult for dear son to pull out as Matt and I sometimes have trouble trying to lightly coax them. But nope...they're no match for Ryan. He will happily slither from drawer to drawer discovering long lost items that are unsuitable for him to munch...like headphones off a Continental Airlines flight Matt once took to visit me in America. Non-edible, of course.
   
   
3. "No" doesn't always elicit the same response.
   
   It does tend to lose its effectiveness after a while. Even combined with a mommy-glare and loud hand-clap, "no" sometimes means, to baby, to stop...look at Mommy...grunt...and return to whatever you were destroying.
   
   
4. Redirection translates in baby-language as: "If at first you don't succeed..."
   
   I swear, sometimes I can remove him from where I don't want him to be over and over and this little boy has SO much determination that I think I will have a run for my money when he's older. Now I kind of see why my parents would eventually 'cave' and lift us of our "restrictions" (as my dad would call them). But hopefully I can stand my ground.

I'm sure there is much, much more to come for Matt and me as parents and I'm quite confident that we will make some mistakes along the way, but I do hope that when the going gets tough we can look back at this time and appreciate every moment, good and bad. I also hope that we can foster that same appreciation in our son so that he will respect and understand the reasons we make the decisions for him that we do, and grow up to be someone we can all be proud of and someone who can have that same pride in himself.