Heather's Diary Entries Diary Navigation: Choose A Diary Entry -------------------- Latest Entry: 1/14/08 -------------------- 4/20/07 4/13/07 4/6/07 3/30/07 3/12/07 12/5/06 10/10/06 8/25/06 7/24/06, Entry 3 7/24/06, Entry 2 7/24/06, Entry 1 7/5/06 6/6/06, Entry 2 6/6/06, Entry 1 -------------------- Heather's Introduction

6/05/06 - The Latest Aidan News

June 6, 2006

June 5, 2006

Aidan is almost exactly 2 ½ years old

So what's new with Aidan? Well, he is fully 2 now. He is on the run constantly, says 'no' to absolutely everything, chatters up a storm 24 hours a day and wants to do just about everything himself.

That said, 2 is not all bad. He's a lot of fun these days, laughing a lot and saying all sorts of funny things. I can honestly say that every stage of his life has had its good and bad – I just try to live in the moment and enjoy every second because I know that in a few months, everything will be different. I like that about motherhood – there's always something to look forward to! 

'No' is his favorite word, by far. The silver lining is that he doesn't scream it or say it maliciously, really. It's more like a question (noooo?). It's downright cute some of the time (yes, I did say SOME of the time) because he'll shake his little head when he says it too. I have to fight the urge to laugh at times. Reading up on the Terrible Twos has been a very big reassurance to me. I knew going into 2 that 'no' was going to be a big deal. For awhile, I deluded myself into thinking that maybe he would SKIP that phase altogether since he didn't hit it right at his 2nd birthday. No such luck, he's a completely normally developing child (ha ha). It's a big consolation to know that every single child in the world goes through this. They all are working towards independence, which is what we want right? Unfortunately, this is the path that gets us there.

I read an article in a doctor's office awhile back on why the 'no' phase isn't the most horrible thing in the world. If I can remember correctly, the general premise of the article was that while our kids start asserting their independence in ways that annoy us, they also will begin to assert their independence in ways that we like – i.e., using the potty, feeding themselves, dressing themselves, etc. So that changed my perspective a bit and I was definitely not as uptight about it as I would've been before.

I've been trying to make a conscious decision lately not to do the "good boy/bad boy" thing. Rather than saying, "Be a good boy and do this......." I've been trying to say, "I want you to behave and do this...." I don't want to send the message that he's only good when he's behaving – he's always a good boy, sometimes he's just not behaving well and I want to make that distinction. If he's acting up, he's not evil to the core – just misbehaving. It's so important to me to help him have high self-esteem and I've been reading up on ways to do that – one of which is "attack the behavior, not the kid". I equate it to "hate the sin and not the sinner" in Christian teachings.

The other conscious change I'm making is to redirect him or to lay out expectations more clearly. Rather than laying down the rules as he breaks them, I'm making a more conscious effort to tell him ahead of time what the ground rules are. This is definitely not second nature, so I'm struggling to stay conscious of this and to do it as much as possible. For example – he has a bad habit of wanting to run out towards the street when we go outside to play in the yard. Before we walked out the door to play last night, I told him the ground rules – "no running out to the street and if you DO go out to the street, you get one warning. If you do it again, then outside time is over and we come back in the house". I always ask him if he understands and then we proceed. I redirected him the other night when he had a plastic shovel and he came over to me and said, "Hit Mommy?" I told him that we do NOT hit people or animals – and that instead we need to do 'nice touches'. I showed him how by stroking his chubby little arm and saying, "See, like this – NICE touches". Since then, he'll do the same thing back to me and I give him lots of praise. It doesn't mean that he'll never try it again, but I know that I'm going to have to do a whole lot of reiterating for awhile........another fun universal 2 year old thing is to test the waters REPEATEDLY.

Wow, 2 is tiring. LOL

Aidan is really, really into the alphabet song. He sings it ALL the time now – before bed, when he wakes up, all day long. He also counts to 20, just out of nowhere. I didn't even realize he could do it until he started counting one morning while I was getting him dressed. One of the fun things about this age is that he seems to be picking up new things every day.  I'm constantly surprised by what he knows and understands.

Aidan was watching his "Elmo Visits the Firehouse" DVD every night before bed, but he went through a spell where he was having nightmares and saying, "Elmo's a-fraid of everybody" so I switched over to Baby Galileo before bedtime instead. In the Elmo Firehouse video, Elmo is in a building that has a fire, and he's very afraid to go back after the fire is out. I didn't even think it would be scary to him because, of course, Elmo learns that Firefighters protect us, etc. etc. and comes around........but it was apparently enough to bother Aidan, so I switched over to something that's really really mild. He likes the Galileo video a lot – which he calls Ah-goo-ga-goo. He always laughs at the moon and the clouds and says they're funny. Ah, the mind of a 2 year old!!!

Aidan is still a major outdoors-boy. He fanatically loves being outside and loves water. Last night I was watering the flowers in our front yard with the hose. Aidan was in his Little Tykes car and as soon as I turned on the water, he busted out of his car and started chanting, "I get wet! I get wet! I get wet!" I can't wait to take him to the pool – probably this weekend – since he likes to swim around in the bath tub every night. Last year he loved the pool and I can't imagine that he won't be even more into it this year.

Aidan's favorite place in the world right now is the park (or the "pook" as he calls it). He loves to swing and he loves to go down the slides, even going down head first which is a huge change from how he approached the playground 6 months ago. He would barely go down the slides and covered/tube slides scared him. Now he dives down them head first with no hesitation. It just shows me that in time, he'll get braver and braver until one day I'm the one trying to make him more cautious!

Speaking of the scary phase, we're not totally out of that yet. This has been a hard phase because it is just awful to see him so afraid of things. He was afraid of the door stops (those little springs that make twangy noises) for the longest time – now he actually plays with them, so there is hope. He's still deathly afraid of strangers, though. He definitely has to warm up to people on his own time and has to be the one to go to them or he gets completely freaked. Last week, one of his great-uncles came to visit him while he was at Mamaw & Papaw's and apparently approached Aidan very quickly and tried to hold him right away. Aidan got so upset that he actually threw up all over himself. Last night, a few friends stopped by and I didn't even realize he was scared until I looked down and saw him sitting silently paralyzed in his little car, his little eyes filled with tears. I've tried to take him to the nursery at church a few times and each time it's not even 10 minutes before they put his number up on the screen to come and get him. The last time I took him, I tried to stay a few minutes longer to get him interested in the toys or the other kids, but when I left he was bawling. When I went back to get him, he was crying so hard he couldn't even talk. The nursery lady said that she was afraid he'd make himself sick.....which he would've. It took me a while to calm him down and then he just kept saying, "A-fraid.....of the kids.....at church!" in that shaky, I've-been-crying-so-hard-I-can't-breathe voice. Ugh, it just killed me. This weekend when I said I was going to church, he said, "No Mommy's church – afraid of the kids!" I told him that he didn't have to go back to Mommy's church – that he can stay home with Daddy. Geez, I hope I haven't completely traumatized him to the point where he never wants to go back!

So this summer, we're going to set up some play dates with kids his age and try to get him around other kids more, to help him learn socialization skills, while we're there with him so that he feels safe. Obviously pushing him head first into the deep end isn't working. I should've known better, really. Aidan has always needed a longer warm-up period; why I thought I could just force him into a scary situation and assume he'd cope was a failure to listen to my gut. Poor kid – I'm just figuring it out as I go along.

I was a shy kid myself, so I know better than to force him to "overcome" his shyness – but I think that the majority of what Aidan's going through is the normal shy period that 2 year olds go through.

Talk to Me – have you gone through the shy period with your child? What else can I do to help him through this time?

That ends this week's installment of our diary. It's good to be back!!!

H&A