Category: Parenting

Uncooperative insects

The minion just had a meltdown because a cockroach wouldn’t stay put so she can look at it.

In other news, we’ve gone two nights in a row with no diaper and no accidents. Yay!

Also, I can give her a series of instructions to complete a task, and not only does she complete the task successfully, she actually comes back and ask questions if she’s not sure what to do. She’s already more advanced than most highschoolers I’d ever taught, and a disturbing number of adults I know…

Growing up

And just like that, the minion no longer needs her step stool and training seat to use the toilet. (She’s fallen in a couple times, but thinks it’s very funny when that happens.)

This morning she also selected her own outfit for the day and dressed herself, and brushed her teeth, all without any assistance from us.

I’ll be teaching her how to drive one of these days (don’t tell anyone, but I’ve already started…)

Little helper

Little helper

I come into the house to find the minion mopping her bedroom floor while the missus is sweeping in the dining room.

Dad, you must be careful you don’t slip, we’re mopping the floor so it’s wet.

Her mom didn’t ask her to mop the floor. She took the mop and insisted that she wants to do it. Last week she spent two days cleaning the living room’s sliding door. I have a screwpine in the garden that’s currently dropping big, hard seeds that need to be picked up by hand before I can mow the grass. The other day she took a bucket and started picking them up.

I like to tell myself we must be doing something right, but honestly we can’t take credit for this. This is all her. We just let her do things even if we have to go back afterwards to do it again properly, lest she becomes discouraged and loses this helpful spirit.

Sleepless nights

Sleepless nights

It seems we have reached the night-terrors phase.

At around 3 this morning Elizabeth screamed, as in damsel in a horror movie screamed. Attentive parents that we are we naturally leapt out of bed and ran to her – no jokes, we live in an area with many venomous snakes, and one regularly hears of people, and especially children, being bitten by a snake in their bed, so naturally we assumed the worst.

When we got to her she kept saying “fork, fork” inbetween sobs – fork is currently her word for anything sharp, which only increased our fears. While the wife held her I took all her bedding and mattress out of her cot, but nothing there, and we couldn’t see any bite or sting marks on her skin, so assumed it was just a bad dream.

So I lay waiting the next two hours for my alarm to go off with the Minion’s feet in my kidneys (not taking chances on invisible snakes we took her to our bed where she promptly decided lying in a position perpendicular to us was most comfortable).

Come morning the missus takes her to her room to get dressed, and she start speaking of the fork again, except now it sounds more like pig (if you’re horribly confused right now, the Afrikaans words for fork and pig differ by only one syllable – “vurk” vs “vark”). Apparently a pig was trying to smell her, and she wasn’t having any of that.

(Your guess is as good as mine where she got the idea of a pig sniffing her – the only pigs to which she has regular exposure is one with a last name Bank and another with a first name Peppa…)

Anyway, come bedtime all goes well – getting dressed, storytime, the regular routine. Until the wife tries to leave the room. Total hysterics. The pig mustn’t smell her. She wants to sleep in our bed. She wants us to stay with her.

Apparently this is a phase they go through, which means it will pass (hopefully soon). Pigs, though? Wherever did she get that one?

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