I will be completely honest. I Love my family. This past weekend has helped to exhibit this once again. Now it is no secret that me and the Mrs have a great relationship. Or even that the joy of my world has been my 3 foot collaboration of me and wifey. You know this, they know this, shoot, I’m not sure how people would not know this. My son, though, has been on this “I want daddy to do it” kick lately. I actually don’t mind doing things for the kid. He would be sooooooo much more spoiled if I could actually afford it. The problem has come when he gets frantic if someone else (read: my wife, his mother) tries to help me by helping him.
Example: He couldn’t reach his juice and mommy was standing right by the kitchen table and I was loading the dishwasher. He said “I need my juice, pweese” and so the automatic thing happened, mommy handed him his juice. You would have thought that someone took his entire Thomas the Tank engine collection (and he has a lot of them) and threw them down the garbage disposal and ran it - twice. This kid lost it, screaming that he wanted daddy to hand it to him. So mommy did the next automatic thing for us (we are smart alecs - even to each other) took juice cup out of his hand and put it back on the table, out of his reach and walked away.
Now I felt bad for both her and him. He’s still thirsty, and didn’t want mommy to help. While my lovely claims that it’s not a big deal, I must admit, it’s kinda disheartening to see because for the first year plus of his young life, he’s always wanted mommy whenever he felt distressed, uncomfortable, tired, upset, anything. I did the only thing that I could do. I dried my hands, went over to him, put him in the chair so he could reach his juice and then, before I would let him drink it, I explained the concept of teamwork.
Ya see I believe in roles and responsibilities. I am quite confident in my ability to cook, but if my wife is the one cooking (she is the better cook, so she does it 97.4% of the time), I try to keep our son occupied. Reading a story, chasing him around the house, jumping off the couch with him (don’t ask...) So my wife doesn’t have to worry about being superwoman for the moment. The same is true if the shoe is on the other foot. Usually when we go to Atlanta, I start off driving. I like to drive (so I usually drive all the way) and I like to drive at night. So while I nap before the trip, mommy will tend to “the boy”. There are just certain things that we do to help the other achieve the goals we, as a whole family, have established.
So in telling my son that me and mommy are working “Together so that Everyone can Achieve Moore” (just thought I throw that in there) things go much smoothly. We are able to make sure a lot more of our needs are met as a family. He looked at me with his big brown eyes and said
“juice pweese”
sigh... this is going to take a while.
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