A Matter of Appreciation

Being a parent can be a thankless job. Like my toddler, I’ve found that I also need a bit of positive reinforcement at times. Just a thank you now and again. We’ve been pushing the please and thank you quite a bit around the house and Connor is doing well in the showing appreciation category, so I thought I’d take it another step. Now I’m working on statements like, “Thank you, so much”, “Thank you for all that you do” and the most difficult to master, “Thank you Mommy, I appreciate all of your hard work.” Except Connor misinterprets the last phrase and keeps saying that he “appreciates all of my artwork.” After spending three months painting a mural in his room, that one works for me too.

I’m enjoying the “parrot phase”. I can’t resist coming up with new and interesting things to have him repeat, but more importantly entertain me or the husband. The other day while Connor and I were in the grocery store he was in one of the “Car” grocery carts. A hybrid of cart and ride on toy, these creations are both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because most kids love to sit in them and they can make a grocery trip manageable and a curse because it’s like trying to drive a Semi down a grocery aisle. Most unwieldy. The particular cart we were in, had the car on the front of it, so that Connor was able to sit as I pushed the cart down the aisles. He discovered at once that while Mommy disapproved of him jumping out and running, through the produce department, for example, he wasn’t reprimanded for laying on the steering wheel of the car and hanging the top half of his body through the cars, “windshield”. He was yelling BYE BYE! EVERYBODY!!! At the top of his lungs so I figured at least if he was going to be hanging out of the front of the car and yelling, I might as well give him something decent to yell, so I asked him to say instead “I’M KING OF THE WORLD!” since he was hanging in the perfect Titanic-ish position anyway. Of course once he determined that he was allowed to yell hanging out the front window of the car, he soon lost interest in it trying instead to see how close he could get his mouth to the bars on the back of the car, before he was not so politely asked by Mommy not to touch the car with his mouth.

The unsurpassed part of the parroting phase however, is the statements that he just absorbs and then springs on you when you least expect it. Today when cleaning up our junk room, I picked up some toys from the floor and handed them to Connor. “Mommy is cleaning this room, so I need you to take these toys back to your room.” I explained. He took the toys from me and as he was leaving the room he said, “Thank you for cleaning up Mommy, you are such a good little helper!” leaving me staring down the hallway after him. Good little helper isn’t the thing that I would write on my resume for my position as stay at home Mom, but I knew what he meant and I thanked him for saying it.