Clean Up!
Thanks (I think?) to his time at school Colin knows that if someone chants the words "clean up!" he is expected to start putting things away... or at least help in the process. This is wonderful because on weekend mornings when I come home from the gym I'm typically met by a book/toy/Lego explosion when I walk in the door. Colin and his dad apparently spend their mornings either playing, or perhaps just seeing how many things they can get out at the same time. Either way they're having fun, and with Colin's help I can usually get things picked up relatively quickly.
This morning was a bit of a twist on that concept.
Our day started early, as we had to drop Sydney off at Camp Bow Wow because the cleaning people were coming today. (Syd is a wonderful girl, but doesn't do well with people outside of our family so there's no way we can even consider leaving her home.) On the way there Colin was hungry, and was asking repeatedly for "more gwape pwease" so I kept feeding him the grapes I had packed for his breakfast as we dropped Syd off and then drove back to drop him off at school.
Being somewhat sleep-deprived I wasn't very organized and when we got to school I couldn't find the lid to the container I had the grapes in. Oh well, no big deal. We got to his classroom and Colin dove into breakfast with gusto finishing all of his sausage while I was still in the room, so I decided to transfer the remaining grapes to the sausage container (which had a lid) so it could be closed up if he didn't eat them all. I washed out the container, dried it, brought it back over to the diminutive table and transferred the grapes from the lid-less container to the now freshly washed container that had held his sausage. No big deal, right?
Wrong.
In Colin-land grapes belong in the grape-container, and only sausage can go in the sausage-container. So he began chanting "clean up! clean up!" as he took the grapes, one by one, and carefully put them back in their original container. I tried dumping them back, but he wasn't buying it. He just kept at it, methodically chanting and moving the grapes back over.
I gave up and left him with his teacher, happily moving grapes as he "cleaned up" after his disorganized mama. When I called at lunch to check in on him his teacher told me that he only ate one or two more grapes for breakfast, because he was much too busy moving the grapes back and forth between the two containers.
At least he ate a decent breakfast and was having fun. This isn't really crazy behavior, just normal toddler sorting. Right? RIGHT???
This morning was a bit of a twist on that concept.
Our day started early, as we had to drop Sydney off at Camp Bow Wow because the cleaning people were coming today. (Syd is a wonderful girl, but doesn't do well with people outside of our family so there's no way we can even consider leaving her home.) On the way there Colin was hungry, and was asking repeatedly for "more gwape pwease" so I kept feeding him the grapes I had packed for his breakfast as we dropped Syd off and then drove back to drop him off at school.
Being somewhat sleep-deprived I wasn't very organized and when we got to school I couldn't find the lid to the container I had the grapes in. Oh well, no big deal. We got to his classroom and Colin dove into breakfast with gusto finishing all of his sausage while I was still in the room, so I decided to transfer the remaining grapes to the sausage container (which had a lid) so it could be closed up if he didn't eat them all. I washed out the container, dried it, brought it back over to the diminutive table and transferred the grapes from the lid-less container to the now freshly washed container that had held his sausage. No big deal, right?
Wrong.
In Colin-land grapes belong in the grape-container, and only sausage can go in the sausage-container. So he began chanting "clean up! clean up!" as he took the grapes, one by one, and carefully put them back in their original container. I tried dumping them back, but he wasn't buying it. He just kept at it, methodically chanting and moving the grapes back over.
I gave up and left him with his teacher, happily moving grapes as he "cleaned up" after his disorganized mama. When I called at lunch to check in on him his teacher told me that he only ate one or two more grapes for breakfast, because he was much too busy moving the grapes back and forth between the two containers.
At least he ate a decent breakfast and was having fun. This isn't really crazy behavior, just normal toddler sorting. Right? RIGHT???
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