Self-Help Skills

A few weeks ago the boys got their assessments from school. I was thrilled to read all about the skills and accomplishments that they had at school. I'm the type of person who really likes this sort of thing. It's ok if you need to groan. One of the things Daniel needs to work on is self-help skills. Which means that his parents need to work on teaching him self-help skills. Now, I tend to take feedback like this well, but very seriously. I've really been thinking about what things we should be making Daniel do for himself that we tend to do for him, and I've had a really difficult time getting past the issue of potty training which is more or less stalled for the moment.

This week the idea of getting dressed and undressed was brought to my attention by more than one source. It sounded like a great thing to start working on, so me being of the complete rational sort, decided to implement our new routine on Wednesday morning before we were all supposed to be ready to go at 7:15 am. It resulted in no less than 15 minutes of Daniel and I in his bathroom with him wailing, "No Mommy, you do it." and throwing his body around like a limp noodle. That combined with Matt's looks of, "Why would you decide that now is the time to do this?" left me feeling a little discouraged. If you want to know why I chose that time, it's because I'm a big beliver of, "There is no time like the present."

I've stuck with this whole undressing and dressing thing since Wednesday morning, and it has not been easy. Daniel is very dramatic and, as Aunt Kelly so cleverly observed, slow to warm up, but this evening it was wonderful to see him put on his footie pajamas almost completely by himself. The best part was the sense of pride I could see in his face when he finished zipping them up. The worst part was the 20 minutes or more it took him to get undressed. Somehow I had to agree to play some flush the toilet game before he would get himself undressed. So when he got his pj's on and asked to play the flush the toilet game which I had forgotten about by the time the zipping was done, I made him go get the toilet brush and I got the Comet and we flushed and cleaned two toilets together. Who knew that lifting and lowering the lid, holding the toilet brush container, and flushing could make a kid so happy? And because I was on a roll, I made a game out of putting my laundry in the chute, too. Give this kid a job, and he is happy.

We will see how this experiment with dressing and undressing goes. I'm thinking it won't be too long before he masters it, but if you have any tips for shirts, I'm all ears.