Barak is not a very cuddly toddler. I don't mean that in the sense that he isn't fun to cuddle. He is, oh, he is. It's just that he's usually too busy and has scheduled his time too fully with other things to have the leisure to just sit in Imma's lap while she inhales his scent and plays with his hair. And he's not so into the giving of kisses either. If I ask him for a kiss, he will, without quite rolling his eyes, usually offer me a cheek so I can kiss him. And then he runs. That's it. I never get kisses.
That doesn't mean he never asks me for kisses though. He does, usually when he's bumped himself doing something he probably shouldn't have been doing. He'll come up to me, eyes big, or sometimes crying (usually not though) and say, "Imma hurt. Imma kiss it!" and show me where it hurts. I'll kiss it, a few times if it looks like it needs extra therapy, and that will be that.
This afternoon, in the category of things Barak probably shouldn't have been doing, he started redecorating his room by pushing furniture around. Specifically, the toddler bed that has been there since his cousins visited last Succos. He doesn't sleep in it, but the occasional visitor does, and he'll climb up on it to read sometimes. Between the bed and the wall is the mattress that's been in there since bedrest; it's propped up vertically, held in place by the frame of the toddler bed. Got that? Good.
So, when Barak started pushing the bed away from the wall, the mattress started to tip over, gradually, since it was moving away from the wall at the same time the bed was being laboriously relocated. After a while the bed stopped, because it hit the rocking chair. At this point the mattress was at about a 30 degree angle with the floor, parallel to the bed the long way, if that makes any sense.
What does Barak have now? He has a slide. Woohoo! So he started climbing up it, climbing down it, climbing under it. I thought about this activity and decided that although he was inevitably going to hurt himself somehow, he was unlikely to hurt himself badly, so I didn't stop him. I did, however, draw the line at going down the slide headfirst.
After a few initial protests, Barak decided that if he couldn't go down headfirst (mean old Imma), he'd send a proxy. So he pushed the monkey down headfirst. And, as Imma had predicted, the monkey bumped his head on the wall.
"Imma, monkey hurt! Imma kiss it monkey!" Okay, fine. "Where should I kiss it?" "Imma kiss it head!"
I kissed its head. "Imma kiss it foot!" I kissed its foot. "Imma kiss it this!" "His tail?" "Imma kiss it tail!" I kissed its tail. This went on for a while.
Then inspiration struck. How I could get kisses out of this. I went to kiss the monkey one more time, and theatrically bumped my face on the monkey. "Ow! Barak, my face hurts! Can you kiss it please?"
"Barak kiss it Imma?" "Yeah, I need you to kiss me right here." I got a kiss on my cheek. "And here, I think my chin hurts." I got a kiss on the chin. "It hurts a lot, I need another one. " "Nother one?" "Yeah, I need another one." I got another kiss on the chin.
I didn't want to push my luck, so I stopped after half a dozen kisses. But now I know where I can get more.
2 comments:
Hmm. And you thought of that yourself. I remember something like that in the first Indiana Jones movie. Only it was Jones who figured out it was the way to get kisses.
Clever Imma! Well done.
Also glad to hear you let him do things that might hurt him, but not too badly. Kids need to figure that stuff out themselves. I'm not in favor of wrapping them in cotton wool.
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