Discontinue Use When Your Child Can Defeat Product

The title sums up Julia these days. She is into everything and into pulling everything apart. We bought safety corners for the coffee table--mainly because at our last PEPS meeting Dan thought that all the other parents were warily eying our sharp oak corners. That and the few close calls Julia has had with said corners convinced us that we needed to be more proactive in that child safety area. So we applied the corners. They didn't seem to make the corners of the table less hard or sharp, but we figured that it was a little better than bare wood.

Almost immediately, Julia noticed that something on the table had changed. She cam over to inspect and started pulling at the corners. We gave her a gentle admonition that the corners were not to be pulled out, but instead we should bang them down. We naively figured that banging would be more fun than pulling. Not so. Within 5 minutes she had all four corners pulled up (On a side note, her daycare teachers marvel at her "fine motor skills"...we think this is code for "We cannot keep anything taped up to the walls or her paper taped to the table."). We continued this game (and variations wherein Julia would run from corner to corner, trying to beat my block) for a week before we gave up. We had laughed when we read about "your child can defeat product", but realized that she is just too smart for safety corners.

She has started to defeat other things around the house too. She is quickly learning how to open doors. She learned earlier how to shut them and that another fun game is to run to another room and shut the door when Mama wants to change your diaper. The closing doors though has come in handy...when she gets too close to the dishwasher, we just ask her to close the door and she willingly complies. This can sometimes make loading the dishwasher difficult, but we love a challenge.

She has also learned how to defeat the pony tail. Her hair is getting so long in front and I am heeding the warnings not to cut it ("or else the curls will never come back!"), so we put her hair in a "pony" every morning. Today was the first day that I picked her up and it was still there. She struggles against having her hair combed and discovered on Thursday that she could simply reach up and pull out the pony tail as soon as I had finished putting it in. I am glad that we are raising such a clever girl, but I think it is going to make parenting more of a challenge.

On the plus side, she is learning more and more sign language: please, thank you, delicious, help, stop...and other gestures that we don't understand at all. Her words are becoming more clear as well. She greets you at daycare with a big "Hiya!" (I think my mother was trying to teach her how to say hi y'all). She says diaper with a thick Southern accent (dyeuhhhh-phur) and has shortened her own name to "Ju-ya" or sometimes "Ju-Ju". But the hardest thing lately has been feeling like I am not getting to hold her enough. She always wants to be down and exploring and sometimes being held by me is equivalent to being held back. At daycare she doesn't run to greet me somedays---a wave from the sandbox suffices. So I can see her growing up and becoming more independent, and I didn't know it would be this hard.