Funny Kid

I was making rhubarb bread the other day because I was feeling a quick burst of domesticity that has been lacking in past weeks.  I decided to seize the moment and grab some rhubarb from our overgrown patch across the road.  I picked way too much, as always.  The leftover lay on the table while I worked.  Sometimes when Knut comes home from work he grabs the leftover stocks and the slop and brings them out to the compost pile for me.  I’ve stopped putting the leftover in my freezer, and learned that I never use it in the winter and it just gets frost bitten in my freezer over years.  I prefer to use the winter months to perfect more chocolate dessert pursuits. 

This little girl has been climbing.

She’s become fast, and stealth-like.  In a matter of a few silent seconds, she will have left your side, climbed to the center of the kitchen table and be sitting on her haunches, dumping out cups of water one by one.

On this day, she discovered rhubarb.

Knut likes this picture because it shows how most of us feel should we try rhubarb in it’s tart-raw form.  I don’t like it because her face had this expression just long enough for me to snap the picture.  The rest of the time she looked content and unassuming.

She tries all food, and has never turned one down.  She loves diverse flavors, from spicy to sour.  Ironically, she was my first child who I never fed from a jar or forced food into her mouth with a baby spoon.  I just fed her off my plate when she reached for it.  Some have some sort of fancy name for that type of parenting technique.  I just called it “busy” and didn’t know it was a “technique” until after the fact.

Have I posted the story of how she learned to climb stairs?  We don’t have gates on our stairs for a variety of reasons.  Mostly, I feel they are dangerous for my older kids as they easily trip over them and have a tough time opening and shutting them.  I’ve thought of the latch swing kind, but my kids already don’t shut doors or shut of lights (or at least forget often enough).  I figure it’s worse to assume it’s safe, and have an untrained child AND an open gate.  It sounded like a haunting fear in the back and one more thing to yell at my kids in reminder.

Knut and I have often been of the idea to house-train the child, not child-proof the house.  That’s just our style, not hard-holding religious beliefs.  We believe in telling our kids “no” at a very early age.  Solveig has been one of the best so far at listening.  Of course cleaning things are not low…but we clean mostly with Norwex cloths or vinegar and water now, so it’s not like we have a lot of toxic things available.  We’ve always tried to keep a child close and not out of site and gradually teach them what to touch and not touch. We’ll use a pack ‘n play and let a little one watch us work, though they usually prefer being in a high chair so they can be high up and see what I’m doing in the kitchen.   I will admit, after Elias came, we started child proofing a tad more.  (I put a gate up to my sewing/laundry room with no door because he kept going in there and destroying it.) A few additional steps have been made with Solveig, but not many.

For the most part, Solveig stayed far away from stairs, and it was never a battle to keep her away.  One day when we were playing in the playroom in the basement, she decided to climb up the stairs.  I was right there watching her, and realized that I now had to spend some time teaching her about stairs.  The hardest part is teaching them to go down stairs.  We teach our kids to start out by going doing feet first on their tummies.

Life got hectic, so I tried to keep Solveig close, and kept her in the pack ‘n play in the kitchen more often until I had a chance to teach her.  About 3 days after my thought that “I need to teach Solveig about stairs” I witnessed her approach the stairs to the playroom, turn around, lay down on her belly, and slowly back towards the stairs feet first.

Amazed, I asked her: “Solveig!  Where did you learn to go down on your tummy?  You already look like a pro!”

Silje was nearby and said simply.  “O, I taught her how to do it yesterday.  She loves it.  It was fun.”

I was 50% proud of Silje, and 50% ashamed of myself for not knowing what was going on, and somehow not doing my job well enough that my nearly 8 year old has to pick up the trail of unfinished things behind me.  We mothers can find guilt in all things…even proud moments.  In my head I was excited that one of my older kids saw a need and filled it without being asked.  That’s a DREAM moment that I will treasure.  There’s just a part of me that wishes that I weren’t the kind of mom that left “needs” for my kids to do.  I suppose it’s one of those situations where God takes our weaknesses and uses them for His good.

At any rate, she runs up and down the stairs like a champ…but she’s quiet.  We’ve already started search parties for her around the house twice.  30 seconds is ample opportunity for mischief with this one.  This week I bought our 2nd baby gate ever.  Like Elias liked to dump out all of my diaper snaps and play with them, Solveig likes to go in Knut’s office and empty the file cabinets into a big fun pile.

I don’t remember the other kids being this quiet, or finding them on top of tables and opening file cabinets.  None of them have ever chomped on raw rhubarb for 15 minutes.  She’s a funny kid.  I love her so much.