As a young father, subconsciously my nature is to play and have fun with my boy …. very wildly. For the past three years of Kayden’s growing up journal, as simple as a towel or a carton box, I can do “play time” miracles out of it. My wife don’t understand how I can always do that, neither do I.
As Kayden has grown up year by year from a curious baby in his baby crib to a little monster that often drives my nerves crazy, as parents we need to educate him to be a young child.
In the mid of his second year, we started to potty train him. Upon removing his diaper, we will remind him that he is not wearing it and every two hours, we will bring him to the toilet to do his nature calls. There were many times when he pee or poop on the floor, we will tell him that this is wrong and the right way to do it is in the toilet and he must to tell Papa or Mama. If he tell us he needs to go to the toilet, we will reward him with a small animal butter cookie.
Potty training is the most memorable program because for myself, I need to clean the pee or poop on the floor and scrub the poop stains off his shorts. After training him for about two months, he got much better. Now his favorite action to do after using the toilet was to flush.
Calling it cold turkey, we are kicking Kayden’s pacifier habit off. This can get emotional for him because he found comfort when suckling his pacifier during nap time. Doing it the hard way, we hid his pacifier and tell him that it went missing. He will cry out loud and kept looking for his pacifier. After a week, he managed to remove his addiction. I thought that was really fast.
Now, Kayden is three years old and he is almost ready to step into his big boy journey. He enjoys asking questions and his favorites are “What is this?” and “What is that?”. He spent most of his time singing his heart out with the same songs over and over again. Occasionally, it gets into my nerves, but seeing him enjoying himself makes me happy. Time really pass fast and he is now a little terrible monster who messed up the whole house with his toys and “helping” us with the household chores. I believe he will continue to give my wife and myself more surprises in the near future, like tomorrow or even the next hour.
Happy birthday, my little boy!