mommy's development at 21 1/2 months

Hi, Daniel here -- wanted to give you an update on mommy. Now, don't get excited -- it's not about this baby thing she keeps talking about. "Daniel = big brother. Baby coming to live at our house. Blah. Daniel help with baby. Daniel gentle with baby. Blah. Blah."

Anyway, she's a pretty quick learner, but here are the things that we are working on at the moment. Mommy's not very good at always cleaning up her projects after she's done with them. I've been trying to work with her to get her to put her stuff away. The approach I use, although I'm sure there are other approaches that may work just as well, is to find everything that she's left lying out and do one of two things -- run off with it or just pull it onto the floor. I think the more effective is pulling it onto the floor, because that gets her attention immediately. If I just run off with it, she doesn't notice until later, and I'm not sure it has the same effect. Pulling everything onto the floor off tables and wherever really seems to get her motivated to clean up. Sometimes, to encourage her, I like to sing "clean-up, clean-up" as she's picking everything up. I think being organized is a good thing and especially learning to put things back where they belong. Granny says she's been trying to teach her that since she was little. Granny used to hide her stuff if she left it out. I may try that too if this doesn't work.

We are also working on anger management and patience, two things that mommy is not the best at. The way that I do this is that I find the thing that really gets mommy all riled up the quickest. This usually works the best when I touch the cat. She immediately jumps up and starts yelling at me to stop. The thing is I'm not hurting the cat -- just giving her a good squeeze, pinch or tail pull -- and the kitty happily plays along with this exercise by yowling at the right moments when it looks like I'm doing things too hard. Mommys gets mad really fast and eventually I end up in a time out. But time outs are just silly because I actually enjoy the change of scenery and when I get out, I just go find that cat again. This is a persistent problem with mommy so we really have to work hard on it. I think she's making progress though because sometimes she doesn't react; she just mutters something under her breath about "stupid cat" and "well, somebody's gonna learn something." That's good though because at least she's using her words to express her feelings. :)

I'll update more later!