Benefit of the Doubt

One of my big struggles with Bree lately (among many others) has been about her cleaning up after herself, or rather, her lack thereof. I know she's only 2 but she's getting close to 3 and she's like a little tornado of mess and destruction everywhere she goes in my apartment. So, we've been working on the concept of picking up some of your stuff before you move on to the next toy. This is a concept that has met with much resistance on Bree's part. In fact I'd say 4 of 5 times when I ask her to pick something up she'll flat out tell me no. This usually escalates into a stand-off of timeout threats and so on until finally she picks up 2 things off the floor and runs off. And, I admit this just broke me down the other day since I don't want to be fighting with her all day. So most days I just clean up myself and don't ask her to help. Because once I do I can't let her tell me no so it gets into this big thing. I actually called my mom crying (hey, I'm pregnant okay!) and was asking her if I'm just the worst parent ever that my kid will tell me no and refuse to pick up. Maybe if I'd started earlier I thought or been more consistent with insisting she pick up from day to day she wouldn't be fighting me on it. Well, mom just laughed and said that's toddlerhood for ya, harder on the parents than the kids. And, turns out that maybe I'm not too terrible a parent and maybe Bree's getting the idea because this afternoon as we played (her doing her normal job of emptying all her stuff into the middle of the room) she suddenly got inspired to pick up all her cars and put them back into the correct bin (which was actually a standoff we had yesterday). Today she did it of her own free will and then ran over to me and said, "High five Mom!"