Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Calling Dr. Freud, Calling Dr. Freud...

My kid is growing. Like most parents I see him first thing in the morning and think "Where did my baby go?" because I am unearthing a long legged, mature looking, just lost his first tooth kid.

Did I mention he lost his first tooth? He did. At school on Friday. The teachers all agreed they have never had any child in younger preschool lose a tooth before. My kid is ADVANCED people.




He is also exhibiting what I think is fairly typical behavior for an almost 5 year old, but it is still annoying and hurtful to certain parties.

In a nutshell, he totally digs me, but is less enthusiastic about his father. To the point where he will not make eye contact, will not answer when spoken to, and generally pushes away from The Bob.

I think we parent pretty similarly, and I am not a push over or soft touch with Coop. I just think we have entered that phase of his development where he digs one parent over the other and I am that parent right now. I remember my brother going through a phase in this age range where he would say he was going to marry our mom when he grew up. It was cute, and he outgrew it.

But in the meantime, it is hard for The Bob not to take it personally. We have responded to this behavior with various things like turning off the TV if he is watching it and not answering his father when he speaks to him. Take away his SpongeBob and it gets his attention pretty fast. I have sat down with him and talked about how sad Cooper feels when he feels like kids at school are excluding him or purposefully being mean, does he want his dad to feel the same way? Of course he doesn't, so then we talked about how much his dad loves him and Cooper needs to show him he loves him back.

When I am not around this is not as much of an issue, so I know I am the catalyst for this behavior. I mean, I know I am AWESOME SAUCE with a side of FABULOUS. But it still isn't fair. So for the three people who read this blog regularly who might have some insight and suggestions, is this just a phase and it will pass just like his "I want to be up playing for 2 hours in the middle of the night" phase passed? Is there something we should be doing or not doing to assist in its passing in a healthy way?

Finally, this weekend we spent time finding ways of killing time because of rain rain and more rain. Cooper has decided working out is FUN!






1 comment:

Celeste said...

Poor The Bob! I don't have any advice...Neko TOTALLY prefers Nick and Milo totally prefers me. Its obvious to all parties involved. I expect the preferences to change and then change back again depending on ages and stages but it seems they are each going to have a favorite at any given moment. It is what it is.