Who Influences Your Baby?
When babies are born, it’s all about mom. Newborn babies need mom for comfort, food, and love, and to a tiny baby, she’s the only one that matters. Then baby starts to notice dad, and grandma, their brothers and sisters, and other people they spend a lot of time with, as well as mom.
And as babies turn into toddlers, influences like other babies and children, book and TV characters, and people they meet start to have an effect. Mom is still number one, of course, but everyone that spends time with a baby influences them. Sometimes good, sometimes bad.
My son, as it seems to be encoded into male DNA, is in love with trucks of all kinds. We live close to a fire station, and as it’s 95 degrees and humid at the moment all the firefighters sit around outside with the garage doors rolled up when they are not on a call.
So occasionally, when we walk by, they invite my son in to sit in the fire trucks. (Thanks very much guys, you make his day!) My son is quite a shy little boy, and usually wary of people he doesn’t know, but he loves the firefighters. He lets them pick him up and pop him in the trucks, and gives them high fives, and chatters away to them in toddler language.
Apart from love of trucks, the other thing toddlers do great is tantrums, and the current battle is over getting dressed. One day I had a flash of inspiration during a fight where he did not want to wear pants.
“Do the firefighters at the fire station wear pants?” I asked him. “Yeah”. He says. “So will you wear pants?” I inquire? He agrees to put pants on.
This also has been very useful with “do firefighters do their seatbelts up?” in the carseat battle, and “do firefighers wear hats?” in the sunhat battle.
Then I undid all my good work this weekend by taking him to a large gay pride parade that our city has every summer. Lots of music and floats and dogs and people throwing candy and lots of parade fun. And also lots of handsome young men wearing nothing but speedos. Toddler is rejecting clothes once again, and in fact he’s running around the house naked except for a diaper and a plastic fireman’s hat. Why do I have a Village People song stuck in my head?
I think we might need a trip to the fire station tommorow.
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