If you need to practice your patience, I have a really great exercise for you: try to teach a toddler to use utensils to eat. Zoey has been learning, trying, and practicing for months now and it still frustrates me. I cooked her a bowl of oatmeal today and she insisted, like always, on eating it all by herself. This would be fine if she could actually get the food to get mouth before turning the spoon and dumping it all over herself, the table, chair, and floor. She is stubborn about this particular thing. If I try to explain to her that she has to keep the spoon facing upward on the way to her mouth, or heaven forbid try to show her, she freaks out and shakes the oatmeal filled spoon trying to get me to let go. I, in turn, trying to prevent a gigantic mess of splattered oatmeal in hair and on walls, hold on to the spoon even tighter, which, of course, makes her shake the spoon even harder. It's quite the struggle and it makes meal time last oh so long. Today tho, after 5 or 10 minutes of this patience practice, Zoey took a good spoonful of oatmeal, slowly brought it to her mouth, keeping her elbow up and her spoon facing the right direction the whole time and slipped it directly between her little lips without even a drop falling off. I praised her and told her to do it just like that again. To my surprise, she did do it just like that again! And again and again. Finally something clicked between her brain and her little muscles to complete the task like she has meant to. All of a sudden she was eating the whole bowl of oatmeal like a regular spoon user. Wahoo! I was so happy, I wanted to squeeze her.
It's hard to believe that all of the negative things I have felt over each meal time in the past few months were erased and made completely worth it by this couple of minutes of accomplishment of eating a bowl of oatmeal. I tell you though, it happened. I don't even care about any of that anymore. I'm just a proud little mama. I was even more proud when I gave her noodles for lunch and she was still able to use the spoon to get them to her mouth. You never really know if something is a one time occurrence or if it will stick till the next time. Today, I relish the joys of motherhood that outweigh the frustrations.
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