For the past two or three months, we've started experimenting with letting the boys go upstairs and play. It's been a relatively slow process, and one that we've had to keep fairly supervised as neither of them has quite worked out the finer aspects of sharing their toys. Generally, as soon as we'd leave them alone to go about their business, two minutes later, we'd hear screaming or crying coming down the stairs, usually to the tune of "(Insert Child's Name Here) won't share the (Insert Toy Here) with me! That's MY (Insert Toy Here)! Wahhhhhh!" So, inevitably, one of us would end up traipsing up the stairs to sort out the trouble.
In addition to this, Finn hasn't quite mastered stair climbing/descending yet. As he has no stairs to regularly climb at home, it's just not something that he's NEEDED to do up to this point, so he's pretty tentative and apprehensive of the stairs (and we haven't felt entirely comfortable that neither of the boys would decide to start playing on the stairs, which would lead the other to join, and would almost certainly end up with one or both of them tumbling back down to the dining room).
Until last night. Really, for the first time ever, we sent the boys upstairs and didn't even follow them up (previously, they'd spent short bursts up there alone, but we'd always at least followed them up to turn lights on and make sure they were situated before going down). We left the monitor in Gabe's room up so we could hear what was going on, in case we needed to intervene, but they played for nearly a half hour up there without any real incident.
What we heard coming through the monitor hardly kept our minds at ease. The noise was considerable and it was usually accompanied by ceiling shaking thumps and crashes (since his room is directly above the living room), but neither kids were screaming, so we decided to leave well enough alone. We really WANT them to be able to sort out their own problems--partly because it is a necessary step in their development as social creatures, but mostly because we don't want to HAVE to be bothered. After a while, it was time for Finn to leave, so the boys were called down, and we didn't think to go up and check the damage. Finn left and we got the kids around for bed.
Right before we took the kids up, I ran a load of laundry upstairs and peaked into Gabe's room. This is what I saw:
Needless to say, I was not pleased. We have discouraged Gabe from treating his room like The Who in a five star hotel, but, obviously, we haven't made enough of an impression on him yet. And this isn't even all of it. The parts of his room that you can't see were equally trashed--and he'd even carried up to the top bunk of his bed where, apparently, they'd spent some time throwing random toys up there (probably what at least some of the loud crashes we heard were).
He will be spending much of today upstairs cleaning his room--with many reminders and naggings from me to get it done until he's at least managed a noticeable dent in the destruction. After that, I will probably end up spending a half hour up there organizing and putting things away (because, after all, even though Gabe is the one who will get upset when he can't find something he NEEDS that is buried in a pile, it is ME who will be the one to suffer as I spend twenty minutes sifting through detritus looking for it--so I might as well safe myself the trouble later).
Still, it WAS nice sending the kids off to play by themselves. Now, for the next two years or so, we can start saying things like "God, I can't wait until they discover video games and will sit up there and play QUIETLY for an hour or two--oh, and entertain Norah, too. Won't that be grand?"
No comments:
Post a Comment