Breaking Sad

I’m a bit ashamed that it took me a couple of weeks to figure out how to handle the morning sad baby routine, the changing table fights, and the months-long splashout fights we’ve been having  getting her out of the bathtub. I never thought of using her daycare-induced cultish programming to the Church of the Red Furry Monster to my advantage in these situations.

My minor victory started three nights ago. Maggie was refusing to get out of the bathtub. I grabbed the iPad or my cell phone, can’t remember which, and put on Elmo in an episode of The Furchester Hotel.

Maggie stood up from the bath, raise her arms and said “up.” We then got her out of the tub, toweled off, dried, diapered, and dressed for bedtime with no complaints. She watched all of about three minutes of Elmo at this point.

The next morning I saw a sad baby when I woke up, sitting in her crib with the unbearable sadness of morning that we’ve been experiencing. Similar situation, put an episode of something Sesame on, Maggie stood up and exclaimed “up!”

Today the same thing.

What’s odd here is that she’s not particularly interested in watching the show all that much, it’s just that she wants something to do while these things are happening (drying off, diaper changing, etc.)

I mean, not that I wouldn’t throw a screen in front of my child for 10 minutes to prevent an hour of useless fighting, but that’s not what seems to be the case. She wants to do something, and getting dried, diapered, or dressed is simply not the thing she wants to be doing.

It seems she’s sort of taking the gym approach to these things: this is not something I want to be doing, but it’ll be all right as long as I’ve got something to watch or listen to.

Now to see if I can’t transition this into some non-electronic stimuli that will still enable me to have both hands free for baby duty. Unfortunately she’s not a huge fan of my singing unless I’m accompanying it with hand movements or puppets so that’s not an option.