Hayley and Kate Minter

Into every child’s life some discipline must fall. And so it is with Hayley. We’ve decided that she’s big enough to handle the concept of “listening to her parents” and “doing what she’s told” and other radical ideas like that. She knows when she’s doing wrong - we can see it.

So about a month ago we decided to go with a “time-out” system. If we ask her repeatedly to do something and she ignores us, if she hits us in a non-playful way, or other such things, she goes into time out. Which means that she has to sit in a chair in a boring part of the house (such as facing a wall) for 2-3 minutes. If she gets out of the chair, that adds a minute onto the time.

It was a fairly rough start. The first couple of times, we had to physically hold her in the chair until her time was up. That was hard on all of us. Fortunately, she’s gotten better. If we tell her she’s going to time out, and put her in the chair, she’s not happy about it (which is good, it’s not supposed to be a vacation for her), but she’ll generally stay in the chair. After her time is up, we ask her if she’s ready to do what we want her to do. If she says yes, she can get out. If not, she sits until she’s ready.

The threat of a time out is usually enough to get her to behave now. But we got a glimpse of the view from her world recently. She was playing with her dollhouse when we heard her yelling. We go in to see what’s up, and she has one of her dolls (a little boy) sitting in a chair and she’s yelling at him. “Sit chair! In Time Out!” So she’s giving her dolls time-out now.

Fortunately, we don’t have to send her to time-out regularly. But, for now, it seems to be an effective way of getting her to understand some discipline.

Hayley woke up the other night, and when Holly went in to check on her, Hayley had slung her leg over top of her crib railing in an attempt to get out.

Now, it’s probably a good four to five foot drop to her floor from there, so if she’s at the point of being able to climb out, that’s a sign we need to do something. So we did - last night, we took the side railing off of her crib and put some pillows down on the floor, giving her only about a one-foot drop.

Our bigger concern was that she’d find that there was nothing physically keeping her in bed, and get up and start wandering around or playing. She can’t open doors yet, but that day is coming pretty soon. She was good about staying in bed last night - woke up a few times, but didn’t get out this morning until I went in and told her that she could get down. I’m betting that will change soon.

I don’t know how she likes her “big girl bed” yet - she may not know what to make of it. When she got up this morning, she went over to where I had put the crib rails last night, picked them up, and said “Fix bed!” I told her that her bed was fixed - she has a big-girl bed now.

We’ll see how well this turns out. Like it or not, she’s growing up.

I’ve been ultra-slack about putting new videos online - the last one was in September. So I’ll make up for it with a January/February double feature.

In the first part, Hayley amuses herself by dancing to the Taters flash animation. She’s at the point now where every time she sees my laptop, she says “Watch Tay-ters.” And she’ll watch it, too. Over and over. And over. And over.

Her little dance is cute, though.

In the second part, Hayley goes with Mommy next door to feed Max, the golden retriever. She loves Max, and she can pretty much feed him all by herself - all Mommy has to do is open the “food closet” door for her. She then goes with Mommy to take Max outside, notable for her cries of “MAX! POO-POO!” that echo around the neighborhood.

Enjoy the video proof that she’s getting to be a big girl.

Update The link to the video page, as well as the permissions on the video itself, have been fixed. You should be able to watch it now.

Hayley did something this morning for the first time that either of us can remember - she woke up in the night and called for me. Every time before this, “Mama” has been part of the equation. Usually it’s “Mama! Mama! Mama? Dada!” or the ever-popular ‘Mamadada!” But today, it was just “Dada! Dada! Dada!”

I think she’s warming up to me more and more. We spent most of the weekend playing together, just the two of us, and she usually wants me to play with her when I come home from work. Sometimes I can even convince her to play with me instead of hanging on Mama’s legs while she’s trying to cook.

So it’s very sweet that she’d rather have me with her on occasion. On the other hand, it’s not even 6 in the morning! I could almost hear Holly warm in bed giggling as I rocked my girl back to sleep. Her head on my shoulder made the lost sleep worthwhile.

The March of Dimes WalkAmerica project is a fundraiser to prevent premature birth. Our friends the Turners are participating in the walk for the second year, and Kelly is taking donations.

The Turners are great people, and they’ve been through the ordeal of premature birth. Their daughter Hallie was born 11 weeks early. She was so tiny, and it was touch and go for a while. But thanks to the work of groups like March of Dimes, she pulled through, and is now nearly three and showing no ill effects.

So this is good stuff, and if you can spare a few dollars, it would be a big help. So visit Kelly’s walk page and help out if you can.

Hayley’s developed a pretty set routine when it’s time to go to bed. She’ll attempt to stall three ways, usually in order.

Us: “Ok, Hayley, it’s time to go to bed.”
Hayley: “Need blow nose.”
Us: “You don’t need to blow your nose. Let’s go to bed.”
Hayley: “Go poo-poo?”
Us: “You don’t need to go poo-poo. Time for bed.”
Hayley: “Turn light on!”
Us: “We’re not turning the light on. You need to go to sleep.”

After that, she’s usually fine. But she’ll go through that routine every night. She hasn’t figured out that she can argue the points with us - that day will come, I’m sure - she just feels the need to ask them anyway.

Hayley is really using her imagination more and more every day. It’s pretty common to see her playing with her plastic farm animals, pretending to “feed” them and talking up a storm.

She’s also doing some self-pretending. Sometimes she’ll go in the kitchen, drop down into a crawl, and say “I’m a kitty cat. Pat the kitty. Hold the kitty.” And she’ll crawl around meowing, pretending she’s a cat. It’s pretty amazing to watch her development (not her development into a cat - that would be “deevolution.” I mean her development from a baby into a person who can pretend and create).

Speaking of the kitty, she was speaking of the kitty today. But instead of calling her “kitty,” she called the cat by her name, “Lucy.” Holly was looking for the cat this morning to take her to the vet, and she asked Hayley to help find her. Hayley wandered the house yelling “Lucy! Lucy!” Apparently she likes the name, because Holly says she’s been asking for “Lucy” all day.

Hayley - she knows what’s going on.