My Busy Little One...

So M is active - like really active.  I know, I know, people will say she's not active, or 'not that bad', or they've always seen someone more active than her.  But she is fiery!

If you take her anywhere, she hates to be held or not allowed to be put down because she wants to roam around and look at things.  Sure - usual behaviour for a 16 month old but...  The real issue here is that for her to look at all the items in a store for example, she has to get down from my arms or out of her stroller, and sprint around the store to every item so that it is about an inch away from her unpatched eye.  This is where her clearest vision point is at this point with this contact.  She's wild!  She runs around, getting super close to everything, just to really check it out.  This doesn't make for a very easy child in a store.

We took her to a barbeque a few weeks back and she was running back and forth in the backyard darting between the climber and the trampoline.  There were kids on both structures and she wanted to see both sets of kids on the play equipment.  So she'd be at the climber examining and watching what was going on, and then when she heard kids having fun on the trampoline she'd run over there to examine what was happening.  By the time she'd make it to the trampoline, something she thought sounded interesting would happen at the climber so she'd have to race back to see what was happening.

Eventually I felt so sorry for her, having to dart back and forth so many times, I unpatched her.  It was getting later in the day, and cut her patching for the day short by an hour maybe...  I unpatched her while she was sitting on my lap and she sat in my lap watching what was happening in all of the yard from one spot.  She no longer had to dart from place to place to see what others were doing.  She sat, content, in one spot, and watched what was happening all around her from the safety of her mom's lap.

This is one way that patching changes the behaviour of my child on a daily basis.  Not necessarily for the worse, but just a different behaviour that takes some energy on her part and mine.