My 8 month old has discovered the joys of grabbing everything within grasp. Spilling drink cups, trying to yank cords out of the wall given a five second head start are just part of the norm.What is very difficult now is that he is fixated on parts of my face. He loves to grab my ears, nose and lips tugging very hard. My right ear seems to be his favorite. Through the last several days of dilligent effort, he has rubbed it raw. This morning my temper finally gave out when he attempted to pull my lip down to my feet, and I screamed in pain.
This upset the boy to no end. He was just having fun and exploring after all. Veteran parents out there, have you had a child who had a lethal left hand? What do you do about it when they are this young, and corrective action is not that effective. It might be good to stock up on ointment or perhaps make him wear socks on his hand.
I was this close to taking him to the police station and registering his fingers as lethal weapons.
4 comments:
corrective action is effective, yes, even at this age. if it's something you don't like, you don't allow it and you redirect the child's attention to something that you both like.
i am a firm believer in clear and consistent limits and boundaries.
ymmv.
I would say you handled it perfectly by reacting naturally. You don't want to scare him or hinder his explorations, but you also want to survive in one piece. I nursed my younger girl for 2 1/2 years. She started biting and once went to far. I reacted exactly as you did and the biting stopped.
The Littlest Critic used to like to pick my nose. Well, sort of.
Usually this would happen when we were in our library, though she sometimes did this while we were lying in bed, and she was trying to forestall the inevitable naptime.
We'd be playing on the floor, me lying on my back, her crawling about. Suddenly she'd come chuffing over. A typical start to the routine had her gently slapping me on the face ten to twenty times. This is followed this up by pulling my hair and yelling "Aaaa-aaaaa-aaaaaa!" in my face. Sometimes she would lean down to bite my cheek or ear with her two to three teeth or put all her weight on her little hand on my throat.
The next thing was to either grab my lower lip and yank my mouth open so she could jam her hand down my throat or try to tear my eyelids off. Once she pulled my eyelid out so far I felt cool air rush around towards the back of my eye.
But my nose, once spotted, was too good a target to pass up. She'd grab it and squeeze. And for a while she'd play innocently. If she could have whistled at this age, as if to say, "Nothing to worry about. I'm just an innocent little baby, lalalalala...," she would have.
And once my guard was down, she'd take careful aim to ram one skinny baby thumb up my nostril. Until searing pain zapped through my skull.
I didn't honestly believe she was actually going to do it this time. I kept telling myself that and she kept doing it. For some reason, I truly thought she's cutely playing, she's not like some ancient Egyptian embalmer about to haul my brain out through the nose. Her little thumb would go in, but she didn't know where to stop.
Usually I'd pull away just before her infant nails lodged in my frontal lobe.
My startled reaction, eyes filling with tears as I yanked my head away and shrieked "Jesus!" always made her laugh. That was what she was after.
Kind of sadistic, really.
I learned after a while to just keep my face at the right distance from her hands so she could gently stroke, but not tug too much.
Umm...mittens?
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