"But imagine what she'll be like in a few years' time!"

[ailbhe]

Today, someone told me I should smack Linnea.

Context: She had just endured a shoe-fitting, including the purchase of a pair of shoes, and wanted to leave the shoe department in the opposite direction to the one I wanted to take. I hel her arm and pulled; she sat down. I picked her up and planted her facing my direction; she turned around and crawled away. I turned her to my direction and pulled her along the floor using her toddler reins, saying "This isn't funny any more," because I had to pretend I wasn't laughing somehow.

An elderly woman said "When my son did that I used to smack him, but you're not allowed to do that any more." I said "Well, I'm hoping to avoid smacking," and assumed that was the end of it. Oh no. She said "But imagine what she'll be like in a few years' time!"

I had no response. I mean, I had a few afterwards - "Yes, she could be the kind of person who tells random strangers to hit people!" and so on - but at the time, I just sort of stood there in shock, then continued dragging Linnea another couple of paces. In total, it took less than ten steps before she got tired of being dragged (initially she thought it was funny), and another two before she decided to stand up and walk where I wanted her to.

Her jacket and padded dungarees were a bit grotty afterwards. Ho hum. Such is toddlerhood.

The shoes, by the way, will have to be returned. A few hours' wear shows that a fitting on the buckle leaves red marks on her ankles. I can't handle this show thing any more. Can't I just cut off her little toe so she fits in normal shoes?

Comments

[ailbhe]

Picking her up now gives me abdominal pains unless she cooperates. And that's not hot at 12 weeks pregnant.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I seem to have mostly blanked out how I dealt with situations like that when my back was too bad to pick ours up. Assuming that it was also too bad to wrestle them into a pushchair, I think probably what I would do would be to let go, walk the way I was intending to go and wait for the child to realise that it would rather be on the undesirable side of the store with Mummy than on the desirable side without, but whether or not that works does depend heavily on the personality of the child.

[ailbhe]

On a bad hands day, when my RSI is playing up, I stick my foot through the loop of the reins. No-one goes anywhere until she decides to cooperate. This would not work if she was the screaming tantrum type, of course, but she's not.

She *is* the "head off to Timbuktoo without Mammy quite happily" type. Though at least I know she won't run into the road most of the time...

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

*nod* The foot-through-loop tactic sounds like a good one for you. Mine were the tantrumming type, although not usually in public, but I wouldn't have liked to push it in that way.

"She *is* the "head off to Timbuktoo without Mammy quite happily" type."

[feetnotes.livejournal.com]

claire was, also; martin (her dad) being left to look after her, and being a quite-happy-so-long-as-he-couldn't-hear-actual-cries (of alarm or pain) type, left her to her own devices in the back garden, to which the gate was secured (pretty well), but around which the fence was - just two planks of wood with a gap half-way up, about three foot high, in all.

the first anyone knew about claire's travels was when the dustbin-man rang at the front door, asking whether this li'l lass they'd seen walking determinedly down the semi-main road onto which the house's not-really-a-road ran's pavement "lives here?"...

we could tease her, years later, with having been "the baby the dustbin-men threw back."