Along with the better grasp of language has been an ability to reason with him more, and to make him understand things. If he wants to go for a walk and I say he has to wear his hat and he protests, I just have to say that if he won't wear it then we can't go for a walk. I might have to repeat myself a few times but eventually he understands that he has to do something to get what he wants. This goes for food, diaper changes...pretty much everything. That's not to say we don't have our struggles as he is a toddler, but at least now I feel like we can usually come to an agreement on most things.
I'm happy to report the hitting and pushing has gotten much better. He still does it occasionally, and so I'm not completely comfortable just letting him run free with lots of other kids around but FINALLY I can say there is real progress. If he's about to run into someone he will make a concerted effort to move around them instead of just pushing them out of the way, and he rarely hits other kids anymore. He does still hit me, especially when he's frustrated, but we're dealing with it and at least when he does it he knows that it's wrong.
In other news, I had a revelation today. From reading the book I mentioned before I realized that Ben does not handle transitions well, and it relatively slow to adapt. A transition can be anything, but it's particularly hard for him when it's one activity after another in a short amount of time. I've always thought this was just something he would grow out of and signed us up for activities that I thought he would enjoy, not really taking into account the fact that they were incredibly structured. Case in point, this morning. We're doing a little three week nature class called Tiny Treks that's suppose to be geared for toddlers but it goes at such a fast pace it sets him up to get anxious and overwhelmed. In the span of two hours we ring bells, sing songs, go a mini hike, do a craft, have a snack, read several books, and get hand stamps. He was having a really hard time with it today, all he wanted to do was push the teachers little cart back and forth, and could care less about all the other stuff going on. But I pushed him (thinking that he needed to get something out of it and that I needed to get my moneys worth) and it didn't end well. The same thing with Gymboree - he loves to climb on the structures but hates the songs, the activites, the parachute time. It just moves too fast for him.
Compare this to a couple days ago when we went to PLAY! in Los Altos and he had a grand time. No structure, no one telling him how to play. We were there for two hours and he spent the majority of it pushing a little toy shopping cart around putting the fake food in a taking it back out. That's what he wanted to do, and was so happy just to be left alone to do it.
So even though today was frustrating, it was good in the sense that I finally realized I was doing these things because I thought they should be fun, even though for him they weren't. I got home, cancelled our Gymboree membership, and am looking forward to a summer of unstructured fun.
