I need to work on giving more specific instructions.

I keep saying “Abigail!” or “Owen!” when what I mean is “look at me,” or “please don’t argue,” or “come here,” or some other less-pithy-but-more-accurate instruction. The other day I even heard myself ask, “What do you think I wanted you to do when I said ‘shhh’?” Hmm, well. I could have meant “stop talking,” or “talk quietly,” or “for the love of pete, do you not realize that the baby has just fallen asleep?”

Yeah, um, it’s not their job to figure out what I meant. Whoops! It’s my job to spell it out, if I expect them to actually DO what I’m thinking they should. Right! I have communication skills, really!

So I’ve been trying to pay more attention to what comes out of my mouth. This morning, for example, I asked Abigail to please “get a toy and bring it to Audrey.” I specified WHAT to get and WHERE to bring it. She brought one lacing bead. “That’s not a toy,” I explained, “it’s a choking hazard. Please bring a baby toy.” See, because I didn’t specify how BIG of a toy I wanted, though I thought I was clear that I wanted an actual TOY.

Owen’s been getting in on this action, too. Dane worked late tonight (or maybe he was out salsa dancing, I don’t know), so I had the unfortunate job great joy of tackling bedtime on my own. Owen wasn’t quite ready to sleep when I needed to put Audrey down, so I told him he could leave his lights on. “Just play quietly in here,” I told him, and shut his bedroom door. I came back ten minutes later to discover he had stripped the sheets and blankets off the bed to “wrap up” some building blocks. See, he WAS playing quietly. I didn’t hear anything that would have indicated bed sheet removal. And I did not specify about that.

So I’m working on it. Tomorrow I plan to tell Audrey to crawl around but not put paper in her mouth. We’ll see how that goes.

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