Sock shock

Monkey is not very good about dressing himself these days, though he's perfectly well able to do it when something enticing enough is dangling on the other side of clothedness. And because I am Bad, and also Impatient, I usually just do it for/with him. My reasoning, apart from the fact that I am congenitally averse to being late, is that at some point he'll start to do it himself, so I may as well save us all the stress and just help him out now. (That's called the "He won't be doing it when he goes to college" defence. If I'm still dressing him when he's 17... well, shoot me now.)

The dressing mostly doesn't bug me, but the shoes and socks do, especially when they have to go back on multiple times a day and I'm always trying to wrangle the same things onto a very wriggly toddler who's likely to throw them off and take the trousers with them for good measure, if I don't get her into the car, stat.

So the other afternoon, when we didn't have to be anywhere in a hurry and Mabel was feeling amenable to clothing, both inner and outer, I decided to take a stand and get Monkey to at least try to put on his own shoes and socks. He faffed around finding them for an age, dancing over and back tantalizingly close to the items in question, as I summoned my inner zen and waited, calmly repeating my request to put them on, or even to sit down and try, and ask for help if he needed it.

Eventually, along with all the other superpower-related burbling and excuses, he said, "I don't like it when the words come out upside down..."

Aw, I thought. What a poet. He's trying so hard to express his true feelings.

"You don't have to talk about them; you just have to wear them," I said, quite pleased with my pithy response.

"No." As withering a look as you can get from a four-and-a-half-year-old. "The writing. On the socks. Is supposed to be on the bottom. They get twisted over and I can't get them straight."

Oh. Right. The non-slip text they put on the soles of kids' socks. So much for my poet.

However, with a little help from me to orientate them correctly, the socks went on, followed in fairly short order by the shoes. A tiny triumph for patience, just for one day.