Yesterday,my one -year old toddler seemed to be in his best behaviour. After observing him for quite a while I decided to leave him alone with his imaginative language and single participant game of exploration and his creative baby talk. A moment later when I checked him, he seemed to be too engrossed with his new toy. The moment I entered the kitchen, I heard a slight noise followed by a small groan which threatened to turn into howls. And what did I see? The little explorer had been holding one whole liter of milk in a big vessel which was taken by him from the fridge. Before I could get surprised as to how did he manage to get it, I noticed 90% of the milk spilled across and the little one with his feet on the spilled milk. The first instinct was to shout at him, but since it is no use crying over the split milk, I decided to keep my cool. I first washed him well and made him sit on the bed and said in a firm tone to be in the bed and not run around for any mischief. Although he couldn't understand what I really said, he knew from the tone that he is not supposed top be anywhere near me.
I went to the messy room smelling of milk (ewieeeee). The place looked really bad with milk all around the floor, near the fridge and even under it. I first moved the fridge away from the wall and noticed that the little genius had dropped/thrown lots of small things at that corner of fridge and how lucky I am to have noticed it. Well, the cleaning work easily took half an hour but I was hell bent on taking things positively, I felt that am neither chatting with a friend (utter waste of time) nor upto any other entertainment source like TV but rather finding myself preoccupied with bending exercise ( moping the floor). Half an hour later, the moping extended to the entire room and lo and behold the house looked clean in no time. .. The little monkey was back to business of exploring but was nowhere near the fridge for the entire day. I wondered, if laziness had crept in I won't have ended up cleaning the home.
Had I not decided to take things positively, it might have been downpour of anger with the toddler (i know, its unfair) alongwith sudden surge of affection for him and hating myself for scolding him. Often we get angry for a split second say things to others that hurt them and the regret it after a while (a day or two, a few days, months and years). Perhaps if we keep patience with other people just like keeping it with kids, it may solve many problems..
