Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Sean's future in a trench coat


Lately I have begun to be afraid that Sean will be an exhibitionist. At least, he would be labeled that way. It isn't that he WANTS to show himself, as an exhibitionist does. It's just that he doesn't really care. I guess really he's an anti-inhibitionist. He has no appropriate sense of modesty. I say no appropriate sense, because he does have some sense of it. It just doesn't have anything to do with keeping his clothes on like it does for the rest of us.
Yesterday he got out of the bathtub, and was walking around naked. I told him to get dressed, and he informed me haughtily that he doesn't WEAR clothes in the morning. Apparently this rule applies to the rest of the day, too, because he can be found naked at just about anytime. You might say, "well, Mom, get some clothes on that kid!" Have you ever tried to put clothes on a cat? Sean doesn't want to wear clothes anymore than your cat does. He does wear them sometimes. Last week, we had relatives over for several hours and he managed to stay clothed the entire time. If I try to force him into clothes when he's refusing to be dressed, I'm fighting a losing battle. Even if I manage to wrestle them onto him, he just takes them off. He knows he won't be playing outside or going to McDonald's if he doesn't have his clothes on.
School starts next week, he will be going to kindergarten. And Mommy will prevail. He will be wearing clothes. But then my problem will be his intense pickiness with clothes. When he does wear clothes, he's a real Diva. One of his hobbies is to get out every stitch he owns and try them all on one at a time. When he's done with one thing, it is discarded, on the floor of course. And in the end he comes out wearing nothing most of the time. Of course, everything has to match perfectly. Ok, that I can understand. Where we run into trouble is when he doesn't want THAT pair of white socks, he needs the other pair of white socks and expects me to find them. Or he wants that green shirt with the dinosaur on it because it's the only shirt that matches THESE pants. So we are beginning now to enforce a condition. Night before, we are going to pick out what he is going to wear and he is NOT going to be allowed to change his mind in the morning, so he has to choose carefully.
Now, William, on the other hand, doesn't really deliberately go about in the nude. He just gets out of the shower and tends to forget to get dressed. Once he was just stepping out of the bathroom (naked), and at that moment the doorbell rang. I tried my dangedest to get to that door before him, but I didn't make it. He flung the door open and said, "Hi!" in all his manly glory. The two Jehovah's Witness ladies on the door step were most admirably unruffled, as is their way, and I told them I couldn't talk to them just then. As this was quite obviously true, they made no protest. And this, people, is the story of my life.

2 comments:

  1. Very interesting read! Have you ever sent anything to a publisher?

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  2. I haven't, Missy, but someday. I thought I would start out this way and get feedback from friends and family!

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