Leveling Up In Parenting

Much like a video game, there are times when you’ve improved/accomplished enough that you can move up to the next parenting level. That doesn’t happen often for me — out of the ten established parenting levels, a two is usually my baseline — but I did level up recently. It was pretty much an accident, but I’ll take it.

Baby Girl wanted me to play hide and seek with her one day. I’m not too wild about playing hide and seek with her because of how she plays. Her “tactics” were cute when she was one, but now they make me fear for her a little bit.

See? Literally this is all she does — she puts her head under a pillow or blanket and yells for me to come and find her. That’s it. Like her face being hidden is enough for the world to suddenly not know where she is. (This was especially amusing the time she decided to “hide” after she got undressed for her bath and I found her with her bum sticking up.) Usually I’m still sitting beside of her when she hides and says she’s ready for me to find her. Rarely am I allowed to hide, and when I do hide, she wants me to hide under a cover or a blanket on the bed, and then declares that SHE is hiding and I’m to find her instead, two feet away from me, partially under a blanket. She’d be the first to go in a horror movie.

At this point we’re kind of wondering how much longer we’re going to have to keep pretending that she’s a) hiding and that we’re b) finding her. I wonder if on some level if she’s just screwing with us, to see how long she can keep it going, but then that’d make her a little evil genius, and I’ve already got one of those in the house.

But when Baby Girl wants to play hide and seek, usually I do. The time that I leveled up, I tried again to encourage her to for real hide and for real seek. On her turn, she went straight to the bedroom and partially hid under the blanket. On my turn, I made her count and went and hid in the laundry room. I waited and waited and waited. And then my husband knocked on the door.

Oops.

A light bulb went off over my head — I can now hide all I want and she can never get to me. And considering how small her hands are, I could probably do this forever. (Really, though, my MIL is tiny like Baby Girl, and she can rarely open the doorknobs at our house because her hands are so small.)

Yep, parenting level up.

And then I leveled back down when I blurted out “That’s what she said!” in response to a comment Little Man made. Oops again.

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