When we were dealing with his contacts 2 weeks ago the lady who fitted him for his contacts had asked Dakota if he was right-handed or left-handed. When Dakota told her he was right-handed she told him to do everything with his right eye first (remove the right contact first and put that one in first.) Once we got home and over the next few days this turned out to be difficult for him because he has an extremely lazy left eye...his left eye is his "bad" eye. So what was happening was when he removed his right contact first, then he was concentrating so hard on trying to get his left contact out that he couldn't concentrate on keeping his eye straight so his eye would turn inward therefore his contact would go in towards his nose and he couldn't grab it...the frustration just grew worse and worse.
Now the simple solution here would seem to be to just switch to doing everything with the left eye first wouldn't it?? Yeah, you would think so! But not so! Do you want to know why? Because my son is a rule-follower. Yep, you heard it. Somebody in authority or leadership gives him a directive or command and he won't swerve from that until that somebody tells him differently (because they know better than I do.) I mean, I've never worn contacts before so what do I know? I'm just his mom sitting here watching him struggle and watching his eye turn in towards his nose! Oh for crying out loud I got so frustrated with him because he wouldn't try it MY way because SHE (the lady at the optical shop) told him to do it the other way. We deal with this kind of stuff with him all the time - and it is annoying!
Okay, fast forward to this past Sunday night. We had our monthly Meet the Church community missions project going on all afternoon and I opted not to participate this month. I had had a very long week and needed to rest. Dakota wanted to work at a fish fry at the Volunteer Fire Department so we arranged for Greg to drop him off there with our pastor and his son and then we would pick him back up at the church later that evening. There was a teacher's meeting and dinner planned at church that night that my parents were attending but there wasn't anything for Dakota to do. After Dakota had been back at the church for about 30 mins (and the meeting was in full swing) I called him to let him know I was on my way to get him. I actually had to meet a woman to pick up something and was going to grab Dakota at the same time - so this trip wasn't JUST to pick Dakota up from church. Dakota started begging me to let him stay there, he was having a good time playing with the kids and he would just catch a ride with Mimi and Bops (my parents.)
Me - "No, you are not supposed to be there. That is only for teachers and their kids."
Dakota - "Mom, I'm not bothering anybody! We are just on the playground playing. I can ride home with Mimi and Bops! There's only a few kids here anyway. What's it going to hurt?"
This went on for a few minutes when I finally realized I sounded just like Dakota...a rule-follower -and he was right! What was it going to hurt? How many times have we been to something like that when other kids were there (that technically "shouldn't" have been there but it didn't hurt anything and everybody had a good time?!) I gave in and let him stay. He had a great time. Nobody came and arrested me for breaking the "rules" and I realized I really need to CHILL OUT - at least on some things.
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