It’s a hard thing, mothering a preschooler. And I think, in my own circumstance, it’s a hard thing to mother a boy preschooler. I’m thoroughly convinced that many of the things I don’t “get” about A I don’t get because he’s male. But that’s beside the point. What I find most exasperating, I’ve realized, is walking that line between allowing him the time he needs to explore and fool around and figure things out, and pushing him along because I.HAVE.STUFF.TO.DO. Like tonight…he went to the bathroom and needed some more toilet paper put on the roll. We’ve recently gone to monitoring his “clean-up” after the pottying, so I went in and made sure the job got done. The boy spent for-freaking-ever folding up the toilet paper so precisely, deciding it wasn’t right, and re-folding it again. While trying the read the title of a book sitting on the bathroom floor. And while telling me a story about the sitter’s house. All I could think about were the reports I need to write for work tomorrow, the list of e-mails I have to answer, and how absolutely crappy I feel with this cold. And he’s folding and re-folding toilet paper that’s going to be used to wipe his little behind! I was so torn between getting on his case about hurrying the process along and allowing him the time to do his thing the way he needed to do it…just so he can learn…and I’m certain I probably didn’t do the right thing. Ahhh…live and learn. And be thankful I’ve got a summer off, full of days to manage these problems when I haven’t been tested by 2 dozen other preschoolers.