Swan Dives into Cat Food

One day, shortly after our toddler learned how to walk, he suddenly became entranced with a new kind of chaos. Hour after hour, our son would make eye contact with me across the room, look at our cat’s food dish, and look back at me. Every time, it felt like a horror movie to which I already knew the ending. I could see it coming. Time and again, he sprinted across the house and dove headfirst into the cat’s food and water. What a fun sensory experience for him, water and protein substitute scattered all across the floor. What a nightmare for his parents.

The first time, I corrected the behavior and moved on. But my son did this multiple times a day, every day. He was obsessed with looking at me and then sprinting across the house to create a new mess. Try as I might, no matter how many conversations we had, he kept doing it. After all, he’s just a toddler. It’s his first time living. I get it. Every parent has been through some version of this. Small comfort, though, when a little one is driving you to the edge of your patience. Tiny legs can still be quite fast when they want to be. I was able to stop him occasionally, but he made huge messes plenty of times.

One day, all at once, he stopped. I don’t think I even noticed it right away. Maybe a month later, I suddenly realized that the cat dish had gone undisturbed for weeks. No more cat food on the walls. No more playing in the cat water. He would just walk by as though there had never been issue, and it’s been like that ever since. Parenting is full of these stories, those small behaviors that drive you to the brink until they suddenly don’t anymore. You seem to be making no progress on helping this small creature learn, but one day they just get it. Other examples of this for our child would include throwing food, spitting water, and, you know, sleeping.

There’s a real lesson here, both for parenting and for all walks of life. Sometimes problems feel completely unsolvable, totally immovable. You grind away at them with no progress for what feels like ages. Then they move. So much of parenting is about learning to trust the process, and I want to take this forward into all walks of life the next time I am frustrated with a new challenge.

It might be a swan dive into cat food.