"Pits"

On a typical weekday morning, I will get Justin up and feed him his bottle. When he is done with that, I will take him back to his room to get him dress and talk to the other two boys so that they start to wake up. Once the older two are awake, Nathan and Darren fight to see who is going to get dressed first. For some reason Nathan refuses to dress himself in the morning, and it is easier for me to dress him than it is for me to fight him.

Now that the back story is told, I can continue on. I put a bib overall outfit on Justin the other morning and then got Nathan dressed. I pulled Darren's clothes out of the closet and he goes into complete meltdown mode. I managed to get his shirt on him, but as soon as I try to put his jeans on him, he starts flailing his legs. He is saying, what I believe I hear anyway, is "I want to wear my pits." I am asking what pits are and trying to calm him down. After a while of trying to figure out what he wants, I ask him to show me. He goes into the closet and points to another pair of bibs of Justin's. I tell him that I packed his pair away in the tubs, and that he needs to wear something else. His meltdown gets a little worse when I say that. By this time I feel like I have been fighting with him for over five minutes, so I will try anything to hurry him along. I tell him that I will go in the dinning room (where all the clothes tubs are sitting currently) and see if I can find them. I do a cursory search and do not see his bibs. I go back into their room and tell him that I can't find them. He then tells me to look with a flashlight. I can chuckle and roll my eyes about it now, but I was reaching the boiling point by this time. I told him that he will either put the jeans on or go to daycare in his underwear. He chose to wear his jeans. Then I fight with both the boys about getting their shoes on, then their coats/sweatshirts on. It took over twenty minutes that morning to get them both dressed and out the door.

They are boys; it shouldn't take that long to get ready in the morning. It's not like I have to put ribbons in their hair...I don't even comb their hair in the mornings. Every morning is a challenge. If I want to be optimistic, I can just say they are preparing me for a grueling day in the coal mines.