Nakedidity

Now that she's discovered that it's possible to take off all her clothes during naptime (read: while Mom's not there to stop her), Beth has progressed to taking off her clothes every time she gets in bed. So I go in to get her up in the morning, or wake her up from a nap, and she's bouncing on her bed wearing nothing but a soggy diaper. Grinning. Giggling. "I'm naked!"

I'm pinning this on Scott and his gleeful shouts of "Naked Bethie!" when she was an even littler squirt than she is now. And to be perfectly fair, here, it's not that I object to her sleeping nude per se...it's that I can see the day she figures the diaper has to go along with the embroidered denim capris. And I'm having bad flashbacks to the poop debacle of a week and a half ago.

We've had a few Serious Talks about this issue, which she's perfectly capable of ignoring completely. By Saturday I was so sick of it I made her put all the clothes back on by herself, which she's never done before, and there were many tears and cries of "I can't do it!" involved. (I'm a big fan of consequences matching actions, mostly because it makes coming up with the consequences that much easier.) The clothes all made it back on, though the back of her waistband was doing an awkward little inward roll and was about two inches lower than it should have been. And she has a terrible time aiming for her socks — there's always a toe or two that ends up on the wrong side of the opening, which frustrates her no end.

Today, though, I had a minor brainstorm. I dug out four large-ish safety pins and attached her pink flowered shirt to her flower-appliqué khakis: front, back, and both sides. She was not happy about naptime to begin with (there was kicking and screaming involved, and many, many tears, all of which only proved how badly she needed the nap) and having her clothes pinned on her was the final humiliation. Oh, the drama! But she fell asleep pretty quickly — within 20 minutes or so — and took a good solid nap. And when she woke up she was a much happier little munchkin, and it turned out that in the 20 minutes before she conked out she had actually climbed out of bed, picked up her socks from the spot on the floor where she'd thrown them in disgust during the tantrum, and put them back on her feet. With the heels in the right place and everything. How about that?