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Maddie: More milk.
Me: More milk, please.
Maddie: Turn it up.
Me: Can you please turn it up.
Maddie: More pancakes.
Me: Can I please have more pancakes.
I am so tired of reminding Maddie to use nice words. I feel like I live on auto-correct with Maddie, just following her around correcting her words. When is she going to internalize the concept of being polite? Not be so demanding? How did she learn to be so demanding??
———- Long pause. Insert a-ha moment here.——————
Oh. She learned it from me.
Me: Come here, Maddie.
Me: Zip your coat.
Me: Put your cup in the fridge.
Me: Say good-bye to your friends.
Geesh, I’m bossy. They do what they see, right?
I realized on my drive to work this morning that I need to stop telling Maddie to use nice words. I need to show her. Duh. So, when we pulled into the daycare parking lot this morning, I put away the bossy and took out the nice. I said, “Maddie, please grab your backpack.” And, “Can you please hold my hand in the parking lot?” And, “Will you hang up your coat?”
They do what they see. Less bossy, more nice.
Murphy's Law 
Oh, those a-ha moments!
“I feel like I live on auto-correct” is a very good line…captures the feeling.
Oh, how very true this is. The little ones are the sponges and the big ones need to see us model those behaviors. This is a great reminder.
Oh the auto-correct! I live and breathe in autocorrect I feel. I love this because I’m right there with you. “Seriously mommy?” About threw me for a loop until I found myself saying it not three minutes later.
Been there…and have spent my life being as ‘bossy pants’. One thing that I know that I worked on so hard was raising them to say ‘thank you’. They are now people who do remember at least that one thing. xo
LAUGH! So very true, though sometimes it takes hearing it from THEM to figure it out.
Funny! And true… been there, done that, and lived to say they now add please and thank you without fail!
I feel like this ALL the time. It is so hard to remember to model polite language when you are saying the same things every day.
Yes, it’s true, happens in the classroom too. Monkey see, monkey do! You’re terrific to figure it out!
This is how I think most of us feel at one point or another. Whether we think of our students or our kids, this is a great reminder to practice what we preach! Thanks for sharing this!
This was always an issue with my me and my husband when our kids were little. I would say please and he would say you are the parent! Of course, I think I was right because we have polite kids! 🙂
SO TRUE. Kids learn what they LIVE not what they hear…..I am not the best at always doing this….so I too need the reminder!