Sister sleeper.

Me: Baby, please don't touch that. That's mommy's.

Baby grins at me and ever so slowly pulls at the laptop cord.

Me: Baby. (giving my best stern mommy voice)

Baby looks over at me, smiles, then yanks on the cord.

Me: No, baby, no! You cannot touch mommy's things. Now come over here and read a book, or start a puzzle, or do something non-laptop cord related.

Baby giggles and heads towards a book. Ya, this whole discipline thing might be a problem.

How do you set boundaries for an adorably sweet 18 month old? Moreover, is it even possible to consider discipline at such a young age? My mother insists on "re-directing" baby to something new every time he gets his little fingers into something. She also insists that this new found "bad" behaviour must come from the other kids at daycare (Pfft! Not my grandson!). But what if baby seriously just wants to push the limits? What if baby just wants to see how far he can go? And really, can I blame him for this? Are these not times when he's learning to be a part of our house?

For the most part, we really do have a great listener on our hands. Baby is quite attentive and actually listens when we call him, when we give him instructions, when we ask him to give us a back massage. Yep, our little one is becoming a full fledged contributing member of this house. However, there are those times when baby throws us a fast one. Take dinner tonight, for instance. Baby thought it would be cute to begin smashing his otherwise tasty, but uneaten butternut squash. After asking him politely to stop (which he did for all of 4 seconds) the smashing began again, this time with a slow introduction of "tap.....tap" on the orange mass. This continued right on through to a rapid "smash..smash..smash.."full of gusto, all the while grinning goofily at his father and I. I smirked and urged my husband to not laugh. He responded by first hiding his grin, then smothering his laughter, to finally choking on his prime rib, all in an attempt to hide his obvious humour in the whole situation. What was I doing? Well crap. Of course I began laughing, too. Of course, I swiftly removed the fork from Baby's hands. He laughed heartily at the whole situation. Groan.

To be honest, I can't really say I am bothered by Baby's attempts on pushing the limits. Sure, I would be mortified if he tried the whole butternut squash incident at someone else's house, but is it fair to really get upset at an otherwise great little boy? Absolutely not. And we do as my mother suggests and redirect and hope that his short attention span will move onto something far more interesting than smashing the food on his plate. Besides, the kid really does rub my back. I can deal with a bit of orange goop in my hair.