Has Anyone Seen The Clippers?

Lately Harper has become intrigued with clipping his fingernails. This switch has caught me a bit off guard because for the last year I would "sneak" and clip his nails while he was sleeping because he would never sit still long enough if he was conscious.

Now he is always wanting to clip his fingernails and toenails. He goes searching for little hangnails and nails that seem too long. Of course he tries to accomplish the task himself but usually ends up taking a chunk of skin off or cutting the nail in the most awkward design. (He does have an independent streak like his mother so he tends to learn by trial and error.)

Recently, he discovered the art of diversion around bedtime. On more than one occasion he has found it necessary to clip his nails to avoid going to sleep. This tactic worked the first few times but I am figuring out his procrastination method for avoiding the bedtime routine. Nail clipping has taken the place of cutting tags out of his shirt as the previous procrastination method. This only worked until every pj shirt he owned was tagless and the excuse no longer had meaning.

Today Harper used the need for nail clipping as an excuse to try and prolong the "getting ready" process prior to school. This invariably has a ripple effect on what time Matt and I get to work. He knows it gets under our skin but I'm pretty sure that is why he does it. Toddlers have a way of continuing behavior that pushes buttons. As he was talking about the need to have one or more of his nails clipped this morning, we were somehow distracted by something else and he obviously forgot about his need for pushing our buttons. (This is also a common toddler trait - they get side tracked pretty easy and can be diverted to something else if the "something else" seems more important at the time.)

To be honest I had forgotten about the episode as well until about 3pm today at work when I kept feeling something a little odd in my shirt. After make some minor readjustments that did not seem to work, I closed my office door and took a closer look. Much to my surprise, I had a pair of nail clippers tucked neatly between my undershirt and my bra. Obviously when I picked Harper up to take him to the car this morning, he no longer had the need for his clippers and deposited them in the closest place he could find..... right down the front of my shirt. What baffles me the most is that it took almost 8 hours before I even noticed they were there. This tells you the level of discomfort that you come to get use to as a parent and the odd things that you are likely to discover upon your person on any given day. I just had to giggle to myself and then I found a hangnail of my own to clip.