She's No Edward Scissorhands

We've all done it. Mentioned something that our child is doing particularly well and then as if to purposely prove us wrong they contradict us the very next day.

Jadyn had two incidents with scissors last week. On Tuesday, I was chatting on the phone with Danielle about their impending move and Jake and Jadyn were to my knowledge playing quietly in their rooms. However, we all know that when kids are being too quiet they are usually up to no good. Jadyn strides out of Jake's room yielding a pair of Jake's kid craft scissors raised to her ponytail with a huge grin on her face, "Mommy look!"

Why do toddlers/preschoolers think we are going to proud of their accomplishment to find and use scissors so inappropriately? Anyway, I gasped in horror, "JADYN, NOOOOOOOOOOO!" as I snatched the scissors from her hands.

She responded in sobs, "Mommy you scared me." to which I replied, "I'm sorry sweetie, but you scared me".

I immediately hung up with Danielle and began the task of checking Jadyn for missing chunks of hair. Luckily kiddie scissors are fairly dull and Jadyn is still pretty uncoordinated. She did manage to snip a few baby hairs off the one side but no one will ever notice. We were extremely lucky, not only that she did not cut her hair but that she did not harm herself. I know people whose children have managed to chop off inches of their hair that takes months, if not longer to grow back. And for the record, I THOUGHT the scissors were in a safe place in the top drawer of Jake's dresser with their other craft supplies. Now that I know she can move and climb on top of the train table to gain access to that drawer, the scissors have been moved to a child-proofed and unreachable cabinet in the kitchen. Phew!

I do recall mentioning in September's month end report how wonderfully Jadyn had been doing at story time at the library and with the scissor incident only days old, I was pleased to find out that for the craft of the week we were cutting out hand traces to form a sunflower. I thought Jadyn would enjoy the opportunity to experiment with scissors appropriately. I thought wrong.

I did not assume she was going to be able to cut out the hand traces, so I gave her some scrap paper to practice cutting but she could not get the movement down right and what started out as simple frustration escalated into the BIGGEST full blown temper tantrum in Jadyn history. And we are at the library mind you. I finally cut my loses, grab the pieces of our unfinished craft and apologized profusely to the librarian who was trying to apologize to ME for integrating scissors in the craft. SHE was apologizing to me while Jadyn was screaming and crying and kicking, her face turning beet red.

Once outside, I was determined to get to the bottom of this. Surely something else was going on here. Maybe Jadyn's head injury was worse than I thought. Or maybe she was coming down with something. Surely there was more going on here. I finally get her calmed down and I ask her why she was crying inside the library and she ensured me it was indeed because she could not cut with the scissors.

So in conclusion, we will not be taking the kiddie craft scissors out of the child proof cabinet anytime soon.