It was one of those days when I and my one and a half year old had returned home from shop loaded with his new toy- a huge plastic play tent where he could squeeze into, stay, play and crawl out of it. His dad was not at home so I decided to build the tent. But then the tiniest member of our family seemed to be very restless and was not allowing the progress. Initially I scolded him but a moment later he would return to his old mischief of fiddling with the parts of the tent before its completion. The third time, I gave up patience and a big shriek from me emerged. The good behavior of staying away just lasted for three seconds. This time my concentration was only on how to stop him. My anger was welling up slowly. Suddenly I remembered that in a religious discourse which I had seen on TV, a lady confessed that she had gone out and when she returned her 3 year old toddler wailed and cried. Initially she wanted to slap her but she tried explaining her that she had to go out for a short while. The child continued to wail. Even after explaining her 3 times, there was no change to the behavior. After repeating her explanation calmly she found the child calming down and was stunned by the power of patience and gentle but firm way of explaining. I tried to adopt the same method of explaining in his own language that I am building a tent for him and he can play very soon...(it is surly hard to explain a kid whose vocabulary is less than 50 words). But I repeated. He wailed. He stared, he raised his eyebrow (one of the earliest forms of his unique expressions). He did not seem to understand very much but perhaps got the message. The next fifteen minutes he preferred playing silently with other toys near me and I assembled things. That was quite a deed from 18 month restless little explorer. 5 minutes later, his dad returned and the little guy made cautious attempt to go near it, but by then the tent was ready, courtesy to his enthusiastic dad waiting to be used and played. I smiled at the pair and felt that "patience pays".
