It's all about the snacks

I do it mostly for the snacks. I suppose that probably needs some explanation.

My son, aka the Little Man, is one of the two lights of my life. He's very much a routine driven 3 year old, which is not unusual for this age. But as She Who Must be Obeyed (SWMBO) and I have discovered, interrupting that routine is akin to opening the Gates of Hell, Unleashing the Dogs of War, and/or summoning the love-child of Chucky and Linda Blair. It might be an overstatement, but when it's in progress, it seems like it.

Anyway, I digress. I've handled nighttime duties for as long as the Little Man has been with us. I truly don't mind spending the hours between coming home from the office and his bedtime hanging out. That gives SWMBO time to decompress with me playing man-to-man coverage, and I get to see the Little Man for more than an hour or two. It also means I get to deal with the stresses of a toddler attempting to assert his independence when it comes to bedtime, but that's a different post.

One of the rituals he has is cookies and milk before bedtime, that's then followed up with giving Mama a hug and a kiss, washing hands and face, and brushing teeth. This is reward sticker driven behavior, and it seems to be working. After he gets to bed (post changing of diaper and reading books), I normally have an hour or two to spend before I go to bed. And I take care of the leftover cookies, thankyouverymuch.

My real point in discussing this is that understanding that my Little Man is routine driven has caused me to examine my own routines and to see clearly that I am also a routine driven person. Maybe not to the same extent that he is, but there are routines that I am now aware of that if they are disrupted, I am disrupted for the whole day. The biggest one that I am fully aware of (but had not appreciated fully until now) is that if I am even out of sequence for a moment in the morning, it completely throws me off and I'm basically on edge for the rest of the day. If I swap shaving and toothbrushing, I'm done. If I have to go downstairs to get clothing to wear, if I do my lunch the night before instead of assembling while I'm in the kitchen fixing coffee for the day, I'm completely cactus for the day.

It does make me wonder that if there's a real dividing line between routine driven and being obsessive. I do understand the difference between obsessive and OCD, but it does seem to me that there's a lot more grey there than I would probably have expected.