The Independent Dresser

Luke is at a point with his development that trying to teach him to dress himself seems pointless. But over the last month or so, Luke has shown some great signs of understanding and wanting to help dress or in his case undress himself. The last few weeks Luke has given me his foot to put his socks, braces and shoes on.


But he is much better at trying to help undress. When I ask him for his shoe he gives it to me and even bends over and touches his laces. When I get his shoes off, many times if I go to his other foot to get that shoe before getting off the brace on his current foot, he’ll reach over and touch it like he is trying to tell me I forgot something. When we get to the socks he tries to take them off on his own. He used to be able to do this before he started wearing braces. Now, it proves to be a pretty funny sight. The socks are almost molded to his foot after being in the braces for so long. So Luke will grab and pull and pull and pull and nothing seems to happen. So I, being the most wonderful mommy, help by pulling his socks about half-way off so he can then do the rest….sometimes even then, the socks still stick pretty good. So you can envision Luke pulling with all his might (with only one hand..because why would he need two?)…and falling backwards and rolling sideways and trying all these different angles to get his socks off.

Anyway, that was just the beginning. Lately he has been obsessed with his long sleeves. When we are eating and I push or roll them up, Luke will reach over with his dirty, food covered hands and try to pull them back down. When he does get it back down he keeps pulling like he is trying to get his arm out of his sleeve completely. So when he starts doing this I have to distract him with more food, which usually works.

The really funny example of Luke helping to undress happened yesterday. To understand you have to know that Luke has been wearing flannel PJ’s lately that are two piece, shirt and pants with no feet. When I went to get him up Luke had one arm completely out of his shirt already…like he was ready to start the day. Then later that morning, he was still in his PJ’s, Luke was crawling all over and I noticed his pants were slipping a little but I wasn’t too concerned. Well the next thing I knew I looked in on him and his sister and all of a sudden he had no pants, just his sweater like shirt and his diaper. I told him he can’t do that in public and then found his pants that were about 4 feet away down the hall and put them back on Luke. Silly man!! If he can’t pull off his PJ’s in order to dress for the day, I guess he can just crawl around until they fall off!!