This is not the most momentous of challenges but it's causing me quite a headache. I've been doing a lot of work recently to be a calmer parent and I think I've made a lot of improvements. But certain things just press my buttons!
Yesterday I took our 2 DS (3.5 and 1.5) to an outdoor adventure play place. They both love playing with diggers so I took a bunch of them along and thought they could dig in the mud. Problem is, DS1 currently (for the last few weeks) has a thing about sand getting in his shoes. His solution to this, whenever he's playing in sand, is to not walk normally but to walk on his knees. And he was doing this yesterday as well, despite there not being any sand, just muddy ground. Now obviously I know I'm not to expect a totally logical approach to everything from a 3.5yo and usually I can work around things but for some reason whenever he does this it just gets me really worked up. He was on his knees. the entire time we were there. Even walking from the entrance to the main play area. When the centre was about to close, he decided he needed a wee, but he wouldn't walk to the toilet, he had to do this weird knee walk thing, which is obviously really slow. I told him we didn't have time to go for a wee before the place closed if he was going to go on his knees (the toilet was quite a walk away from where we were). He wouldn't stand up so I ended up just carrying him to our bike (as well as DS2) and going home with no wee. He did manage to wait until we got home but he got really upset and I was so stressed and grumpy about the whole thing that I've probably just reinforced his stress about sand and mud.
What would you have done in that situation? Can anyone suggest an approach they would use to helping him de-stress about sand in shoes? Playing with diggers is literally his favourite thing to do so we go to sandpits a lot.