I'm Proud of My Son!

My son has a little bowl he carries his snacks around in.  It has a lid on it, and he carries it ever so carefully by the open lid when he walks around the house.  Today he accidentally spilled some of his snacks on the kitchen floor.  Hubby and I just looked at him for a second after he spilled them to see how he'd react, and you know what he did?  He bent over, picked up a snack, and put it right back in his bowl.  And then he bent over 2 or 3 more times, picked up some more snacks, and put them back in his bowl.  By this time we were clapping and cheering for him, so I'm not sure how much more he would have picked up if we didn't distract him.  We helped him clean up the rest.  =)  We always clap and cheer and compliment when he does new, good things.  For instance, when he first learned how to put a magnet on the fridge we cheered at him every time he did it, and now he does it all the time just for some positive attention.  He'll put the magnet on the fridge, run into the next room if we weren't there to see it, and start clapping for himself to tell us what he did.  He loves positive reinforcement.

The real miracle about what he did today is that, without ever being taught how to "clean up" or "put away" he instinctively tried to clean up his own mess.  What toddler DOES that?  We never taught him how to put anything away, and to be honest, we aren't the tidiest people in the world so it's not like he sees us cleaning and putting things away all day every day.  I had a feeling he might be developing clean-freak tendencies though because when he plays he always tries to stack things on top of each other, and he has specific places he likes to put some things. It's not unusual for him to take a drink from his cup, put it on the coffee table, look at the cup on the coffee table, and then move the cup over to the end table instead to see if it looks better there.  He's just amazing.