Category: Family

Whilst at the fair today, as we were regrouping after lunch, the lass bade me “Father, wouldst thou carry these heavy bags for our fair Mother, who is weary worn from a long morning of drudgery in the fields?”

To which I replied, “Go soak your head.”

Actually, it didn’t quite happen like that. It was more like, the lass ordered that I carry the bag for the Wife. Never minding the fact that I had been carrying the lass’ bag all morning because “it was too heavy” for her. Regardless, I was more amused at her audacity and asked who “had put her in charge?”

She hates when I challenge her like that and didn’t reply. Instead, she started doing this body-checking thing. I asked her a couple of more times (good naturedly, I’ll add) and also threw in a “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me” for good measure.

Finally, the Wife picked up one bag, I grabbed the other and I looked at my brother and made the comment “I can’t show her a soft underbelly ever, or it’ll be game over from then on. It’s going to be challenge enough when she hits the teens.”

He chuckled a little. I did too. But only a little.

I took the kids grocery shopping yesterday in preparation for an impending visit from my brother. One of the items on the list was “chick peas” which we (well, the Wife and I anyway) like to put on salads. The kids have seen them enough, so in a bid to keep them busy, I asked them to find the chick peas and bring back a couple of cans. The know what the can looks like, and the boy can read so I didn’t give it a second thought when they came back with 2 cans that sure looked like chick peas.

So last night, after the kids went to bed, the Wife asked me why I bought white beans.

What the hell are “white beans”? It only took a second for me to realize what had happened and I explained it as above. A simple mistake.

The Wife chuckled and explained that when she showed them to the lass and asked, the lass informed her she thought they were the chick peas. When the Wife told her that they were in fact beans, the lass gave that a couple seconds thought and then asked “Are white beans good for your heart too?”

Naturally, on the first full day back with power, the kids had peanut butter on toast for breakfast. They never tire of such fare.

I’ve noticed it before and figured I’d commit it to digital memory because, well, what better way to waste bits, right?

The lass actually abhors toast. I figure that’s something she’s likely to grow out of. But what I’ve always noted about how she “butters” her bread is that every square inch of the bread has to have peanut butter on it. She refuses to tolerate any of the white of the bread showing through her peanut butter. She even gets huffy with me when I prepare her peanut butter and don’t completely cover the bread (she’s gone as far as refusing to eat the peanut-buttered bread). I solved that problem by not preparing her peanut butter anymore. She’s capable, she can do it. I don’t need grief about peanut butter at 7 in the morning.

As a side effect, anything within a several inch range of the bread also ends up with peanut butter on it. Her fine motor control not being so fine, yet. One might be tempted to draw a larger conclusion like “well, she’ll be real thorough when she grows up.” Don’t. I have 5 1/2 years of evidence to the contrary.

“Time for you to get dressed,” I told them after their last cartoon finished.

“I know,” she replied.

“Make sure to brush you teeth,” I added.

“I know,” she replied.

“You know, but you don’t do. Make sure to brush them well.” She has, er, breath problems when she doesn’t brush well.

“I know,” she replied.

“Know isn’t the same as doing. You know it all, but I still have to remind you to do it,” I finished.

“I KNOW!” she semi-snapped at me. I’d finally gotten to her a bit.

Dealing with 5-year-old know-it-alls is hard.

Believe me, I know.

Over the course of making a marriage work, the Wife and I have established a number of what I’ll call “behavioral agreements.” For the purposes of this post, an example would be as follows: when the Wife is sitting down and doesn’t want to get off her duff to get something for herself, she’ll ask me to do it for her. But she always makes the request prior to me sitting down; as in, I start to sit down and she’ll say “Before you sit down, could you get me a drink of water?”

She won’t make the request if I’m already sitting down; and, if I’m fortunate enough to get my rear planted prior to the request, she’s SOL. She started doing that because way back in paleolithic times, she’d make the request literally as I sat down or a microsecond thereafter; and I let it be known that her timing sucked. She’s improved her timing and I’m still working on my next plausible excuse to evade the requests.

So this morning, having cooked everyone a nice bacon and egg breakfast I went to sit down and putter around the intertubes for a bit, when from behind me arose a very familiar sounding request, only this time it was from the lass: “Dad, before you sit down could you get me some more milk from the ‘frigerator?”

The Wife just laughed.

The Wife and I are starting to put together some ideas on how to redo the lass’ room. The main motivator is that her room is on the smaller side and it’s difficult to come up with an efficient use of the space so that there’s actually clear floor space. Towards that end, we’ve all but decided that her bed will get lofted.

In the course of brainstorming further about the lofted bed, the Wife mentioned that rather than making her a ladder to get into the bed, an idea she’d come across was a set of stairs. The neat thing about the stairs was that each stair could double as a drawer. I agreed with the novelty of the idea.

It was at this point that the lass chimed in, “Am I going to have stairs to get into my bed?”

“Maybe, although I was thinking a rope would be a lot easier…” I started.

“Naaaaaaaaah..” she said with a smile.

“Well, then we could have a helicopter come each night and morning, drop a rope down and you could hold onto it while the helicopter raises or lowers you into or out of your bed…”

“Daddy….”, still smiling. But also with a giggle.

“Alright, I know. We get a dinosaur to stick its head in the window. Then, you climb onto the head and that’s how you can get into or out of bed.”

She was about to say something, but I cut her off.

“OOOO! Even better! We’ll let a radioactive spider bite you and then you’ll be like Spiderman and you can just climb the walls to get into bed. Or you could use your webshooters [me, pantomiming web-shooter usage]. Or you could just jump into bed. We’d even let you be SpiderGirl, but you’d still have to be in bed by 8 each night. Non-negotiable.”

“Um, Dad. I’d rather use the stairs.”

“What’s wrong with the other ideas?” I said, mischievously.

She didn’t disappoint, “The helicopter might fly away with me, the rope might fall from the ceiling, the dinosaur might not be nice and the radioactive spider might kill me.”

Dang. Shot down. Just like that. I tried to salvage the spider, “But Peter Parker didn’t die when he got bit by the radioactive spider. That’s how you’ll get all those spider powers…”

“Where are we going to find a radee-active spider?” she asked.

“I’m sure we can figure it out. Maybe at a science museum.” I replied.

She considered this possibility, then scrunched up her nose and shook her head. “I’d rather have stairs.”

She drives a hard bargain.

Most of the stories I relate here are more to the innocent side of the spectrum. Examples of the kid’s naivete, amusing growing pains, that sort of thing. Lest this somewhat stilted sampling of the kids’ lives give the wrong impression, here’s an example of life with the lass when things don’t go so well.

Although, when it’s all said and done, I still find it amusing.

First, a little setup.

The lass woke up and came downstairs, did her typical morning ritual and then was served breakfast by the Wife. On her way to sit down, the lass dropped what was on her plate onto the floor.

Rather than do something about it (the sensible thing to do), she stood rooted to the spot gathering dark clouds. When the Wife told her that maybe, perhaps, possibly, it might be a good idea to clean up the mess the lass reacted in a completely sensible way. She unleashed hell.

Granted, it’s hell from a 5 year old, but the screaming was really something to behold. On balance, it didn’t go well for the lass either. She was put in the corner, where she continued her tirade and antics, at which point the Wife told her she’d be going to bed early.

And like that, the storm passed, the skies cleared, angels sang and there was peace unto the land.

Until about 7:15 that evening.

Never one to let her older brother have anything over her, the lass has decided she wants to read. Actually, this state of affairs has existed since before the Summer began. Without the constant distraction of going to school; however, the situation has intensified.

So we’ve purchased flash cards to help her memorize some of the common simple words like ‘of’, ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘are’, and so forth. She’s going to be learning these words as part of kindergarten this year, so she’ll just be ahead of the game a bit.

While going through some of the cards the other night, I thought I noticed something. After the first time through, she seemed to be predicting the next word. The giveaway was when she didn’t look at a card and managed to recite it. She had memorized the word order. Or come pretty close.

So I switched gears and did my best to pull randomly from the stack. Her focus shifted back towards looking at the words. But then another complication arose.

The cards all have a word on the back and the front; in some cases I would show her both words because I judged them appropriate for her. One example is ‘for’ and ‘get’. An easy one to remember.

Turns out she also started picking up the word pairs. So again she’d tilted a temporary advantage. I started using multiple cards and not showing the second sides to navigate around this particular adaptation of hers.

After the 3rd time through, I felt she’d done well enough so I handed her the cards and started asking her to hand back to me individual cards with a particular word on them. I started her out easy going with ‘the’ and ‘a’.

And that’s when she revealed a third trick that I hadn’t picked up on. The words on the cards are different colors. For instance, ‘the’ is printed in orange while ‘it’ is printed in green. She’d memorized the colors of the different words and used it as a cue to eliminate certain words from the realm of possibilities.

The other thing she did, which her brother did and still does to a degree, is look at the first letter in the word and make a guess. For instance, she never missed the word ‘the’ after the first time through. My suspicion is she noticed that the only flash card word that started with the letter ‘t’ was ‘the’ so she’d use that as her cue to say the word.

So that’s 4 different things she memorized, as opposed to just memorizing the words themselves.

This is what I’m up against.