Tag: the lass

“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.

The Tooth fairy responded to the lass’ letter from the other day:

Thank you for letting me know that you were at your Grandma’s house. I am so glad I was able to find you there.

Signed,
The Tooth Fairy

The note was written in silver ink on a fancy piece of paper with a picture of a fairy on it. Words cannot describe the level of glee the lass was in after her brother read the letter to her. The boy, for his part, was very impressed with the letter, deeming it to be an authentic work. They were both impressed with the picture, automatically assuming that it was a picture of the Tooth Fairy herself. She wanted to write a “You’re welcome” letter back to the Tooth Fairy, but we told her that she can’t have the Tooth Fairy as a pen pal.

The day will come when she and her brother figure all this stuff out. When it comes, I’m wondering how bad a day it will be. At this point, their belief is so strong that I can’t help but think that the fall will be long, hard and jarring. But then I remember that I, too, once believed like that and managed to survive the revealing of the man behind the curtain.

In the meantime, our neighbor has definitely earned a bottle of wine for a job well done on this caper.

The lass lost her 4th tooth last night. But she had a problem. She was going to be staying at Grandma and Grandpa’s and was concerned that the Tooth Fairy would not be able to find her. She asked me if I thought there would be a problem.

Never one to miss a chance to mess with a child’s mind, I answered with a “definite maybe.” I told her that the Tooth Fairy is pretty busy and has to run a pretty tight ship to keep up with all the kids whose teeth she has to pick up. I told her it was entirely possible that the Tooth Fairy wouldn’t know where to find her.

Enter the Wife, who suggested she leave the Tooth Fairy a note telling her where the lass would be. She wrote the following:

Tooth Feree- Wr at Grandmas

And she signed her name. (The ‘Wr’ is pre-K spelling for “we’re” for the uninitiated. Be afraid…)

She was delighted this morning when she woke up to find her tooth gone and a caboodle filled with girlie stuff. And with a lesson in taking the bull-by-the-horns thrown in free of charge.

The lass took a shower tonight, but it was on the later side. So, before going to bed, the Wife took her into our bathroom so she could comb and dry her hair a bit before going to bed. I remained downstairs with the boy, helping him with a picture search.

After finishing it up, we trudged upstairs. The Wife was still fussing with the lass in the bathroom, which seemed a bit odd but I didn’t think too much of it. “The girls are having a bonding moment in the bathroom” was my thought. I decided to water a couple of plants and when I made my way back to our room, the Wife cornered me and asked “Did your daughter tell you what she did?”

Note the use of the word “daughter” here. That’s a signaling word indicating the lass has perpetrated some sort of mischief on the sly. I told the Wife that the lass hadn’t said “boo” to me.

“Yeah, she doesn’t want to tell you and I don’t blame her.” More signaling phrases. Whatever it was, the “act” was moving up the severity scale quickly.

The Wife finally, er, “cut” to the chase. She said “She cut her bangs with her scissors today.” (There might be an expletive or two missing from that.)

Apparently, the Wife realized something was amiss while combing her hair. She noticed that there was a “hole” in her bangs in the middle of the lass’ forehead. The Wife was finally able to squeeze out of her that she’d used her pair of craft scissors because her “bangs were too long.” So the Wife had to shorten up the rest of her bangs in order to “fix” the problem.

For my part, I found the whole thing highly amusing. It was only a matter of time before she pulled this stunt. This is the little girl whom has lathered up the cat once before with skin cream because she wanted to help keep the cat’s fur soft. The lass, for her part, was too mortified to tell me, probably assuming I’d be mad at her or something. But all I told her was “That’s why we leave hair cutting to the experts” with a big smile on my face. All I got in return was a grunt.

I mean really, think about it for a second. A 5-year-old takes a pair of craft scissors to her own hair and miraculously all that’s missing is a small chunk in the bangs. Am I the only one thinking that easily could have been much worse?

After the Wife fixed her oops, the lass immediately looked for a silver lining. “But Mommy, they’ll grow back!”

At which point, she’ll probably try it again.

A package arrived today for the lass. The Wife had purchased a bunch of easy reader books for the lass’ perusing pleasure. The lass was quite excited about the books, but her little imagination pointed her in a different direction this afternoon.

She’d set her sights on the box the books had arrived in. She knew what that box was right from the outset: an airplane. Complete with wings, a tail, a steering wheel and other controls. She brought it out onto the deck and set it down and began crafting her world. She wanted me to watch what she was doing.

I nonchalantly noted that she could draw all of the planes controls onto the box so she’d be able to fly the plane. She processed that for all of a millisecond before she scooted inside for a pen.

She spent the next hour “building” her plane.

She gave it 3 steering wheels for different sized people. She gave it controls that never run out of “stuff” because there are people who fill the “stuff” back into it- “It has infinity stuff, Dad” she informed me. She gave it dials and knobs and switches for every possible scenario. She gave it guns and bullets. She decorated the tail to “make it cool” and drew grass and sky on it to “make it more real.”

And when she was all done, she gave it to her dolls because they were the right size for it. Besides, something better had come along.

Mom had come home with a new paper shredder for her office. And the box it was packaged in is much bigger.

Forgot to mention it earlier, but twice this past week the lass came home from school, laid down on the couch and napped for over 2 hours. On another day, she clearly came home tired and nap-primed, but afternoon activities kept her from napping.

In addition, both the Wife and myself have observed that she’s been eating quite a bit more than usual. The evidence points to the conclusion that some time next week the lass will be looking the Wife in the eye.

Or there about anyway.