"She makes a little sound," my daughter says, describing a little stuffed blue bird.
"And when she makes that little sound," (a high pitched little sound) "it means she's going to cry again, so she's in time-out." Time out is in the trash can at McDonalds.
I wonder what this says about our parenting styles.
Bailey asked me if squirrels have imaginations. I asked her what she thought and she said they do and I asked her if she had one.
She told me she doesn't have one. Considering I'm forced to call her "Cinderella" right now while she wears a blue ball gown and we're sipping tea and Fudge is currently in mouse mode, I tend to disagree.
Seriously.
I just asked this question in my household only a few minutes ago. "You're really going to ruin our day over apple juice? Really?"
Twenty-five minutes ago, somebody was a little disappointed to discover we were all out of apple juice. Not that she normally drinks apple juice with breakfast, in fact, she never does, but apparently that was the plan this morning until she discovered the empty bottle with the recycled plastic. She's been pretty much quiet ever since and I will tell you something, I almost prefer the loud fits over the silent ones. Almost. And I say almost because she freezes up completely during these silent ones and even moving her is difficult. And getting through to her takes forever. Then again, the loud ones, she'd flail about and those would take forever to calm her down too. I guess there's no winner.
But since she's quiet, it gives me a chance to remind her of significant facts. I reminded her how most of the time she doesn't even drink her apple juice and we have to dump it out. I also asked her if she really wanted to ruin our plans for the whole day, like going to the farm after preschool today.
Her answer? Silence.
It's not so golden today, folks.
I'll admit, this may only be funny to me as so many things in life are, but I was buying something online (in fact, I'm still in the check out process as I type) and one of the steps in the check out process is:
Please enter the birthdate and gender of the children you shop for most often
Now, you may be reading this asking yourself and the skies above, "why is that so funny?", "Has she lost her mind?", and/or "I still do not get her sense of humor and lack thereof," but I will answer "not at all."
Read it again.
"The children you shop for most often." As in, you don't shop for the rest of your offspring. As in, picking favorites. As in, you only buy for one or two and not all of the above. Okay, well I found it funny. So while you argue favorites and hand-me-downs and such, I'll continue laughing.
And for those who laughed with me, thanks for your avid support.
We may never know where this notion came from (like so many that enter her genius brain), but on March 31, Bailey announced that she was a rockstar named Spongebob Squarepants (again with that pesky yellow square) and that she played a guitar (but it looked a lot like a grey remote control to me) and rocked out in Princess boots that she proudly told me she had just bought at the store the day prior. Funny, I remembered getting them on clearance last year.
She summoned me into the living room to watch her concert which was "starting in three minutes." The rockstar rocked out on a stage sponsored by Rubbermaid. It took all I had to not laugh hysterically. I do not expect the same self control from you.
I figured you'd laugh.
We were on our way home and to explain just how important it was to get there in a quick fashion (as in no other stops anywhere else), I simply told Bailey we had to get there because Fudge was sad. She pondered this and asked a couple questions like, "when people get sad, do they cry?" She answered for me. I asked her if she ever gets really sad and according to her, boy, she gets really sad.
"Yeah like when I get sad when Spongebob and Gary are supposed to come over and play but they don't. That makes me really sad and I cry because I miss them."
She went into extremely rich details concerning this, but I was far too busy dry heaving over the fact that Spongebob Squarepants has made it into yet another discussion with my child. Sigh.
With having a new puppy comes training and lots of usage of the word, "no." It's like getting a brand spankin' new toddler. One of her naughty little tricks is knocking over the kitchen trash can. This is not an admirable trait. This is not an acceptable trait. This is an aggravating trait.
So after a couple occurrences, a punishment had to be exacted.
If you remember (well, if you knew us then), when we trained our feline Aerial all those many, many years ago, we used the ever humane device appropriately named The Zap Mat. It was the coolest little gray sheet of a tool that would inflict a slight twinge of shock into whatever touched it. Either the cat learned her lesson or just was always well-behaved. We tend to assume the best. And although we joked about using it during Bailey's toddler training, we honestly never did, just thought really seriously hard about it.
Well, since we still had it gathering dust in the basement, we brought it up for some fun. It'd lived a lonely enough life, so it was due time for it to relive its glory days.
We explained in grave detail to Miss Bailey on how important it was to not touch it and that it would zap her. She's a curious child after all. We made sure she understood and she would gladly remind you of its powers and "that it would really, really hurt you." And Fudge can contest to that because although we haven't witnessed her sneaking in to knock the ecru mass of filth over, we have heard her yelp a pitiful cry that the whole neighborhood could probably recall hearing once or twice. We'll continue leaving it in its place for a little longer though just to make sure its lesson has stuck.
Then out of the spontaneous blue, Bailey spoke of how it zapped her big toe, but not her whole foot and that it hurt. "But it didn't zap all of me." Apparently she told Rob and I this same tale at separate times, making us both wonder whether this was a possibly true event or a concocted one.
We're going to just go with the "healthy imagination" excuse.
