Tonight my son, Will, made delicious salmon and shrimp for dinner, and we had dinner together after I'd spent the afternoon keeping Elena there. Will had been running around town doing errands--which included buying food for the four people and sixteen animals that live there. (Eight chickens, a horse, two dogs, two turtles, a kitten, a parakeet, and the pony that is arriving this week.)
At some point, Elena--who has now mastered enough words that she would like to be the center of all conversations--did her "bad" thing that is guaranteed to get her daddy's attention; she threw some food on the floor.
"Do you want to go to time out?" he asked her, trying to look serious and stern.
"No," she said. "I sorry."
In a few minutes she interrupted again to ask, "Am I a bad girl?"
"No, you're not a bad girl," we all said in unison--her mommy, her daddy, and I.
She knew the answer, she'd just asked the question guaranteed to provoke the answer she was looking for: "You're a good girl."
"But we don't throw food on the floor," Will told her. "If we do, we have to do time out."
Earlier today, she had reminded me that she had to have time out at the restaurant on Saturday night for throwing a chop stick across the table. "Why did you have to have time out?" I asked. I knew. I was there. I just wondered if she had connected the dots.
She grinned mischievously. "I throwed food on the floor," she said. She likes time out; her daddy goes with her and she gets his full undivided attention.
We talked on about other things and she discovered that she had a black spot on her toe, maybe a splinter from going barefoot all day. "Come sit on my lap and I'll get it out," I said.
Turned out it was just a black spot and I got it off right away by wetting my thumb.
She looked at her parents and said, by way of explanation: "She's a mom."
No comments:
Post a Comment