Week ending June 1, 2008: This week’s stories are about the everyday quirks of my two 4 year olds instead of any specific events.
Starting very early in the school year, I took the kids to Blockbuster every Tuesday after school to rent a movie (I have the “Rewards Card” and Tuesday is rent one, get one free day). Every week while we waited in line the twins would ask “can we have a gumball from the machine?”, and I would always answer “no, we come here to get movies, not gum. You can have a piece of gum from my purse.” Doing some mental math, I think that is at least 30 weeks of Tuesdays, so at least 30 times that they have been told no gumballs, but that never deters them from asking the next time. Then I realized that billions of lottery tickets are sold to people who, week-after-week, do not win the lottery. So I guess any wishes I had for the kids realizing that I’m never going to buy them gum at the Blockbuster is in vain, but that isn’t a real problem, just one of those charming attributes of young children.
The kids have a strange notion of hide-and-seek. They like to play hide-and-seek every night between when we brush teeth and when we read stories. Sometimes the kids hide and they want their dad to find them, and sometimes they ask their dad to hide. Here is the strange part: they hide in the EXACT same place every night. I just don’t understand why it is so fun to go “find” someone when you already know where they are. I guess I’m just too literal. Fortunately for the kids, Casey is a good sport and allows them the joy of “winning” this game.
My next strange-but-true story is about blowing the kids’ noses. They hate it. I mean really hate it. They’d rather sit for 20 minutes screaming on the steps (as in, “you may not leave this step until we blow your nose”) than to blow their noses. I’ve tried everything I can think of to desensitize them to the process including talking about their fears and promising that no one in the history of history has ever been hurt blowing their nose, but haven’t had much luck. At one point I thought that Chloe wasn’t physically capable of breathing out of her nose, so we tried blowing out birthday-sized candles with our noses. After a few tries the kids thought that was GREAT fun, but it didn’t seem to quell their fears about blowing noses as I’d hoped. Gradually Chloe seems to have gotten used to the process, but with this latest cold, the issue has come up for Alex again. I’ve tried insisting that he blow his nose once, everyday. He’d do it very tentatively and not very productively, but at least he’d try. By the 3rd or 4th day Alex gave it a real try and had a very productive blow. He grinned from ear to ear and said “Mom, that didn’t hurt, it tickled! I’m going to do that EVERY DAY!” I was so joyful until the middle of the same night when he kept us awake with his coughing and sniffling and I got up and asked him to blow his nose and he kicked and screamed for 20 minutes about it. Oh well. Just chalk it up to one more quirk of the age.
Starting very early in the school year, I took the kids to Blockbuster every Tuesday after school to rent a movie (I have the “Rewards Card” and Tuesday is rent one, get one free day). Every week while we waited in line the twins would ask “can we have a gumball from the machine?”, and I would always answer “no, we come here to get movies, not gum. You can have a piece of gum from my purse.” Doing some mental math, I think that is at least 30 weeks of Tuesdays, so at least 30 times that they have been told no gumballs, but that never deters them from asking the next time. Then I realized that billions of lottery tickets are sold to people who, week-after-week, do not win the lottery. So I guess any wishes I had for the kids realizing that I’m never going to buy them gum at the Blockbuster is in vain, but that isn’t a real problem, just one of those charming attributes of young children.
The kids have a strange notion of hide-and-seek. They like to play hide-and-seek every night between when we brush teeth and when we read stories. Sometimes the kids hide and they want their dad to find them, and sometimes they ask their dad to hide. Here is the strange part: they hide in the EXACT same place every night. I just don’t understand why it is so fun to go “find” someone when you already know where they are. I guess I’m just too literal. Fortunately for the kids, Casey is a good sport and allows them the joy of “winning” this game.
My next strange-but-true story is about blowing the kids’ noses. They hate it. I mean really hate it. They’d rather sit for 20 minutes screaming on the steps (as in, “you may not leave this step until we blow your nose”) than to blow their noses. I’ve tried everything I can think of to desensitize them to the process including talking about their fears and promising that no one in the history of history has ever been hurt blowing their nose, but haven’t had much luck. At one point I thought that Chloe wasn’t physically capable of breathing out of her nose, so we tried blowing out birthday-sized candles with our noses. After a few tries the kids thought that was GREAT fun, but it didn’t seem to quell their fears about blowing noses as I’d hoped. Gradually Chloe seems to have gotten used to the process, but with this latest cold, the issue has come up for Alex again. I’ve tried insisting that he blow his nose once, everyday. He’d do it very tentatively and not very productively, but at least he’d try. By the 3rd or 4th day Alex gave it a real try and had a very productive blow. He grinned from ear to ear and said “Mom, that didn’t hurt, it tickled! I’m going to do that EVERY DAY!” I was so joyful until the middle of the same night when he kept us awake with his coughing and sniffling and I got up and asked him to blow his nose and he kicked and screamed for 20 minutes about it. Oh well. Just chalk it up to one more quirk of the age.
No comments:
Post a Comment