Anything We Want

Children learn from about three hours old how to work their parents.   Cry and I get attention.   Cry louder and I get attention more quickly.   Throw something and I get negative attention, but hey, it’s still attention.   Say something nice and I get what I want maybe even if I don’t deserve it because I just flattered you.  Children figure out so many ways to work an angle with us as feeble-minded, gullible adults that it’s interesting they can’t manage to do something as simple as putting their shoes away after school.

But that’s children for you.   Smart in all the ways that count.   Because truthfully if the shoes are in the middle of the hallway, there’s a good chance we’ll pick them up as parents while they’re out playing in the yard—and they know this.

Madison, my next-door-neighbor’s daughter was over two days ago.   She always asks if they can go into the craft room to do this or that or something fun for the children that means supervised work for me and usually a mess to clean up.   They know they’re not allowed in without an adult, and they always respect that, which means we’ve gotten at least one thing right.

I was already in the craft room with an older neighbor’s daughter, Keira, enacting a plan.   Keira had wanted some paper.   I have a lot of paper.   There are some papers the children can use and some they can’t.   I told Keira I had an idea: that I would put smiley face stickers on all the drawers and containers of things they could use without asking.   They still couldn’t enter the room without permission, but this would make things easier for me.   They would also help my daughter find what was available as well.

As I was adding stickers more children started to pile in.   It’s an interesting room with lots and lots of little things, interesting tiny-drawered bins and toy-like things.   I’m a collector and there is just a lot of things in the room that are fun for young children, hence the ban on entering without an adult.

The table tops are ideally cleaned off but I’d been piling up things since Christmas without successfully getting it all sorted and put away, mostly because I had to come up with new locations to store the additional stuff.   Add to that a lot of little fun trinkets and things from my obsession with shopping online from China and the table tops were too exciting to ignore.   Panda stickers, rainbow markers, tiny little notepads, monkey post-it notes, slime, a unicorn stapler and stocking things still unsorted.

I got the children busy with a painting project and then started going through everything.   All the painting stopped when they realized there was candy coming out of the bags.   There were lollipops too.   Keira asked if she could have one to which I asked if her mother would be okay with it.   I trust her and she said yes.   Then Madison wanted to know if she could have one too.   And then I was in trouble.

Madison’s father is our dentist and he isn’t so fond of lollipops, but I’d already told Keira and my daughter they could have one.   I told Madison to go ask her father if they could and if he said yes, it was fine with me.   She ran home and not a minute later came running back into the room with her younger brother, saying breathlessly, “my dad says we can have one”.

I trust Madison not to lie as well so I let them choose the flavor of their choice.   And then Madison said something I didn’t expect from a six-year-old.   She was very matter-of-fact as she explained how simple it was to get permission for the lollipop: “if we tell my dad we’ll be good for the rest of the day, he’ll give us anything we want.”

The next day Madison’s mother came over to borrow some things and I pulled her over, away from the children to tell her what Madison had said.   She said exasperatedly, “I know!  I’ve told him he’s got to stop doing that because they’re getting away with everything by promising to be good.”   We laughed and I told her to not tell that I’d given her daughter’s secret away.   I wonder what schemes my children have with my husband and me that we don’t even know they’re using on us?

The Big Boy Update:  My mother picked my son up from school a while back.   She had plans to take him to her house so they could play with her toys there and visit the neighbor’s playground, but he didn’t want to go.   He asked if they could go home instead.   As they were riding home my son asked in a concerned voice, “Mimi, are you disappointed that we didn’t go to your house?”  She assured him she wasn’t but it was so very nice of him to ask.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My son got into some old Wii video games in the attic over the weekend.   He was ecstatic he’d found them and happier still they could be played on the newer Wii U system.   The next morning my daughter was explaining it to another neighbor when they came over to play.   She said, “we have some new video games that dad used to play when he was little.”  I didn’t bother telling her they didn’t have video games yet when dad and I were, “little”.