It’s Polite to Say Goodbye

My daughter has this watch phone.  The phone part is not the primary feature of the watch from my husband and my perspective, we got it because it was a wearable GPS device for her wrist.   The phone part was a nice addition, and quite frankly, the main selling point to my daughter to get her buy in on wearing it daily.

We can track her location as she rides to and forth from school, but it’s had unexpected benefits from the phone perspective.  We can call her if we need her to come home from a friend’s house.  And then there was the time she called me because she was lost just across the street from our driveway, stuck between a trash and recycling bin.

She likes the option to call people on the watch.   We’ve had to limit the number of people she can call because she can’t see what’s on the face of the watch and without the help of a friend to help her determine who she’s selecting, she typically has to try a few times to get the person she’s looking for.

With the recent post here about my daughter being bored on the ride home from school, my mother asked if she’d like to talk with her as she rode in the taxi.   It took us a few days to get this working.  First, my daughter didn’t remember to wear her watch one day and then for two days she wasn’t answering my mother’s calls.   We figured out at that point that the phone had been set to silent mode and it wasn’t ringing so she could hear it.

But once we figured that out, my daughter has been into talking on the phone with Mimi after school—or at least that’s who I think she’s calling.   I don’t really know.   What I do know is that she’s calling someone.   Or, rather, that she wants to call someone.

She’s called me the last several days on the way home from school.   I see the call coming in, answer it and say, ‘hello’.   She then says, “who’s this?” because she can’t tell on the little watch speaker phone who the voice is from the single word, ‘hello’.   When I tell her, “it’s mom” she immediately hangs up.   It’s like she’s got her finger hovering over the terminate call button because its nearly instant.

It’s not uncommon for her to misdial a second time, like she did today.   When she hears my voice (and now I know to say, “hi, it’s mom”) she unceremoniously hangs up without a word.   I get the message.   She doesn’t want to talk to me.   I need to let her know it’s polite to say, ‘goodbye’ I think.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was very happy to be going to see Liz today for OT.   When they came out they talked about empathy.   Liz said one of the people they’d talked about was Vladimir Putin.  My son asked who he was and Liz explained.   She said maybe he could think about why someone would want so much power and maybe we could empathize with wanting power.   I’m not sure about the session, but it definitely got my son thinking.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter told me this morning, “you know what they should do?  They should make hats in the shape of underwear because I’ve tried putting underwear on my head."