Nosey-Wosey

See, now I don’t even know how to spell the title of this post because it’s something my children say and they’re not the best spellers yet.  We’ve been working on a lot of things in this household of late. “The broken record” being one of them—when you tell or ask a child to do something multiple times and suddenly it hits you, “I’m the broken record”.   The child has learned they don’t have to do that particularly thing on the first ask because you’ll ask again shortly if they just don’t bother to comply.

So there have been consequences coupled with crying and or yelling and maybe some screaming mixed in.   And as parents we’ve been steadfast in our position or stance while telling ourselves internally how we created the problem and vowing to do better going forward.  

Tonight my son was told multiple times he had to sit in his seat at dinner.   He tried putting one foot on the floor and half-standing and then came up with reasons he absolutely had to get out of the chair.    He was warned (more than once) that he’d lose dinner and not get dessert if he got out of the chair again.   And he got out of the chair again.   He was upset, thinking he’d get another chance at dinner, right up until they were going up to bed.   He ate most of it and probably wouldn’t have even eaten the rest but it was the principal of the thing I suppose that made him so distraught, angry and focused on that last bit of meal.  Tomorrow morning, he informed me, he wanted to finish his dinner before eating breakfast.   “Done!” I told him.   We’ll see how he feels about it in the morning.

Then later there was the. “no standing up in the bathtub” warning that went unheeded several times, causing my daughter to get pulled out of the slime bath (a product that turns your bath into green slime) and dumped unceremoniously into the shower under cold water to get the slime off so she could be toweled dry.    That was a logical consequence I hope she won’t forget for some time.

But before the whole out of the seat at dinner thing had even gone down my daughter was in trouble.  in her case she was throwing Duplo blocks at her friend, after being told not to throw them.   When I walked in with dinner my husband was in an uproar, something he doesn’t typically get pushed into, but I suppose hard cornered things being thrown at children’s faces was the point at which he drew the line.  

He sent my daughter to her room and told her she couldn’t come out until he told her she could.  She was hungry she wailed from the open door, not crossing the threshold for fear of additional consequences.   All she had to do was calm down and be quiet and she could come down but she went on and on.   She said she was trying but couldn’t help it.   And then she said, “I want nosey-wosey”.   My son leapt out of his chair and started heading up the stairs saying, “okay, I’ll come and help.”  We told him to come back down because the last time I saw him doing what I thought she was talking about, she was angry and upset about it.

But she asked again and seeing as how things couldn’t get much worse we told him to go up.   He happily ran upstairs and did something to touch her nose, saying, “nosey-wosey”.   And then…she laughed.   And giggled.   And then laughed really loudly.   She was completely over being upset.   She was invited down for dinner and it was all over.   And to think I thought my son didn’t know any real magic tricks…

The Big Boy Update:  In the tub tonight my children were playing.   My son grabbed my attention saying, “watch this…” and then he asked his sister, “what’s your worst fear?”  I held my breath because blind, vision loss, bodily injury because she can’t see where she’s going—you name it—I didn’t know what she was going to say.   What did she reply to her brother?  “You are!”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I let my daughter ride the three blocks from our neighborhood pool to our house home in the front seat of our car.   I suppose she’d never been up there before and if she had, she’d never explored things.   She felt all over and asked, “what’s this?”  I told her that was the dash. Then she reached further up, touching the glass which explained was the windshield.   She asked, “could we open it?”  I got adult satisfaction out of explaining a word that was rather self-explanatory broken down into parts and easy for a child to understand.   So much easier than explaining why we, “hang up the phone” when we just push a red button on a touch screen.