"I'm the Winner!"

I've started to notice something interesting with Norah lately. It's been something that has developed so slowly in her that I almost failed to notice it happening. She is a pathological liar and cheat.

Now, when I say that I "failed to notice it happening," that isn't to say that I haven't noticed her lying. I do. All the time. SUPER all the time. But it started out as just regular Norah silliness, and now I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not starting to see the budding of a possibly nefarious personality type.

Let me explain. First, she's turned into something of a storyteller. I, obviously, take credit for this as I have encouraged both of our kids, throughout their young lives, to tell me stories. Like the story of the Buried Queen. Have I shared this already? If not, it really needs to be documented, so I better share it again. Just skip ahead if I'm repeating myself.

Over a year ago, they tore down our Dairy Queen. It was sad to see it go, but it was, honestly, a dump. The service was worse than terrible and the food had gotten pretty unreliable. Whoever owned it had obviously given up on life. It needed to be done away with. Still, there is something inherently awful about the closing of an ice cream store. One day, I pointed it out to Norah. "Look!" I said, "They tore down the Dairy Queen!"

"The Buried Queen?" Norah asked. And from then on, that is what it became, and every time we drove by it (which was often since it was on Main Street), I had her develop the story of the Buried Queen.

Here is how the story ended up after several weeks of careful plot and character development.

There once was a queen. She was very evil. She owned an ice cream store and she made her ice cream out of poop and pee and hate.

Side note: For awhile now, when asked, "What words are bad words?" Norah has responded, "Poop and pee and hate," and always with a slight southern drawl on hate, like "Hayte." Not sure where she got that list, but that is her list of bad words. When asked, "What words are good words?"  Norah always responds, "Studio." She cannot say WHY "studio" is a "good" word. But it is.

Anyway, the Queen fed people ice cream made of poop and pee and hate, and the people were not fond of this ice cream. They were so unfond of the ice cream that they buried her in the ground. But the Queen had an undetermined number of daughters. These daughters were sad that the queen was bad, but they were not bad. Apparently, they had no problem with the moral dilemma of burying their queen mother under their castle and then living in that castle, either, because that's what they did. With the help of Mr. Matt (the teacher's assistant at the preschool), the princesses decided that they were going to make their own ice cream and be good princesses and give the ice cream to preschoolers everywhere. They made this "good" ice cream out of, you guessed it, studio. Yet, despite the fact that they made building flavored ice cream, everyone loved them and they lived happily ever after.

This is the official version now, though I think some of it was embellished just now when I asked Norah to help me remember all of the details. There you have it. Ever the perfectionist, honing her story as she goes.

Over the last month or two, though, she's gotten to be more than just a storyteller. It's morphed into something kind of annoying and rather persistent.

Let's say she has two options, and both options will have a mundane outcome. Like, just a few minutes ago, she ran up to me while I was making a panini for a customer (I'm at the store, I don't have customers coming to my home asking for grilled sandwiches) and said that she needed to go to the bathroom. The toilet here is still tall enough that she can't crawl onto it without a little help, so she kind of can't go unless someone helps her up. I told her that I was busy but she should go into the bathroom and try to get on the toilet herself and I could help her when I was finished. Instead of going into the bathroom, she ran back to where Gabe was playing and went back to work jumping off the raised area in the front window, pretending to be a butterfly. Five minutes later, I finished with the customers and asked her if she still needed to go to the bathroom.

"Nope!" she said.

"But how is that possible?" I asked. "You didn't go into the bathroom. You just came over here."

"I just peed on the floor," she said.

"Um, what?" I knew this wasn't true as she wasn't covered in pee. She doesn't have the coordination to pull her pants down and not pee on herself unless it's into a toilet.

"I made a little potty here in the middle of the floor" (spooky, right? She even recognized that she couldn't just pee on the floor but would need a potty to not get it all over herself so she modified her story to match up more closely with reality--she's a bit of a natural at this) "and then when I was done I took it back to the bathroom and dumped it in the toilet and flushed it away."

A pretty serviceable lie, if not for the fact that she would have had to walk past me to dump this potty in the toilet, which she obviously didn't. I pointed that out and she smiled, knowing she was busted, but she was completely blase' (sorry, I have no idea how to make accent marks) about it. Still, she put together a basic story with all of the elements intact. If she'd thought it through to the "walking past dad to get to the bathroom" part and come up with some other way to get rid of her imaginary potty, it would have been a pretty solid lie (well, if there was a feasible way for her to create a potty out of thin air, I suppose).

See? She had nothing to gain by it, but she did it anyway. Possibly a bit worrisome. Again, as I've said before, having a well-developed ability to lie will probably only help her in her future life. But that doesn't mean that I want her doing it to me. So I'm going to have to figure out a way to nip that in the bud.

But lying isn't all of it. She's also a cheating cheater who cheats. When she first figured out that she could buckle her own seat belt, we started having a "contest" pretty much every time we got in the car. For practical reasons, mostly. Without the impetus of the contest, she tends to dawdle. There's another "tradition" we have to help speed the kids putting their belts on. It started when Gabe first started doing it on his own. For a short time before that, Norah had this thing she did to torment Gabe. She'd ask, "Would you like a wet finger?" Then she'd stick a finger in her mouth and wipe it on him. To help encourage him to get his seat belt on, we made it a rule that, if the belt hadn't clicked into place by the time we pull out of the driveway, then he would receive a wet finger. This was expanded to include Norah when she started putting her belt on, but she has about zero tolerance for receiving wet fingers (often resulting in crying fits when Gabe starts to threaten her with them), so the contest was developed as encouragement for her.

As the weeks past, she began to grow tired with occasionally losing this contest to Gabe as he was more adept at putting his belt on. So she often declares that "it's not a race!" Specifically, she declares this every time it looks like she might lose the race. And it happens with other races. Often she and I will race to the car when we're leaving the store (as she has a tendency to stop and examine pretty much anything that happens to be in the middle of the alley or parking lot and it can take ten minutes to get to the car if she's not spurred on to win a race). But, lately, she's been adamant that we're not racing, unless she has a good ten foot lead before we even start.

Today, she did exactly this as we walked up to the store. She was about ten feet in front of Gabe and I, and she shouted, "It's a race!" Neither Gabe nor I even made an attempt to catch up to her because we were carrying the many, many bags full of toys and electronics they both require to keep them entertained for the hours that we're here at the store. She made it to the door first and said, "I won!"

"But you cheated," I pointed out. "You didn't call the race until there was no chance that we could catch up to you. That's called cheating, when you rig the race so that you are the only one that wins. Nobody wants to play with a cheater."

"No I didn't," she claimed.

"Yeah. You did. That means you're a cheater."

"I'm the winner!" she countered sagely. And that's the point that worries me. Even though she's still very young, I'm pretty sure that she is already capable of weighing the moral dilemma of cheating versus the tiny thrill of winning a contest, and she has chosen to win over choosing to play fair. I know that sounds like a complicated concept for an almost four year old to grasp, but she's a shrewd one. One of nature's manipulators. And, lucky me, I get to try to figure out a way to convince her to do the right thing instead of always being the winner. A task that my particular moral flexibility might not be best suited to accomplish. Guess we'll see.

Another "Special Little Man" Moment

Last week, during spring break, I let Gabe get a pack of bubble gum flavored Trident. He's been kind of obsessed with gum for the last month or two, and he's been able to eat it responsibly so far, so I let him get the pack. Over the course of the week, he ate it all, but, for some reason, couldn't bring himself to throw out the pink box it came in. He had put it on my desk (where everyone puts everything they don't know what to do with, for some reason) this morning before he left for school. Before we left for work, Norah noticed it, saw that it was empty, and asked if she could throw it out. I said, sure, it was trash, go for it.

This afternoon, after school, I was sorting through some laundry and then decided it was probably time for me to take a shower, since I hadn't yet today. I walk into the bathroom and see Gabe running through my office. I can tell by how fast that he's moving that he's nearly emergency stage for peeing--this past few months he's had a few problems with waiting until he pretty much pees himself because he refuses to tear himself away from whatever it is that he's doing (this afternoon, it was lying down in the "cramper" Libby made for them yesterday. Actually, let me sidetrack my main story for a bit with some pictures of these crampers).

Most people, including us, call these "hammocks." Gabe decided they were "crampers." And he kept insisting even after we corrected him a couple times. So that's what they are now. If the kid's going to be insistent on a name change, who are we to judge? "Cramper" is probably a more accurate description of what these things actually do and are to anyone who isn't under the age of ten.

This was Libby's project for yesterday. It took us to Wal-Mart (where we also bought the first rice cooker we've owned in over a decade, because we're tired of soggy rice, and I broke down and bought a Magic Bullet so I could finally chop my "stinking, nasty garlic"--go to about the :58 mark to see Hazel's classic line at this . . . morning after gathering) for the fabric. The kids have loved them.

These legos being here ended in tears this morning, when Norah tried to get in from the other side of her cramper and fell into the lego bin. She's not quite mastered getting into and out of the thing yet.

Norah pretending to sleep. 

Anyway. I was standing in the bathroom, getting ready to get in the shower, and Gabe runs through the office. On the way to the bathroom, he notices the pink Trident box in the trash can and stops. He bends over and examines the box. While he is doing so, he starts to pull down his pants.

Now, this is weird. But it's not unusual. Often, as soon as the thought of going to the bathroom enters Gabe's mind, he drops trow, then and there. We can't figure out WHY he does that, and we can't convince him not to. We point it out to him, and ask him why he's doing it, and he always gets a little embarrassed and pulls his pants up and goes to the bathroom. But that doesn't keep him from doing it again the next time (not every time, mind you, just once in awhile). So no alarm bells went off when he did it this time. I just figured he wasn't paying attention again and was pulling down his pants prematurely. Just as I was getting ready to remind him that he hadn't gone into the bathroom yet and didn't need to pull his pants down yet, he did something entirely unexpected.

He started to pee in the trash can. Now, this trash can isn't really a "can" as such. It is made of wire. It does a pretty half-assed job of containing small pieces of trash. So, obviously, it's not going to keep pee inside it. In other words, he wasn't really peeing IN the trash can so much as peeing THROUGH the trash can and all over what was behind it.  Which, in this case, just so happened to be a 16x20 wedding photo that, for some reason, Libby had rolled up and put in a basket there beside my desk--and behind the trash can. It was soaking wet when he was finished.

Obviously I didn't just stand there not saying anything and watching dumbfounded while he did it. I immediately started with stuff along the lines of "what are you doing?" Possibly with minor cursing. He looked at me, genuinely confused with what I was making a big deal about. I don't even think he was immediately aware of what he was doing. Then he looked down and realized what was going on. After a few seconds, he stopped (which I'm glad for, it's not easy to stop peeing mid-stream, especially when you've not even mastered bathroom using enough to not pee in trash cans). And went to the toilet and finished.

He was pretty embarrassed and apologetic. And, honestly, after the initial shock of witnessing him peeing in the can (and then of cleaning off the wedding picture and rolling it out on the table in the hopes that it would dry), I was too busy laughing for either of us to get too broken up about it. Then, obviously, after dinner, I came in here to type this out because these kinds of stories are too few and far between these days.

Hot Squirrel and Disney on Ice

Yesterday, Gabe came with to do the grocery shopping. Usually I try to take one kid or the other with me to do the shopping, just to spread the misery out as much as possible. Gabe used to enjoy it, but over the past few months has gotten to the point where he'll come up with any excuse he can to get out of going. Yesterday, though, I had the "If you want to go to Disney on Ice later, then you're going to have to help me with the shopping." Obviously, since we'd already purchased the tickets, there was zero chance that we would skip the show, but, fortunately, Gabe hasn't been able to decipher all of my many and varied idle threats yet. Which is good, since idle threats are my primary parenting weapon. 

Anyway, as we were walking down the soda aisle, he grabbed a bottle of red gatorade and wanted me to get it.

"This is what I called Rigade," he informed me.  I'd heard this story from Libby already. She had some orange gatorade at Gabe's last soccer game (which, by the by, is going HORRIBLY--Gabe has completely lost interest in soccer and is now the kid who just sits out on the field and/or follows the refs around trying to strike up casual conversations with them instead of doing what he's supposed to be doing. It's kind of a nightmare. I'll try to get some good video next time to properly document it.) and he, for some reason or other, decided to call it Rigade.

"No, that is what you call Hot Squirrel. The orange gatorade is Rigade."

"No," he corrected, "the orange gatorade is Hot Squirrel (do you like how I capitalize the made up stuff and use lower case on the actual brand name?). The red gatorade is Rigade."

"Not a bit of it. I can prove it when we get home because I wrote it all down right after the Hot Squirrel thing happened."

And then, by the time we got home, I forgot all about it.

Fortunately, he reminded me of it this afternoon, so I spent some time trying to figure out where I'd documented the Hot Squirrel incident. After scanning nearly a year of stuff on here (because I don't know how to set this site up so I can keyword search everything, and don't care enough to spend the time I'd need to do so), I figured I must not have posted anything about it on here. Which left Facebook. Which also doesn't have any good way to search previous posts. Eventually, however, I did find it. From April of 2012. 

It saddens me that it never made it onto this blog, as this blog is what I consider my official parenting documentation for the children to go back to years from now so they can accurately pinpoint when and how I screwed them up to help streamline their therapy sessions. It sucks that Facebook has become my go-to place to post this kind of stuff.

But, then, people actually read my facebook posts, so someone at least will see the silly things my kids are doing.

Anyway, here's the official recounting of the Hot Squirrel thing:

"Gabe, as we walk by a soda vending machine: "I want to get some hot squirrel." Me: "Hot squirrel?" Gabe: "I LOOOOVE hot squirrel!" Me: "I understand the concept of a hot squirrel (a lie), but I don't see how it relates to soda." Gabe: "Remember when we were watching Tin Tin and I spilled the hot squirrel all over Nana and Poppa's carpet?" Me: "Gatorade?" Gabe: "Yeah. I call it hot squirrel." Me: "Ah, well, we don't keep hot squirrel in our house because you have a record of spilling it on carpets." Gabe: "Ahhhhhh."   And Hot Squirrel was born. And now it's documented in a way that I might be able to go back and check on at some point in the future.   In other news, we went to Disney on Ice yesterday . . . .    It wasn't bad, really. I mean, the show itself wasn't even that bad. I have very low expectations of anything "on ice" (even Reunite on ice, so nice). I appreciate all the hard work and training that goes into figure skating. It has to be a massive undertaking and people who put that kind of effort into anything deserve recognition for their hard work. Then tack on a hundred pound Jiminy Cricket costume and you have something doubly impressive. I don't, however, care all that much about the fruits of all those labors. I appreciate it, and I'm glad that it exists, and I think it's wonderful that people have the option to perform those kinds of feats and other people enjoy them. I just don't care. To me it's like if NASCAR and basketball had an arctic baby--lots of alternating between going around and around in circles and going back and forth and back and forth, on ice. Just not really my thing, I guess.    But the kids were pretty interested and had a great time. I'm not sure I would say they were mesmerized, but there were certainly times when you couldn't have pried their attention away (well, Norah, anyway--Gabe was easily and consistently distracted by the cotton candy guy every time he walked by). And the bit where all of the Princesses came out with their Princes and went around in circles and then back and forth and back and forth pretty much made her day.    The best part, and another thing I need to document because I think it's adorable, was when Pocahontas came out. First off--kudos to Disney for using both Pocahontas and Mulan, two of their less popular (but more "diverse") princess options.  So props for not going the easy route and sticking with only the white princesses.   Norah's first exposure to most of the princesses was through a compilation DVD that we bought her two Christmases ago. It's a princess sing-a-long DVD, so it has selections from many of the movies from over the years. She still hasn't seen probably half of the princess movies, but she still knows who they are and a song or two about them from the DVD.    So it wasn't really surprising when, as we were scanning over the movie options on Netflix a few months back, when she saw Pocahontas, she said, in a very excited voice, "Oooh! Pocahontas Colors of the Wind!" After a little proving, we discovered that she was convinced that this was not just a song from the movie but the actual name/title of the main character of that movie. So that's what we call her now.    And she got SUPER excited yesterday when Pocahontas Colors of the Wind skated onto the rink. It was pretty cute. Actually, she was pretty cute the entire time.  Of course, she crashed HARD after that, but what can you expect. Both kids did really well while we were there--no fits and they stayed sitting for almost three hours without any real blow-ups or anything. Pretty awesome.   Libby showing the kids the videos on the website of the four different Disney on Ice shows. Norah watched them over and over again for about an hour yesterday before we left. We let them each pick out a single HUGELY overpriced tchotchke. Gabe got a light up sword. He had lost interest in it before we even left the arena. We would have been better off buying him a bag of cotton candy. Live and learn. Waiting for the show to start. I ate most of that bucket of popcorn. My face still feels moisture deprived from all the salt. Norah's memento. Her arms swivel at the elbow. And that's it. For $15. Norah, at least, has set Snow White on the shelf by her bed and will likely keep it around for a good long time. Something purple. The kids watching something purple. This was the "It's a Small World" act, I think. I must be getting too sensitive. Mostly I just wanted to be offended by all of the "ethnic" versions of the song playing while people who were obviously not that ethnicity skated around in preposterous costumes that no real person would ever wear. I kept trying to force myself to not be offended, but every time the song changed geographically, I could feel little bits of my skin crawl. The kids looking out the window. This was my first time in the downtown Arena. I think it's been done for like five years now. I'm pretty far behind the times, usually. Wait, I didn't select this picture, too. Just the earlier one. And I noticed that blogger put these all in different orders, too. Oy. The aftermath. Fortunately, she crashed on the way home. She was a wreck until this point. I like how she's holding Snow White totally upright, and she kept it that way, while sleeping, the entire car ride home. This will almost certainly not go down in her books as one of the most flattering pictures of her childhood.